Luke 1:5-13
5 In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6 And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. 7 But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years. 8 Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, 9 according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. 10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. 11 And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. 12 And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.
Every single detail the the universe is orchestrated perfectly and synchronously by our sovereign God. Not only is every event “Okay” in God’s plan, but every event is perfectly correlated and woven together in an amazing masterpeice by our Creator. Every atom in the universe follows our Lord’s decree and not even one of the slightest details of the cosmos can take place without matching God’s master plan. It is a great and awesome God that we serve, that He can control and design our universe in every facet of existence. From the temperature of a morning in China, to the major events that shape our world, every event is in obedience to His plan.
In this passage in Luke we see a godly man named Zechariah. He had no significance of his own doing, no traits that typically mark human greatness, no royal bloodline, no heaps of money to define him. For all we know, there was nothing particularly special about Zechariah, until luck changed his life and left its mark on the entirety of history. When he was chosen to serve incense to the Lord, he would have been overjoyed to have gotten such a chance. You see, in Zechariah’s time there were thousands and thousands of priest waiting to serve incense in the temple of the Lord, but being chosen for this duty was no everyday deal; to be chosen for this sacred task would be a once in a life time chance. The one to go into the temple and burn this fragrant offering to God would be chosen by lot out of the innumerable assembly of priests. When the anticipated moment came, he entered the temple, but no priestly training could have prepared him for what he would see inside. When Zechariah went in, an angel of the Lord appeared to him and told him that his prayer had been heard and that his barren wife would bear a son. This son was John the baptist and would herald the coming of the Messiah. But what if Zechariah had not been chosen for this service? The angel would not had appeared to him in the temple and given him this good news, and were it not for this good news, his wife would have remained barren. Would his wife had remained barren there would have been no John to fulfill the prophecies of the one crying in the wilderness, and if that prophesy would have gone unfulfilled, the Messiah would have no grounds to pay for our debt because His prophesies would have been proven untrue. In essence, the very pivot of Messianic history relied on this single casting of lots. How can something so important be left up to luck?
Luck did not decide that Zechariah would be the one to serve in the temple:
Proverbs 16:33
The lot is cast into the lap, but its decision is from the Lord.
The dice is the closest thing that we can think of to amount to randomness, but is it really all that random? If you were to roll a dice in the exact same way, in the exact same conditions, in the exact same place, the outcome would be the exact same. So, even the closest thing that we can imagine to create a random output fails. Although all of the variables coming into play with the result of casting lots may completely exceed the scope of our puny understanding, they don’t exceed God’s. As total sovereign of the universe, no detail whatsoever can escape His attention, and no circumstance is ever out of His control. You may have very well been the one to roll the dice, but it will yield only the result that God so desires. Simply put, luck doesn’t exist. The entirety of human redemption could hinge on the roll of a dice because God is equally in control of those rolling dice as He is of the biggest event happening in our world. He has as much control and discretion over the outcome of casting lots as He does over the day of your death, or something catastrophic like whether or not a tsunami will strike. He is both the governor of the great and the minuscule. I would dare to say that not one molecule, not even an atom can be anywhere other than exactly where God wants it to be: Matthew 10:29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. No detail is too small for His focus; even a bird cannot fall to the ground apart from Him.
To the following view of God’s sovereignty I have devoted much time of study and am compelled to believe that it is true, however I reserve the right to be wrong and may God have mercy on me if I allot to Him that which isn’t His. With that being said, I must state firmly that in which I am convicted:
It may be tempting to think that God sees events and works around them, or reacts to them in His plans, but I would say that such an idea insults His authority over His creation. God doesn’t have a plan B; He not only isn’t surprised when something happens, but its happening was a part of His original plan since before earth was made. When God planned to send Himself in the form of man to pay for the sins of the world, He didn’t do so because He had to react to the fall of man. No, He did so because the fall of man was always a part of the plan, in other words, I believe that God isn’t so reactional but instead stative and active. His plans don’t have to await our approval; He declares, and it is so. God’s way of accomplishing His will is the perfect way to do so. He would never or could ever use any means of attaining His goal that were less than perfect, so I believe that there is only one way that things could happen – the way that they did and will. When Judas betrayed Christ, it wasn’t because that was one way to accomplish His plan, it was the only way to accomplish His plan; the perfect way. Not only did Judas suffice to accomplish the plan of God, but he, and he alone could. If God is truly sovereign over every minuscule detail of the universe, nothing could happen that does not agree with His plan. Even Judas himself could never have chosen not to betray Christ, because that which was, is the only thing that could be; if Judas betrayed Christ, his betraying is, and therefore nothing else could be.
