The king is not the King - Audio
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And God has not been answering my prayers this year. I prayed that COVID would last for two weeks, and God said no. I prayed that the church would be free to do what we have been called to do, and God said no. Most recently I prayed and have been praying that the presidential election would be a decisive one way or the other. It would be a landslide, either blue or red wave, but a definitive statement on what America wants principally because I'm very, very disturbed about the divisions going on the country, the hatred between right and left. Just to say, hey, we're done with it, and God said no. And there have got to be some of you who are like me, or like if God's in charge, what does that look like, and how is that mediated? Like this is crazy, and I'd like to invite you to see with me how the Bible thinks about God's exercise of control, God's rule over the world. And I want us to think about that specifically in the context of 2020, of what we're sitting in, right now, my understanding is that the latest is that the networks have declared that Joe Biden is the president elect. The Trump campaign has refused to accept that, Trump is not conceding, it's going to go to the courts, and it seems like there's no end in sight, and I want to know how is God operating right now? Listen to this text from the Proverbs. The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of Yahweh. He directs it wherever he wants. Everyone's path is straight in their own eyes, but Yahweh weighs the heart. In Hebrew, the word for king is melech, and there's also a female version, a melechah, king queen. But it's not just, we tend to think about kings in terms of queen Elizabeth and robes and sectors, and that sort of thing, really, the ancient world, they're thinking about kings almost more in terms of tribal chiefs, right? The person who's at the top of any organization, of any community, those are kings. And so when we think about kings, we tend to think about, like I said, King George III or whomever, but really from the Bible's perspective, Governor Newsom is a king, right? Whoever the person is on January or whatever is the king. Moreover, Jeff Bezos is a king, Sergey Brin is a king, Tim Cook is a king, Mark Zuckerberg is a king. And listen to what the proverb says about kings. The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of Yahweh. That word channels can mean either one thing, two of two different things in Hebrew. It can mean like a canal that is the overall direction of a river, like the shore to shore, where the shores are located. It can also mean the little individual paths in the river, the currents and eddies. It can be both, it can be either. And so in Eddy, for those of you who are not familiar, eddies look like this, eddies are parts of the river where there's sort of an outcropping and the rush of the river causes like a little kind of peaceful circular space, which is particularly good for fishing, because fish like to use that as a spot to kind of rest and eat. And so if you're a fisherman, it's like it's, you know, shooting fish in a barrel. No, that's a little too on the nose. But it's something like that where it's an easier spot to fish. And so it could be that the proverb is saying that the king's heart is like the currents
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Is God in control and if so how? 2020 has been a tough year, see how the Bible makes sense of human and divine power and what that means for us as we finish 2020 and prepare for 2021.