God is the most detailed planner ever. No matter what circumstance, scenario, outcome, et cetera, God knows every single detail and every single potential detail. Basically, God has every single second and every single detail planned out. Does that mean you don’t have free will? No. However, that is a topic for another time. The focus of this week’s message is that since God has everything planned and everything in God’s plan, then God is in control of everything.
This may seem confusing or even impossible to fathom but, fortunately, there are examples that help show how God’s planning works in our lives. One example is found in the book of Esther. In the book of Esther, it tells a story of a Jew named Mordecai who saved the king’s life and as a result, was promoted to a high position in the king’s court (Esther 2:21). However, during this time there was also a man named Haman who hated Mordecai and wanted all Jews killed (Esther 3:5-6). So, Haman devised a plan and convinced the king to issue an edict that on one particular day, all Jews would be killed (Esther 4:7).
When Mordecai learned about this plan, he informed Queen Esther about it, since she was also Jewish. Initially, she didn’t want to get involved because she thought she might lose her own life if she did (Esther 4:11) but Mordecai convinced her otherwise by saying “Who knows whether you have not come to your royal position for such a time as this?”(Esther 4:14b). In other words, maybe God had put her in that specific position at that specific time, so she could save her people. And sure enough with some convincing from Esther Haman’s evil plot was revealed and thwarted and instead of being executed he ended up being hanged on the gallows he had built for Mordecai (Esther 7:9-10; 9:25-27)!
So, what does all this mean? It means that no detail is too small or insignificant for God. He knows every single thing that happens or will happen, and He has everything under His control. We see another great example of this truth in Matthew 10 where Jesus sends out His disciples on their first missionary journey, telling them not to worry about anything–not even what they will say when they are put on trial because “it is not you who will speak—it will be the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (Matthew 10:20)! Can you imagine? The Holy Spirit Himself would give them utterance! What a wonderful display of God’s sovereignty over every single detail!
Referenced Verses:
Jeremiah 29:11
James 1:2
Romans 8:28
Video Transcript
Please use the share icons below and help other people listen and find Social Media Ministries, because, after all, it is our mission to spread the living Word of Christ to as many people as possible through the use of social media and also to help them understand and interpret the Scriptures in the Bible. So, if you could help us do that by sharing on your social media, that would be amazing.
If you’re a first-time viewer, awesome, thanks so much for tuning in. Hit the like button, the subscribe button below, and the bell icon to be notified when we post new content.
Today we are talking about a great message on how God plans in detail and [how] everything is in God’s control—He has control of everything. A lot of points to take away from that. You don’t need to worry about anything. You have a purpose in your life. God’s got it all under control. We are going to start out reading the Bible. We are going to go to the Book of Jeremiah.
If you have your Bible, please turn there with me. If not or if you are not capable of looking something up right now, come back later; I’ll have all of the reference verses in the description below so check them out, look them up, read them, [and] you can re-watch this.
You can share it with your friends, your family, and talk about it with them as well. Because through repetition, engagement, and conversation we internalize and learn, which is really the point of all of this.
So Jeremiah 29:11, hopefully, you know this Verse: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD Yahweh, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” What does that mean? Well, let’s dive into this verse a little bit more before we move on.
“For I know the plans I have for you.” God has plans for you and He knows what they are; He knows them, you don’t need to worry. He knows exactly what He has going on in your life. “Plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” So you are going to prosper, you are not going to be coming into harm, you have hope and a future. This is there. He knows this for you, you have to choose it.
He knows everything that is going to happen to you, that’s the bottom line. He has it all planned down to the tiniest detail. There is no room for error in God’s plan. Why? There is no error. He is a very detail-oriented person.
You think you might be a little bit OCD? Try to the max. God would be that way, except it is not a disorder for Him—it is a quality. He has everything to the time. If He forgot a detail and left out something, there could be major problems in who knows what.
There are stories of a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the earth causing a tsunami on the other side. Imagine if God didn’t have a detail worked out, it could be the end of the world. He has every single detail worked out. He is in control of everything. No matter what happens in your life, God would never leave anything to chance.
In fact, every single thing is a part of God’s plan. No matter what happens in your life, He is always in control. Do you know why? Well, for the simple reason, you could even call it a fallacy in reasoning, but it is a good one nonetheless, God is in control of everything because if He wasn’t in control, He wouldn’t be God.
