As God Wills

by Rev Greg Obong-Oshotse 11 September 2020

Text: John 3:27 “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven.”

In Homer’s The Iliad, King Agamemnon and Achilles are rewarded with two beautiful damsels captured as war booty during the war of Troy. The father of the King’s mistress comes to secure her ransom but he is rebuffed. A priest of Apollo, he threatens vengeance, petitions his god and a pestilence falls on the Greeks. The King is forced to give up his mistress and decides he will have Archilles’ mistress, leading to a quarrel between both men. Agamemnon says to Achilles: “If thou hast strength, ‘twas heaven that strength bestowed; For know, vain man! thy valour is from God.” Amazing that what modern man denies, pagans know instinctively. For all the blindness of their idolatry, these ancients knew, to some degree, their place, and the supremacy of God. All that we have comes from God.

John the Baptist and Christ Himself affirm this truth. John exalts Christ when he might have been jealous of Him: Christ’s ministry was growing, John’s on the wane. By teaching Pilate the true source of authority and power, Christ also gently puts him in his place when He might rightly have exploded in righteous indignation at Pilate’s effrontery. It ought to be a great source of joyful contentment to every believer that God, in His Sovereign will, decides his or her gifts and also offers the providence for their use of them.

Prayer Dear Father help us to know our place and rejoice in it as Your providence and gift to us in Christ’s name, Amen.