With God's Help: Devotions from Time of GraceSample

Whose fault, God?

When a badly needed job disappears through layoff, when a child is seriously ill, when the biopsy comes back positive, when your family income is so strained you miss another house payment, when your marriage breaks up, how can you not want an explanation of cause and effect?

It’s one thing to take personal responsibility for personal sins and mistakes. It’s another thing entirely to attempt to figure out if someone is getting punished by God. It’s not our job to judge. If God seems to prefer to work quietly and behind the scenes, we should hold back on laying guilt on others or ourselves.

“As he [Jesus] went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life’” (John 9:1-3). It may well be that God sends a hardship as a rebuke for our hardheadedness. It may also be that he is allowing a grief, and then grieving with us, so that he can work in our weakness and bring about something great because of it.

Since we can’t tell the difference, let’s let God do his own business. Our job is to thank him for our blessings and pray to him for help in time of need so that the work of God might be displayed in our lives.