What is the definition of God? An all-powerful [and] all-supreme being. Our God, Yahweh is I Am, He’s so great that He just is. That is how. We can’t even comprehend it; we put humanistic terms on it, the three O’s: Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent—all-knowing. He’s always everywhere and He just knows everything that is going on.
So if He knows everything that’s going on and He is everywhere, it’s great. Therefore if He wasn’t in control of something, He wouldn’t live up to the definition of the term “God.” Therefore, He has to be in control of everything. I know it’s simple, connecting the dots, but it is a pretty good argument.
Yes of course we could sit here and argue back and forth on it, and if you want to, feel free to post it in the comments below. I always encourage a little discussion and hopefully, others will chime in and you can get something going—talk about it with your friends, use this reasoning, it is a pretty basic definition of God, proves God is in control of everything, otherwise, He wouldn’t be God.
I know that may be hard to accept for you because maybe you have had a rough life, or maybe there have been some bad things, trial, loss, sickness, persecution, any of that could be going on in your life.
Maybe you have led a hard life of abuse; it doesn’t matter what you have gone through, I mean it does matter for you, not that it doesn’t matter at all, but the point is that no matter what you go through, God has been in control of it all.
I want you to think of Job before you start arguing with me about how could God want this to happen in your life, He doesn’t want it to happen obviously, but He knows the plans He has for you; “plans to prosper you, not to harm you.”
But wait a minute, you have gone through harm, God doesn’t want to intentionally harm you, but there may be something going on out of your capability to understand. Come back to Job; that poor man went through literal hell. He was tortured, tormented, I mean painful, all by Satan.
The devil came and took everything from him, yet he still hoped in God. He had no idea that there was an epic battle going on between good and evil, and he was the center—the kingpin of the battle, and whether or not Job held on was really whether or not God would be victorious.
Well, God is in control of everything. He knew Job. He knew what he was capable of and what he could take, so He allowed bad things to happen to him. Why? To give Himself glory. He allowed bad things to happen to Job for the glory of God.
In everything we do on earth, what is our purpose? To bring glory to our Creator. It’s why we were created. God created humans to bring Him joy and to bring Him glory and honor, so if that is why we are created, sometimes we might go through some bad stuff to bring glory to God.
We might not even know, but God knows we can handle it. He knows we can take it just like Job. So think about that when you go through something, that it might be something that is happening while you go through that, you have a chance to prove Satan wrong and to honor and glorify God.
We’re going to go to James 1:2. James is an awesome book, it is a very straightforward matter-of-fact book. I really like it.
James 1:2 says, “Consider it pure joy my brothers when you face trials of many kinds”—Verse three—“because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.” It continues on with some great advantages that come next, and we’re not going to go through them because that is another day, but pretty much you need to be happy and rejoice when you face trials of many kinds.
Why? Because you are developing perseverance, you will be able to undergo it and later the person you are or the people you know are that way. Why? Because of the life experiences they have gone through.
Think about this: let’s say you were abused, or let’s say you had a rough childhood, let’s say you had a really good childhood—the person you are today is a direct result of the people in your life.
I know that could be hard to believe, some of you might say, “Yep I am exactly the way I am because of them.” But it is also your choice—how you deal with those experiences, what you do with them, how you externalize them. Do you use them constructively? You have a choice.
You could have been taught the best cat burglar skills in the world, are you using it for good and helping secure places? Are using it for evil and stealing for your own gain? It’s up to you. You have the choice.
Think about this too: there are tons of different people that shape your life and maybe you don’t have parents, orphaned or they died, one died, maybe they left. Whatever the case may be, you are a direct result of that action.
You are the way you are because of your parents who may not have been there, they left and it made you the way you are today. You were made the way you are because of your life experiences, whether you like it or not, and God was in control of all of that because there is a plan for your life and in order for you to become the person you are meant to be, you had to go through all of this other stuff before you can become the person you’re meant to be.
How do you get there? You gotta be making the right choices. Are you glorifying God in your choices? Are you glorifying yourself? Cat burglarizing and glorifying you? Or helping secure other stores and people and businesses or whatever and using your talent for something good? The point is, if you didn’t have the specific experiences that you have, you would be a different person.
