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DOES HEAVEN EVER PANIC? #1

BLINDSIDED BY A CNN NEWS REPORT

Things are humming along nicely for you.  Your administration is running smoothly; your job approval ratings are sky-high, about to pop into the 70s.  You’ve got a State of the Union message to deliver in a few days, where you can bask in the glow of, say, a balanced budget.  After years and years of red ink, you’ve delivered on your promise to balance the federal budget — and you’ve done it ahead of schedule.

And then all at once, you’re hit by a torpedo called a late-breaking headline.  There’s a scandal that splashes onto the front pages of every newspaper in the world.  The nation is rocked by gossip and innuendo and the possibility that very soon, a politician’s kingdom may come to an end.

Well, this all sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?  We’ve seen it more than once.  And one word certainly must describe the White House or Number 10 Downing Street at such a moment.  Here’s that word: PANIC.  All of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue goes into a dither, with all-night sessions and pizza brought in and guarded “no-comments” to the press, as a spokesman like Mike McCurry tries his best to hold together some semblance of order in the press room.

And I imagine that the number one comment in the inner recesses of power must be this lament: “Oh no!  We didn’t anticipate this!”  Followed immediately by: “What do we do now?”

It’s very often here at the Voice of Prophecy that we pick a certain topic for future discussion . . . and then, lo and behold, events in the world around us tumble right into that very exact arena.  Because our title for this week of radio programs, chosen several months ago by our producer, is this: DOES HEAVEN EVER PANIC?  Does God on His throne ever look around His universe with a look of desperation on His face, and then cry out:  “Oh no!  I didn’t anticipate this!  What a political mess!  I never dreamed such-and-such would transpire down there on earth.  Now what are we going to do?”  Is it possible that heaven, just like they have in the White House, maintains a War Room where damage control is done in response to Satan’s sneak attacks?

There’s a verse in the Bible that has quite a bit to say about this business of panic, of headline surprises.  Is God ever blindsided, or thrown for a loop by unexpected world events?  Is He a deity who RE-acts instead of acts, being pushed around by every tire blowout as He drives along the freeway of eternity?

Well, here’s that verse, and it’s found in the obscure book of Amos, chapter three, and verse seven.  Notice:

“Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets.”

If we think for just one more moment about White House politics, we might note that usually a presidential team can either have panic or they can have a plan.  And here in this verse of the Bible we discover three very encouraging things about how heaven operates.

First of all, friend, our heavenly Father has a plan.  He’s not in panic mode; He’s not in denial.  He’s not confused or scared.  Not ever!  The authority of Scripture says with calm assurance that God has a plan.  No panic; just a plan.

But there are two more things to notice, and both of them are tremendous good news.  Here’s point two: it’s our sovereign God who has this plan.  You and I might have plans and be pretty excited about them, fairly confident.  Maybe our poll numbers are good too, and we wish the networks would give us some free TV time to do our own State of the Union chest-thumping.  But we’re not sovereign beings, are we?  And neither is the president.  Surprises can and do come his direction.  But our heavenly Father is sovereign.

Now what does that word mean?  Any good dictionary will flesh out the nuances for you, but the main line to notice is right here.  Sovereign means “of superlative strength or efficacy.”  And in the case of God, it’s not just superlative strength, wonderful strength, more strength than we’ve got.  No, listen.  This is SUPER-superlative strength; in fact, it’s infinite strength.  As the kids’ song goes, “There’s nothing my God cannot do.”  More about that all week long, but can you see how sovereign strength and power would push panic right out of the kingdom?  A person doesn’t usually need to panic when he or she has sovereign power that truly is sovereign.

Point three to notice from this wonderful verse in Amos is this: God’s plan is one that He has chosen to clearly reveal to His servants the prophets. Which, of course, means that He’s revealed His plan to us too.  There are no secrets kept from us; there’s no stonewalling a grand jury or plot to keep the truth from coming out.  Friend, our sovereign God says to us every day of every year: “My child, I have a plan.  No matter what happens in your world, I’m still in control.  My plan continues.  There’s never a crisis here, never any unexpected problems.  And My plan for your world and for you is something I’ve revealed.  You can know what it is — right now.”

Maybe you recall clear back in the 1968 presidential election that candidate Richard Nixon told the country he had a plan to get the United States out of Vietnam.  However, it was a “secret plan.”  And I’m sure that there are many aspects of foreign policy that a president or a candidate cannot openly share with 250,000,000 curious citizens without jeopardizing The Plan.  Madeline Albright does have to keep some secrets locked in her purse as she flies from one world capital to another.  But political detractors couldn’t help but notice that four years after Nixon became president — in fact, even after he’d won a second term — that Vietnam plan was still kind of secret.  Tens of thousands of our troops were still in Danang and Saigon.  When it’s a secret plan, and your own leader isn’t telling you where he’s going, the following gets kind of tough after a while.

But here the Bible tells us these three reassuring points:

“Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets.”

God is sovereign; He has a plan; and He’s willing to tell us what it is.

You know, one thing I think we’ve all learned from recent political scandals is that our thoughts and opinions and, yes, our plans are so quickly and immediately set aside by transpiring events.  We’re recording this program on a Tuesday, September 19 . . . but you’re not going to hear it until November 27, more than two months later.  Sometimes that is absolutely scary to us.  Who knows what kinds of things might transpire between now and then?  I might be tempted to say something very bold about what’s going to happen in Washington, D.C. — only to be rendered a blindsided fool by the headlines that come along.

And even those in power face that same dilemma.  A crisis happens and all the great minds come together and say, based on the evidence they have: “Well, here’s our plan.  We’ll say such-and-such.  That’ll be our response.”  And they send out all the spinmeisters the following Sunday to parrot that line a million times on the talk shows.  But when the next day’s headlines reveal that nine more impeachable things also happened, then their plan blows up.

It’s the same for the press people who clamor for these stories.  The crisis hits and they all announce: “This is it.  The smoking gun.  Impeachment is inevitable, just around the corner.”  But a week or so later, as different plot twists come along, the conventional wisdom soon goes down a completely different path.  Before you know it, the president’s more popular than ever.  And for sure all of us have noticed how completely stupid a newspaper headline can appear just one day later.

I imagine that newspapers around the world probably said pretty calm things on December SIX, 1941.  “Everything’s fine; the surf is up at Waikiki.” I’m sure there were gossip sheets and tabloids and even respectable newspapers which, because of their reporting deadlines had, even on Sunday morning, August 31 of 1997, cheery little gossip headlines reporting the littlest bits of trivia about Princess Diana — what she was wearing, what kind of perfume.  How much her lunch cost there in Paris.  But what a difference a day makes to those of us who aren’t sovereign; how quickly we’re pushed into crisis mode when someone hits the panic button or when the Japanese strike force bombs Pearl Harbor, and nobody heard the planes coming.

It may be that you and I look up at heaven and we don’t see a plan — either because we haven’t read it much or because it just gets obscured by all the confusion and the pain down here.  Auschwitz happens and Rwanda happens and the messes in Washington happen, and we shake our head in bewilderment.  We decide that God has either a bad plan or no plan at all.  And we base that judgment on how it looks from where we’re sitting, from our tiny little peephole.  We base it on the sordid headlines of today, instead of trusting that when the whole story plays itself out, we’ll see the big picture, the total mosaic of God’s dealings with us.

Friend, there’s no crisis in heaven.  No panic.  Which means that if the sovereign God is our sovereign God, there doesn’t have to be any for us either.