Why does God do what he does?

Exodus 32:11-12

But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people.

W

hen life gets weird and things just don’t seem to fit our concept of justice, we are prone to ask, “Why?” And I don’t think it’s a problem for us to ask that question from time to time—as long as we realize that God is the Sovereign and has the ultimate right to do as he sees fit. God is also righteous, so everything he does is right—even when it doesn’t necessarily seem that way to us.

This morning I read the Exodus 32 story of Moses pleading with the Lord to relent from his anger against the Israelites. Then I read the following quite from one the early American Puritans. I thought these two went together well. Perhaps God is trying to tell me something.

Why God’s providences are often misunderstood

Take a straight stick, and put it into the water; then it will seem crooked. Why? Because we look upon it through two mediums, air and water: there lies the deception visus; thence it is that we cannot discern aright. Thus the proceedings of God, in His justice which in themselves are straight, without the least obliquity, seem unto us crooked: that wicked men should prosper, and good men be afflicted, that the Israelites should make the bricks, and the Egyptians dwell in the houses; that servants should ride on horse–back, and princes go on foot: these are things that make the best Christians stagger in their judgments.

And why? Because they look upon God’s proceedings through a double medium of flesh and spirit, so that all things seem to go cross, though indeed they go right enough. And hence it is that God’s proceedings, in His justice, are not so well discerned, the eyes of man alone being not competent judges thereof.

—Thomas Fuller

Golden Treasury of Puritan Quotations