Friday, April 14, 2006

He Numbered the Stars

Hadleigh and I like to read together. We have made it through quite a few books recently, including, but not limited to "The Poky Little Puppy", "Snow Bear" (which her grandparents just sent), "London Refrain" and "Paris Encore" by Bodie and Brock Thoene. We are currently working on "Putting Amazing Back into Grace" by Michael Horton. Horton actually has a radio program called The White Horse Inn which deals with issues that in evangelical America (OK, I am totally not doing that justice...anyway). There are a few of us in our chapel community that get together on a monthly basis to listen to one of the radio broadcasts and then to discuss it. We call it "Reformation Sunday" and it is pretty fun/interesting.

When I realized that Horton was the one on this radio program we were occassionaly listening to, I remembered there was a book on my shelf that I had yet to read and I thought this sufficient motivation to pick up the book. It is a wonderful book. In fact, Hadleigh might become a theologian since she is hearing great theology at this early age... I was struck by this passage early in the book and so here it is my musings for the day.

"In his best-seller 'When Bad Things Happen to Good People', Rabbi Harold Kushner states, 'Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it. Even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check and limiting the damage evil can do.' Such a limited view of God is exploded by the biblical notion of creation. It fails to account for a God who 'determines the number of the stars' and who 'calls them each by name' (Ps. 147.4), who numbers our hairs and sees to it that every robin's breast has a pattern. While sin introduced disorder, destruction, and decay, the same God who created order from chaos is ruling and redeeming his world so that one day 'the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay'...(Rom. 8.21-22)."

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