The One Who Is Still In Control

As Captain Obvious would say, “These are uncertain times.”  You don’t need me to tell you that.  Think of the words that now mark our daily vocabulary:  protests; corruption; hatred; market crashes; and now, pandemics.  This all adds up to a lot of anxiety because we live in uncertain times, and we don’t deal well with uncertainty.

Let me tell you about another time of uncertainty.  Consider the Book of Esther, which is in the Old Testament in the Bible.  In this time of history, there was a lot of uncertainty for Esther’s people, the Jews.  Many of them were still living in Persia (modern-day Iran).  Persia was the world’s most powerful empire at that time.  The Persian King, Xerxes, was ramping up his war machine to try to suppress the rising Greeks.  His right-hand man, Haman, was developing a plot to exterminate the Jews from the empire entirely.  So, the Jews faced a rising enemy empire on the outside, and a genocidal threat on the inside.  Uncertainty, indeed!

While everything seemed uncertain at the human level, God had a plan, and He was still in control.  In His sovereignty, God raised up two ordinary people from within the Jewish community: Esther, who became Queen of Persia, and Mordecai, her cousin and guardian, who eventually became the Prime Minister.  Through their courage and faith, God used them to thwart Haman’s plan and save the Jewish people.  This miraculous intervention had (and still has) eternal impacts for all of us today.  Had Haman’s plan succeeded, the birth line of the Saviour, Jesus Christ, would have been wiped out.  But God had a master plan, as well as a plan to deal with the uncertainty of the times, and His plans always succeed.

As Christians, we can take comfort in Esther’s story.  Esther and Mordecai didn’t know exactly how everything would work out, but they had courage and faith that God was in control, and that He would work things out in the end. 

As for those Greeks?  They eventually did take over from the Persians, just like God said they would in the Book of Daniel.  Because they did, we have the Bible that we have today.  Our uncertainty is God’s certainty.  He knows the end from the beginning. 

Take courage, have faith, and take care of each other.