I propose that indeed Judas could never have chosen not to betray Christ, not because he somehow didn’t have the physical ability, but because every man is bound to his own will. As RC Sproul says in his book Chosen By God, No-one will ever do anything that they do not want to do. The idea that Sproul is getting at is that man will always do that which he desires to do most in the moment of decision. You may then raise the charge, “That is not at all true, I do things every day that I don’t want to do! Why, just this morning I had to begrudgingly get out of my bed when I didn’t want to!” Yes, that may be true, but you desired to escape the consequence of not raising from bed more than you desired the benefits of remaining. So in truth, you did want to get out of bed, therefore you followed your greatest inclination in the moment. If we truly are creatures totally in sin and incapable of even the slightest righteous desire from our own flesh, it would take nothing less than a divine intervention to make us desire (and therefore act upon) what is right. There are really only two options for our desires: God lets us desire what we want –evil- and we act upon it, or He changes our desires and we do what we want – good. Without God’s intervention, were Judas given a thousand chances to undo his betrayal, he never would or could, because he didn’t want to – and indeed was incapable of wanting to. All of this is to say that God is totally and absolutely in charge; even that which is evil is under His control.
Before I close, I have to clarify two things that I am adamantly not saying:
1. I am not proposing that God creates man’s thoughts and desires. Man in his mind and will are free, but nothing in the universe is totally free besides God Himself; man’s thoughts and desires are in bondage to his own sinful nature and his actions are chained (or liberated depending on your perspective) by his own desires. However, just as God created the heart, He has the right to change it and to shape it, to redeem, or to leave broken.
2. I am not saying that God is by any means the author of sin. Let’s return to our example for a moment: God did not make Judas betray Him in any way; that was totally and 100% what Judas wanted to do. However, God is sovereign even over sin itself and were God to desire it to vanish in its entirety, it would immediately obey Him and all sin would cease to exist, however, for His purposes, He does not desire such.
It is a great and awesome God that we serve, and we can take comfort in this: that which God desires to be, is. We need not worry about the end of the story; God wins! We might not understand how God is accomplishing His will, but we can be resolutely firm and know that He is in total control and all this is a part of His perfect plan. Everything from wars, to a family member dying, to you losing your job, even down to the roll of a dice, God is in charge.
5 In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6 And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. 7 But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years. 8 Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, 9 according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. 10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. 11 And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. 12 And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.
Every single detail the the universe is orchestrated perfectly and synchronously by our sovereign God. Not only is every event “Okay” in God’s plan, but every event is perfectly correlated and woven together in an amazing masterpeice by our Creator. Every atom in the universe follows our Lord’s decree and not even one of the slightest details of the cosmos can take place without matching God’s master plan. It is a great and awesome God that we serve, that He can control and design our universe in every facet of existence. From the temperature of a morning in China, to the major events that shape our world, every event is in obedience to His plan.
In this passage in Luke we see a godly man named Zechariah. He had no significance of his own doing, no traits that typically mark human greatness, no royal bloodline, no heaps of money to define him. For all we know, there was nothing particularly special about Zechariah, until luck changed his life and left its mark on the entirety of history. When he was chosen to serve incense to the Lord, he would have been overjoyed to have gotten such a chance. You see, in Zechariah’s time there were thousands and thousands of priest waiting to serve incense in the temple of the Lord, but being chosen for this duty was no everyday deal; to be chosen for this sacred task would be a once in a life time chance. The one to go into the temple and burn this fragrant offering to God would be chosen by lot out of the innumerable assembly of priests. When the anticipated moment came, he entered the temple, but no priestly training could have prepared him for what he would see inside. When Zechariah went in, an angel of the Lord appeared to him and told him that his prayer had been heard and that his barren wife would bear a son. This son was John the baptist and would herald the coming of the Messiah. But what if Zechariah had not been chosen for this service? The angel would not had appeared to him in the temple and given him this good news, and were it not for this good news, his wife would have remained barren. Would his wife had remained barren there would have been no John to fulfill the prophecies of the one crying in the wilderness, and if that prophesy would have gone unfulfilled, the Messiah would have no grounds to pay for our debt because His prophesies would have been proven untrue. In essence, the very pivot of Messianic history relied on this single casting of lots. How can something so important be left up to luck?
Luck did not decide that Zechariah would be the one to serve in the temple:
Proverbs 16:33
The lot is cast into the lap, but its decision is from the Lord.