Someone loses a parent, they grow up differently than if they had not lost a parent—different experiences. God uses these negative experiences to shape you and mold you into the person He wants you to be.
That’s where we go wrong as humans. We always think of the person we want to be, or maybe others want us to be. In reality, the only person we need to be is the person that God wants us to be.
Now how do you find out what type of person God wants you to be? Well, it’s really very easy. Be like Jesus. How do you know what Jesus was like? Read the Bible, right here; you read the New Testament, you can read all about Jesus, that is exactly what He was like.
You want to read more of the Bible, you can. You read the Old Testament, you can find out all the different ways God commanded the Israelites to live and follow that. Don’t do the things that they did wrong, all that kind of stuff.
Do what God kept telling them over and over to do. Be who He wants you to be. No matter what has happened in your life, God knows it and it is all part of His extremely detail-oriented plan. Nothing is left to chance.
Let’s go to Romans 8:28. It says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” All things, everything, whether you have someone that died, whether you had something bad happen, whether you had a great life, whatever the case may be.
Maybe you look at your life and the life of someone else and you say, “Man this person is a fool as defined in Proverbs.” Read the Book of Proverbs, you will know how bad fools have it. I would never—do you think that fool is a lighthearted thing to call someone, “Oh you fool”? That is one of the worst insults ever. Read the book of Proverbs and you will find out.
Maybe there is this fool in your life and all of a sudden it is like, “Man, why does God keep giving them all these blessings because they are so foolish and they just squander everything?”
You think of this other person in your life who is really having a tough time, but they are just the nicest person and they really try to do everything good, but nothing seems to be going well. You look at the two and you say, “What is going on?”
God has a plan. Nothing is left to chance. Right here, “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.” You say, “Well this fool might not love God, but this other person clearly does. What is going on?” Maybe this person’s journey doesn’t need all of that stuff, maybe the fool needs that to learn loss and become the good person God wants them to be; you never know what is going on.
We cannot comprehend it. If we knew that much of what God knew, oh my, we would probably be dead and in heaven. We would lose our minds; we would be gone just like the prophets that God would pull up right into Heaven, gone in a whirlwind.
“For the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” See, it’s not our purpose, so we may not understand. You might not understand what the heck this fool is doing and why the good person isn’t getting more. It’s not our purpose. It is not even their purpose.
It is God’s purpose for us and it is our privilege to live this life and read the Bible and pray and talk to God, to understand what our purpose is and be able to live it, because it is through that that we will accomplish and receive pure joy. Remember trials produce perseverance. God has everything in control or He wouldn’t be God.
I really encourage you to think about that, ponder it, meditate on it, it is a very simple argument but when you go through it, man does it make a lot of sense, and it’s strong. Talk about it, discuss it with others, get in your philosophy class, and discuss the topic of God being in control and would He be God if He wasn’t in control? Kind of like those thought experiments of “Could God make something so heavy He couldn’t lift it?”
I don’t know. Could He? Not the point. Use this as fuel as a topic for discussion, to open more doors and tell others about Christ, because really that is all of our purposes, to share the Gospel, one of our many purposes, [and] it is God’s purpose for us. Read your Bible, pray, talk to Him, find out more about what it is for you.
Let’s pray. Lord Jesus thank You so much for bringing us here today. Thank You for this quick easy message, for everyone to grasp. I really ask, Lord, that they would think about it and internalize it and let it mean something to them. Let them ponder really the depth and the magnitude of the fact that we are a direct result of our life’s experiences and if one thing were different, we would not be the same person.
One thing, some little insignificant thing like if we had stayed another day here, or if we had slept in one morning here, I mean we don’t even know what You do for us every day. Lord, anytime someone goes through some trauma or some hardship, help them remember Job.
And help them receive hope because we know that You have the plans for us, to prosper us, to give us hope and a future. I ask that You would do that for each and every one of these people and help them see it in their daily lives. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Thanks again for tuning in today. I really appreciate it. I would really also appreciate it if you use those share icons below, hit the like button, the subscribe button, show your support for Social Media Ministries and what we are doing to try to share the living Word of God with as many people as possible.
I really hope that you tune in again next week and also spend some time thinking about this, reading the verses, and really understanding the magnitude of this seemingly simple piece of information. God bless.
