Are You Where God Wants You? – by Ken Lawler

I was listening to one of my favorite radio preachers and he said something I didn’t agree with and I doubted he actually meant what he said.  It was a message about the call of Moses and he detailed how Moses had spent the 40 years since he had escaped Egypt with a murder warrant on his head.  What this preacher said was, “Wherever you are, whatever you’re going through, you’re where God wants you.”  I personally think God’s people often find themselves in a situation He does not want them in.

That does not mean God will not use the situation for either your eventual benefit or His.  One example is Abram going to Egypt (Gen. 12:10) when there was a famine in the land God led him to.  Granted, this was no minor drought, it was a “grievous famine.”  Famine or not, God wanted Abram in the land, not in Egypt.  Going there (twice) caused all sorts of problems, not the least being he came home with Hagar.  What we see though is God using these out of His will episodes to develop Abram into the giant of faith who took his son Isaac to Mount Moriah for a sacrifice to God.

You see the same results when Joseph’s brothers sell him to the Midianites (Gen. 37), who re-sell him to the Egyptian Potiphar.  I don’t see God’s fingerprints anywhere near this episode, but He obviously used it as the catalyst that culminated in The Exodus.

Probably the best example is The Lord Himself. Obviously, God the Father sent Him down here to be the final Passover sacrifice for man’s sin problem.  How God would have preferred for that to go down we don’t know.

We do know neither the Bible record nor eye-witness accounts in secular history records a humane execution on a cross.  When you’re omniscient (knowing everything) you know exactly what is going to happen, but it’s hard to believe God wanted Jesus tied to that stake in Jerusalem after being beaten until He was not recognizable.  How God would have preferred this sacrifice to have been carried out we’ll never know, but I doubt if God’s preference was for Him to go through everything He experienced.

Every time I think of that day in Jerusalem I think about who is surely one of the most obedient beings ever created.  Watching this unfold was the Commander of the angelic warriors who I imagine had them armed and ready to head for Jerusalem.  But when God said, no Michael, he obeyed God, sheathed his sword, and watched it happen.