New Thoughts
The story told in Esther stands as an example of the wisdom spoken forth in the rest of these verses, especially Job 5:12. Haman was indeed a clever man, shrewd in arranging things to suit his desires. He knew how to play the king, how to play the laws of the land, how to feed his pride. But, he didn't know God. God allowed Haman to play his games, but in the end, the very things he planned for his enemy fell upon him, and the things he planned for himself came upon his enemy. Indeed, God frustrates the plans of the shrewd!
But why? Why does God do this? We can look at verses like Job 5:12, and Psalm 33:10, and it may seem like God is just toying with mankind. He frustrates? What's up with that? Just because somebody has a sharp mind, God has to block his way? He will not allow their plans to succeed. This is the message in both of these verses. We must recognize that, no matter the appearance to our thinking, God is not a capricious God. He is just and righteous in all His actions. He is wise beyond our understanding. So, how are we to understand these verses?
I believe that God frustrates man's plans for the simple reason that those plans so rarely depend on God. When we start planning our ways, rarely do we call upon God to give us counsel. We tend to plan in our own strength, and if success comes we tend to give the glory for that success to our own abilities. God is also jealous. He claims Jealousy as His name! The glory is His. The strength that gave your plans success is His. If we will insist on taking the credit, He will insist on humbling us sufficiently to give credit where credit is due. Notice the point of Psalm 76:10. Even when His humbling brings us to the point of wrath, that very wrathfulness serves to glorify Him as praise, for that very wrathfulness is an unwilling acknowledgement that He is in control, not us.
Even when we seek to resort to games of chance to determine our fortunes, we cannot escape His providence. Proverbs 16:33 closes that escape to us. His control even extends to such seemingly uncontrolled events. In our time, science has begun to recognize that even where there appears to be chaos - a total lack of order or control; even there, order exists. How can they see such order and not see God's hand controlling the order? How can they miss that? Even the most chance occurrences contain not the slightest bit of chance. They are fully ordered and controlled by our Creator!
Chance has been given incredible powers in the mind of man. As mankind has abandoned the true God for the god of science, they have promoted chance as the supreme being, the creator of all that is. But chance is nothing, and can do nothing. Chance has no power, it has no substance. In reality, chance has no being. It doesn't exist. What seems to be chance, what we ascribe to chance, is still fully under God's control. The earliest understanding I had of Providence was the simple phrase, "there's no such thing as coincidence." This is a popular bit of Christianese, now, but it remains a basic truth. There is no such thing. It didn't "just happen." It happened precisely as God had ordained it.
There is nothing in this life that can be ascribed to chance, to circumstance. There is nothing in this life that can be blamed on circumstance. Free yourself from this! The 'circumstances' of your birth are not some irresistible force in your life. They are not some accident that you'll never recover from. They are just as much a matter of God working in your life, working on your life, as the things you choose to give Him credit for. The works of the devil are not much different. They may be a hindrance to our present course, but they are only so because God is allowing it. We should seek to understand why He is doing so, not what the devil is up to. The devil doesn't hold the keys, God does. The devil would like to have our attention, for it feeds his own pride, but our attention is to be upon God alone. We are His servants, and our attention must not wander from Him. We must remain attentive to His directions to guide our ways.
Finally, I'd like to look at Proverbs 21:18, because the second half of that verse seems like a complaint at first reading: The treacherous take the rightful place of the upright? How is that a good thing? The key to understanding the wisdom presented here lies in recognizing the parallel nature of Jewish verse. The tendency in the poetry of the Bible is to state the same underlying truth in two different ways, to better provide understanding of that truth. Thus, when the verse tells us that the treacherous take the place that should belong to the upright, it is telling us the same thing as is meant when it says that the wicked are a ransom for the righteous.
Do you see the implication of this? Why did the righteous need a ransom? Because even the best of us, even the holiest of men remains fallen. He remains sinful and deserving of the full wrath of the Law he has violated. This simply points us back to the salvation that is by grace alone. In His gracious providence, He has provided a ransom to cover the sins of the righteous. When this verse speaks of the treacherous standing in our rightful place, it speaks of them standing in the place of judgment. They stand to receive the punishment we deserve. Why is that? Because we all deserve that punishment. Every man that ever lived, and every man that ever will deserved that punishment.
But, for the righteous there is a Ransom, there is a Redeemer! Those who refuse the gracious gift of God will indeed stand in the very place our own actions deserved. In this, they will show God to be just. We, who have accepted the gift He freely gave will know pardon, and thereby show Him to be merciful, as well as just. He will be shown true, no matter. He will be glorified, no matter. Willing or not, we all, whether believer or not, will acknowledge that He has ever been in control, that He alone is God and there is no other!