The dice is the closest thing that we can think of to amount to randomness, but is it really all that random? If you were to roll a dice in the exact same way, in the exact same conditions, in the exact same place, the outcome would be the exact same. So, even the closest thing that we can imagine to create a random output fails. Although all of the variables coming into play with the result of casting lots may completely exceed the scope of our puny understanding, they don’t exceed God’s. As total sovereign of the universe, no detail whatsoever can escape His attention, and no circumstance is ever out of His control. You may have very well been the one to roll the dice, but it will yield only the result that God so desires. Simply put, luck doesn’t exist. The entirety of human redemption could hinge on the roll of a dice because God is equally in control of those rolling dice as He is of the biggest event happening in our world. He has as much control and discretion over the outcome of casting lots as He does over the day of your death, or something catastrophic like whether or not a tsunami will strike. He is both the governor of the great and the minuscule. I would dare to say that not one molecule, not even an atom can be anywhere other than exactly where God wants it to be: Matthew 10:29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. No detail is too small for His focus; even a bird cannot fall to the ground apart from Him.
To the following view of God’s sovereignty I have devoted much time of study and am compelled to believe that it is true, however I reserve the right to be wrong and may God have mercy on me if I allot to Him that which isn’t His. With that being said, I must state firmly that in which I am convicted:
It may be tempting to think that God sees events and works around them, or reacts to them in His plans, but I would say that such an idea insults His authority over His creation. God doesn’t have a plan B; He not only isn’t surprised when something happens, but its happening was a part of His original plan since before earth was made. When God planned to send Himself in the form of man to pay for the sins of the world, He didn’t do so because He had to react to the fall of man. No, He did so because the fall of man was always a part of the plan, in other words, I believe that God isn’t so reactional but instead stative and active. His plans don’t have to await our approval; He declares, and it is so. God’s way of accomplishing His will is the perfect way to do so. He would never or could ever use any means of attaining His goal that were less than perfect, so I believe that there is only one way that things could happen – the way that they did and will. When Judas betrayed Christ, it wasn’t because that was one way to accomplish His plan, it was the only way to accomplish His plan; the perfect way. Not only did Judas suffice to accomplish the plan of God, but he, and he alone could. If God is truly sovereign over every minuscule detail of the universe, nothing could happen that does not agree with His plan. Even Judas himself could never have chosen not to betray Christ, because that which was, is the only thing that could be; if Judas betrayed Christ, his betraying is, and therefore nothing else could be.
I propose that indeed Judas could never have chosen not to betray Christ, not because he somehow didn’t have the physical ability, but because every man is bound to his own will. As RC Sproul says in his book Chosen By God, No-one will ever do anything that they do not want to do. The idea that Sproul is getting at is that man will always do that which he desires to do most in the moment of decision. You may then raise the charge, “That is not at all true, I do things every day that I don’t want to do! Why, just this morning I had to begrudgingly get out of my bed when I didn’t want to!” Yes, that may be true, but you desired to escape the consequence of not raising from bed more than you desired the benefits of remaining. So in truth, you did want to get out of bed, therefore you followed your greatest inclination in the moment. If we truly are creatures totally in sin and incapable of even the slightest righteous desire from our own flesh, it would take nothing less than a divine intervention to make us desire (and therefore act upon) what is right. There are really only two options for our desires: God lets us desire what we want –evil- and we act upon it, or He changes our desires and we do what we want – good. Without God’s intervention, were Judas given a thousand chances to undo his betrayal, he never would or could, because he didn’t want to – and indeed was incapable of wanting to. All of this is to say that God is totally and absolutely in charge; even that which is evil is under His control.
Before I close, I have to clarify two things that I am adamantly not saying:
1. I am not proposing that God creates man’s thoughts and desires. Man in his mind and will are free, but nothing in the universe is totally free besides God Himself; man’s thoughts and desires are in bondage to his own sinful nature and his actions are chained (or liberated depending on your perspective) by his own desires. However, just as God created the heart, He has the right to change it and to shape it, to redeem, or to leave broken.
2. I am not saying that God is by any means the author of sin. Let’s return to our example for a moment: God did not make Judas betray Him in any way; that was totally and 100% what Judas wanted to do. However, God is sovereign even over sin itself and were God to desire it to vanish in its entirety, it would immediately obey Him and all sin would cease to exist, however, for His purposes, He does not desire such.
It is a great and awesome God that we serve, and we can take comfort in this: that which God desires to be, is. We need not worry about the end of the story; God wins! We might not understand how God is accomplishing His will, but we can be resolutely firm and know that He is in total control and all this is a part of His perfect plan. Everything from wars, to a family member dying, to you losing your job, even down to the roll of a dice, God is in charge.