Where can I go to escape your Spirit? Where can I flee your presence?… If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light around me will be night’ – even the darkness is not dark to you.
There’s a way of thinking about divine guidance that suggests that God has a secret plan for our lives and that our job is to find it and stick to it. If we miss it, we’re on plan B. Maybe we even need to retrace our steps.
This sounds good, but is in fact totally unbiblical. It takes no account of sin, or even just unwise decisions. I’ve made so many of those in life that by now I’m certainly not on plan A, but way beyond plan Z! It is a view of God that suggests He requires our perfect co-operation to achieve any of His plans. It is a view that can fill people with terrible regrets and morbid fears about the future.
We live in an age of commitment anxiety that sometimes frets so much about the consequences of our choices that we take no risks.
Psalm 139 rides to the rescue. David is revelling in the fact that whatever choices he makes, God is there with him. Wherever we go, this is true.
More than that, as David continues, all my days were written in your book and planned before one of them came to be (verse 16). Still He is with me; still He is working out His purposes for me.
Of course, we can make wise and foolish choices. But God’s sovereignty is bigger than this. The Bible is full of people who stuff up – yet God works out His purposes even in the thick of that. Read up on Abraham, Jacob, or Joseph and we see mistakes, apparent disasters, difficulties, all turned for good by our sovereign God. (We’ll have an opportunity for that in our sermon series this Sunday morning.)
He is sovereign over our exact situation today. He’s known all about it for all eternity. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He is with us. We can trust Him!
We’ll be digging much more into this matter of divine guidance this coming Thursday evening, at our Central Teaching Meeting.
