As we’ve begun a series in Daniel, one theme that shows up repeatedly is God’s sovereignty. As I quoted one author, this means that “God is in control of who’s in control.” That sounds great, but it’s challenging, isn’t it? How can God be somehow “in control” when so much stuff in the world seems to be so contrary to His will? It’s comforting to know that when I read books like the Psalms or Habakkuk, biblical authors struggled with that same question.

I suggested on Sunday that one of the ways to think about this is that God allows people to go off track. He gives freedom for people, including powerful leaders, to make a major mess of things. However, He is able to take those developments and use them towards His own purposes: for example, to strengthen His people, to discipline them, or to make the Gospel known. Maybe He does all three at once!

As I mentioned on Sunday, one somewhat recent historical example of this is the underground church in China. When Mao Zedong and the Communists came to power in 1949, foreign missionaries were forced to leave in droves. The last Protestant missionary managed to stay until 1959. Apparently, most of them assumed that because of the persecution against the church, the removal of missionaries, and the overpowering control of the Communists, the church in China would essentially go extinct. In reality, the opposite happened. I have a little book about the underground Chinese church with a quote that sums this up well:

I have another book about the church in China that makes further connections. For example, as many leaders were thrown in prison in China between the 1950s and 1970s, prison cells became a place where faith was shared more openly than even in homes. Those cells became a channel for transmitting faith, causing conversions as well as new connections between leaders. Another example: in 1989, the Tiananmen crackdown by the Communist government led many to see their government as morally bankrupt, causing a significant number of conversions to Christian faith. Apparently, the Christian theology of sin helped many make sense of the violence they had witnessed. Again and again, the evil intentions of worldly leaders backfired. It’s like Psalm 2:1 says, “why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?”

We may not always see what God is doing in world events, and it may often seem that the outcomes are anything but Gospel-oriented. However, I’m encouraged that as we seek to be faithful to Him, God is able to use what’s going on around us for Kingdom purposes. We don’t have to figure out how that’s going to work, but we can trust His ability to do it. He did it in Daniel’s day, He’s been doing it in China over the last century, and He can do it our own time and place too.