THE ULTIMATE TRIUMPH OF GOD’S WILL

Ultimately, hardship and suffering, evil and sin, will not have the final word… Isaiah 51:11 captures this well when God promises the Jewish exiles living in Babylon, who had absolutely no human reason to hope for a return to Zion, “The ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.” To those who had no hope, God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”  (Jeremiah 29:11)

We may not always live to see this hope fulfilled. The Jews were in exile for fifty years in Babylon, but they died with the hope that their descendants would return to Zion -- and they did!

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. concluded his final sermon, preached on the night before he was shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee, by drawing upon the biblical picture of Moses, standing on the mountaintop looking over the promised land just before his own death. King told his audience that he had been to the mountaintop. He, like Moses, had seen the promised land -- for King that was a land of freedom and equality for all people. But then King, in a prescient moment, told his audience that he might not enter the promised land with them. But he was not afraid. He was, in fact, happy because, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” That’s what faith in the God who will ultimately triumph looks like!  

-- Adam Hamilton in “Why?: Making Sense of God’s Will”

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