Saturday, September 04, 2010
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Seek, and ye shall find: knock, and it shall be opened unto you." - Matthew 7:7

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The betrayal by Judas was a pivotal event. Good Friday may have been very different without it. Judas is condemned in the minds of righteous men for what he did, but did God condemn him for carrying out a key role in accomplishing His will? Matthew 27 says Judas was seized by remorse and threw the money into the temple. Then he committed suicide -- another act condemned by righteous men. Did Judas go to heaven or to hell?

The eternal fate of Judas is in God's hands. That is not for us to judge. But the larger question here is how God can condemn evil men who are the instruments of his will. The testimony of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, and of the early church, affirms that, as Augustine explained: "Through the bad wills of evil men God fulfills what he righteously wills." This has always been a paradoxical mystery that we will never fully comprehend, because it touches on the core of who God is. But this is a truth that, although we as finite creatures will never exhaustively understand, it is also a truth that has led the people of God to a deep sense of assurance and peace that nothing is outside of God's benevolent control, and that nothing can shake or alter God's ultimate loving purposes for us.

God is sovereign over all things and directs and orders all things to accomplish His purposes, so that even our evil desires and actions do not and cannot thwart or frustrate God's divine purposes for the redemption of the world through Christ. God is not constantly running along behind us, attempting to tidy up the mess we have made; rather, God by his divine ordering of all things, uses even those who rail against him to accomplish his will.

In Isaiah, the Assyrians, who were famously violent warriors, are seen as instruments of God's wrath against Israel for their disobedience, even though they have only evil purposes in mind:

"Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger;
the staff in their hands is my fury!
Against a godless nation [Israel] I send him [Assyria],
and against the people of my wrath I command him,
To take spoil and seize plunder
and to tread them down like the wine of mire of the street.
But he [Assyria] does not so intend,
and his heart does not so think;
But its is in his heart to destroy,
and to cast off nations not a few."
Isaiah 10: 5-7

Even though the Assyrians are unwittingly accomplishing God's will, they will nevertheless be judged because they have only desired to do evil, not good, and have in effect accomplished God's purposes in spite of themselves:

"When the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem,
he will punish the speech of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria
and the boastful look in his eyes."

This same understanding of God - so ordering the affairs of this world that he uses even evil men to accomplish his purposes - is seen clearly in Acts 4: 28, where the early Christians saw this as an occasion to give thanks and praise to God, praying:

"Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David,
your servant, said by the Holy Spirit,
'Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed'
for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles
and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever you hand and your plan had predestined to take place."
Acts 4: 24-27

John Calvin notes that Augustine also praises God for the mystery of his sovereign ordering of all things: "Great are God's works, sought out in all he wills; so that in a wonderful and ineffable manner nothing is done without God's will, not even that which is against his will. For it would not be done if he did not permit it; yet he does not unwillingly permit it, but willingly; nor would he, being good, allow evil to be done, unless being also almightily he could make good even out of evil." And so it is with Judas and his betrayal of Jesus. While Judas meant only evil, God so orders all things that this very depth of evil has by God’s sovereign hand brought us the supreme good of reconciliation with God through the sacrificial blood of Christ.

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