On a recent Saturday, I awoke to a weather alert on my phone. The National Weather Service had issued a severe storm warning for our region with the added threat of tornados. The tornado threat level was both significantly high and rare. All the conditions pointed to the potential for large, powerful tornadoes that could stay on the ground for a prolonged period of destruction.
Living in tornado country, we don’t take such warnings lightly. A few years ago in our community, a tornado came through without an actual touchdown, but nevertheless caused a portion of the roof on a nearby mall to collapse. Then it headed east, leaving a wide swath of destruction in its wake.
So throughout the day, I frequently checked the weather app for latest developments. Just after the supper hour, a severe storm headed our way; the radar detected unmistakable rotation in the system. The weather service issued a Tornado Warning for communities in its path, including ours. We were a mere 45 minutes away. Our son’s family who lives nearby in a ranch-style home with no basement came over to shelter in ours.
We kept our eyes on the radar, watching as the menacing storm inched closer. The weatherman reported someone in a nearby community spotted the funnel cloud. As the edge of the storm reached Sterling, I went upstairs to check on conditions outside. The wind howled, bending trees and driving rain.
Fifteen minutes later, the storm had passed, the clouds cleared out, and stars sparkled in the night sky. That was the end of it.
Forecasting
As we all know, forecasters can quite accurately predict general weather conditions. Yet we also know the weather—at least where I live—can be predictably unpredictable! Several times last winter, the weather service warned of storms with significant snowfall accumulation. Once we got a couple of inches, another time a dusting, yet another, nothing but flurries.
The nature of forecasting, it seems, is predictably unpredictable!
Take our current global crisis—the COVID-19 pandemic. How many predictions have you heard, confidently declared by the prognosticating expert, that completely failed to materialize? Others, only partially. As I write, we’re warned of everything from total, global economic collapse to a Chinese takeover of the world to a coming Russian-Chinese invasion of the United States to the impending emergence of Antichrist and the Beast with a forced chip implant via vaccinations to the complete reduction of the true Christian church to a relatively few marginalized house churches.
Other forecasters predict a rosier future. The USA will get through this and be stronger, the economy will soar once again, we’ll drastically reduce dependence upon foreign nations for everything from oil to pharmaceuticals, and we will be better prepared to defend ourselves against any future pandemic.
Which “weatherman” will be right? Predictably unpredictable.
THE Forecaster
Personally, I trust an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-wise sovereign God. He knows the path of every storm. Ultimately, He superintends each one, tornados and pandemics. Were He to choose to do so, He—and only He—could tell us fully and completely every detail of what the storm will bring, when it will lift its spinning cone of destruction, and all of the immediate as well as long-term effects, ramifications, and implications. He could tell us…if He chose to do so. But He hasn’t.
Sure, many claim to speak for Him, declaring what He’s doing and what He’s got in store. That’s always been the case in widespread calamities. Would that they spoke with less bravado and arrogant certainty, with greater humility and gentleness. History tells us the vast majority of such divine prognostications are predictably unpredictable.
The Story
Let me share one example from Os Guinness’s most recent book, Carpe Diem Redeemed.
After training to be a medical doctor at Cambridge in England, Guinness’s grandfather went to China in the late 1800s as a medical missionary, working first in Beijing then in Kaifang. He died of typhus at age 54 after personally caring for a severely ill imperial soldier. Os’s parents followed in his grandfather’s steps, serving in the hospital in Henan that his grandfather pioneered.
Then came World War II. “We soon found ourselves surrounded by the Japanese, communist, and Nationalist armies,” he writes. And conditions deteriorated rapidly. A locust plague from the middle east left a path of crop destruction in its wake. Famine followed. Chiang Kai-shek confiscated food to feed his soldiers, leaving civilians to starve. Within three months, five million people in the province died of starvation, including Os’s two brothers. He himself and his mother nearly died as well. They were forced, along with 10 million other refugees, to flee the region.
Eventually, the communists took over China. Guinness’s parents lived under house arrest for years. When finally released, they left China, returning to England for a while, before serving elsewhere in Asia. Often in telling of their experience and being forced to leave China, Os heard people predict, in effect, “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have all that work wasted.” His father consistently replied, “Wasted? We were privileged to sow the seed, and what happens now is up to God.”
“What happens now is up to God.” Only He is the 100% reliable “prognosticator”!
The End of the Story?
So what did God do? Was all that work wasted, as the well-meaning forecasters predicted? I’ll let Os Guinness report:
“After more than a century and a half of modern mission, there were probably no more than three quarters of one million Christians in China when the communists took over. So the planting had been tough, the brutal system of persecution of Christians that followed looked dire, and there were many in the West who joined the communists in condemning all missionary work as colonialism. Yet fifty years later, those Chinese Christians had not only stood firm, but increased exponentially. There were said to be around one hundred million Christians in China, or more, certainly more than there were Communist Party members, and many members of the Party had themselves become Christians.
“So when my father paid his last visit to China in his ninetieth year, he found that the Henan province, where we had originally lived, had become the epicenter of the fastest growth of the Christian church in two thousand years. Nanjing, where we lived at the end, had become the world capital for printing Bibles. Accompanying his obituary in the London Times was a photo of my father talking to a Chinese man he had led to faith fifty years earlier.”
Summarizing this century of God’s work in China, Guinness remarks, “What looks like the end of something is not always the end of the story.”
Let that sink in.
Now, God has revealed the ultimate end of the story of redemption that began in Genesis 3. The final chapters of the Bible tell us His plan to restore paradise, and the process will involve great global upheaval, even the “passing away” of what now is to make way for what shall be.
That said, I refuse to play the role of “prophet,” trying to predict—even using the Bible to do so—the end of the story God is writing in the current global crisis. I’m sure some things will come to an end along the way. We’ve already seen that. Lives have ended…jobs have ended…businesses have ended…. But trying to predict the end of the story is, well, predictably unpredictable.
…I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.— Isaiah 46:9–10
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. — Revelation 22:13
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