The Panoramic View

God uses most anyone to accomplish His purposes.  He pays no attention to our personal dislikes, our prejudices, religious affiliation, national origin, or our preferences for people who look like us, think like us, and act like us.  He has yet to check with us about His choices.  What He does is done solely on the basis of sovereign will.  In a book entitled, Holy Envy,"  Barbara Brown Taylor writes, "...examples of redemptive religious strangers...include Bithiah, the Pharaoh's daughter who plucked the baby Moses from the rush basket...Jethro, the Midianite priest who was Moses's father-in-law and teacher, the Moabite who became the ancestor of King David; and Cyrus, the Persian king...the only non-Jew in the Bible who is ever identified as God's anointed one."     

As hard as it is for to accept, God does not care what we think about His choices.  Most of us should have figured that one out when Jesus sounded the call of discipleship to us.  The problem is we are willing to apply this divine logic to ourselves, but we are often too slow to give some of the unlikable ones in our life the same measure of grace.  The Word tells us in many places and in many ways to watch where we point our finger of judgment, but it goes ahead of us, nonetheless.    

The divine plan is bigger than anyone of us, or any particular group of us.  As we read the Word we see that God chooses individuals whose name would never appear in any history book, kings and political leaders, and even nations.  We may be able to catch a glimpse of what God is doing in our little corner of the world where so much of what happens is about "me", but we can never catch the panoramic view of what God is about as He moves His plan from where it is now to the place where "Thy kingdom comes, Thy will be done" takes place.