God is on the throne!

No purpose of God can be thwarted. Man may be godless, but God goes His way. Man may have a lot to say, but God has the last word. Solomon reminds us that “There is no wisdom and no understanding, and no plan against the LORD” (Proverbs 21:30). And Jeremiah testifies that “the purposes of the LORD are carried out” (Jeremiah 51:29).

Joseph’s brothers had decided to get rid of him by selling him to a group of Midianites. But all they accomplished was fulfilling God’s will. The Midianites provided Joseph with a free trip to Egypt, where he rose to become viceroy and the savior of his people.

When the man born blind received his sight and became a believer in the Lord, the Jews expelled him from the synagogue. Was that a great victory for them? No, because the Lord Jesus would have brought him out anyway, because the Good Shepherd “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out” (John 10:3). So they merely spared the Lord the trouble of doing it Himself.

The godlessness of men reached its absolute peak when they took the Lord Jesus and put Him to death by nailing Him to a cross. But Peter declared that He had been handed over “by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). God outdid men’s monstrous crime by exalting Christ as Lord and Savior.

Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895 – 1960, American pastor, radio preacher, and Bible teacher) told the story of a wealthy landowner who had beautiful trees on his estate. But he had a bitter enemy who said, “I will cut down one of his trees; that will hurt him.” In the darkness of the night, the enemy climbed over the fence, went to the most beautiful tree, and set to work with saws and axes. In the first light of morning he saw two men in the distance riding over the hill toward him, and recognized one of them as the landowner. Hastily he knocked out the wedges and brought the tree down, but one of the branches caught him and pinned him to the ground, so that he died of the severe injury. Before his death, he screamed: “Ha, I have cut down your beautiful tree.” But the landowner looked at him with pity and said: “I brought the architect with me. We are planning to build a house, and it was necessary to cut down a tree to make the space needed for it; it is exactly the tree you have been working on all night.”