Then the LORD said to him, "Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” (Exodus
This passage came up a couple days ago in my daily Bible reading. I can never read it without remembering a conversation I once had with a good friend about how he became a convinced Calvinist through reading about Moses’s call.
When he first told me that, I assumed that what had persuaded him was God’s assertion of freedom to harden Pharaoh’s heart. Instead, it was God’s claim to be sovereign even over physical disabilities. My friend and his wife had a baby with Down’s Syndrome. He was devastated and sought the Lord in prayer. This is the verse that came to him. He found comfort in knowing that God had caused his son to be born with that extra chromosome just as he might make a man mute, deaf, or blind.
It is far more comforting to know that an all-wise, loving God has his own good reasons for doing something than to believe in the process theologians’ God who empathetically joins us in our suffering, wringing his hands helplessly in the face of accidents he can’t do anything about. That sort of God can’t possibly lift us out of hopelessness because he’s too busy wallowing in it himself.
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