All Things Are Of God
By John Gavazzoni

Scripture says: "Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ..." (2Cor. 5:18a NKJV) Paul, Christ's special emissary to the Gentiles, wrote those words in his second letter to the Church in Corinth, and anyone familiar with the man's thought, knows it was not at all unlike him to make such a bold statement. Some of us who have been helped by the Spirit to get into the man's heart and mind, upon reading that again, might be prone to say to ourselves, "Wooowee, there goes our brother Paul again pulling no punches. You just gotta' love the guy, but there's an awful lot of our brethren who won't find it at all comfortable to set awhile chewing on that verse. Whenever he drops any one of those kind of bombs of his, some theological box gets blown to smithereens."

He's right, though. All things are of God---ALL things!!! Trace back anything you care to, to who's ultimately responsible for its existence, and you come to the throne of God. If it exists, it exists because God intended its existence---whether good or bad. There's no such thing as God being confronted and surprised by something the devil slipped in under the Divine radar. There's no such thing as, "Oh, dear Me, we've got a crisis on our hands. Alert! Alert! All hands on deck. Sound the alarm. Get to work on damage control. We'll have to do some improvising to deal with this mess, and there's going to be some severe everlasting loss involved; I can see that already."

There was no hoping on God's part that Eve might not take the serpent's bait. It was all planned. O yes. O yes, yes, it was. I'm bold to tell you, yes it was. A garden including a cunning serpent slithering up to unprepared innocence. What would you expect? It was a no-brainer: Score: serpent one; Eve zero. But look down the road you students of scripture, that loss, in the end, will be integral to, and seminally serve, a gain of such vast proportions, that not even the greatest suffering that has come from that first "loss" will compare with the glory which shall be revealed to, in, and through us, and by "us," I mean we poor, wounded, captive, sin-sick souls. The Seed of the woman SHALL crush the head of the serpent, you can bet on that.

God is not a loser; He never loses---anything, anyone, not even, and especially not even, that only one lost sheep out of the hundred. You can go ahead and try getting yourself lost. It ain't gonna' work. You'll only end up coming home loving much, because you've been forgiven much. You think it's a challenge to be acceptable to God? Hey, try to be finally rejected. That, you'll find, will turn out to be the ultimate frustration. You reject God; He rejects your rejection. You throw your resignation onto His desk, and He refuses to accept your resignation. He counts you in, and there's no getting out.

"I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice, to worship You, O my soul rejoice. Take joy, my King, in what you hear. Let me be a sweet, sweet song in Your ear."