When I first learned how to share my faith, I was taught to tell people, “God loves you and he has a wonderful plan for your life.” Which is absolutely, wonderfully, gloriously true for the people God saves. But there should be an asterisk next to the word “wonderful.” Because the wonderful part of God’s plan comes after some parts that aren’t so wonderful.
That’s the bold assertion Paul made when he summed up all of human history in one sentence: “God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Rom 11:32). That must have shocked some people in the first century when they first read it.
The word “consigned” has the sense of being put in prison, so you could say God imprisons us all in disobedience. He stuck us on this earth full of disobedience, and sin, and evil, and pain, and suffering, and he did it on purpose. It wasn’t a mistake. He wasn’t at all surprised when this world went off the rails. He was expecting it, and now he’s using it for his good purpose. He consigned us to disobedience so that he might show mercy to us. He’s uses this evil world to make us long for and appreciate his grace, and mercy, and love.
And so that’s why Paul says in the very next verse, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” Yes, God is inscrutable. Absolutely, he’s unsearchable. Because he deliberately put us in a world where the effects of sin would weigh on us all the time.
He put us in a world where we would go through infertility and miscarriages, cancer and heart disease. He put us in a world where we would experience emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. He put us in a world where you could take a family trip to the Netherlands, then put your three kids on a plane with Grandpa to go back home to Australia while you and your wife spend a few extra days in Amsterdam, then find out a few hours later that the plane was shot down, and all your kids are gone.
Paul knew what it meant to be imprisoned in this disobedient world. Literally. Thrown into a hole in the ground where the same bucket would be his food tray and his toilet. Whipped on five separate occasions with 39 lashes (the maximum number of lashes allowed by law), which would have turned his back into jelly, and prevented him from standing up for a month.
That’s why you can hear groaning in his voice as he says … “Ohhhhhhhh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.” We’re in the depths here. We’re so far down into the heart of God that it gets hard to see. Like when you’re snorkeling and you go out to the edge of the reef, and then it just drops off into blackness. Down there, it’s dark and murky. Unsearchable. Inscrutable.
God has imprisoned us in disobedience, but why has he done that? That he might have mercy on us. That’s the riches at the bottom of the ocean. The sunken treasure. The treasure is God’s mercy sovereignly poured out on us a according to his wisdom and knowledge, not our preconceived notions of how it should be poured out. In his wisdom he’s using disobedience, sin, evil, pain, and suffering as a conduit for his blessing. Like you receive electricity through power lines, you receive God’s mercy through the suffering and evil of a disobedient and wicked world.
And when you raise your hand to object to that, Paul responds in the next verse, “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (Rom 11:34). Because he knows we’d all like to be God’s counselor. I try to be God’s counselor every day, every time I complain about anything. When I complain about how I can’t sleep because it’s so hot and humid, I’m telling God that he’s not doing a good job controlling the weather. When I get stuck on the H1 during construction and a 4-year-old on a tricycle could go faster than I am, and I whine and complain about it, I’m trying to be God’s counselor. I’m telling him that he’s not running the world the way I think it should be run.
The world is filled with people who want to counsel God about the way he does things. But there’s a glorious method to his unsearchable and inscrutable madness. He wants us to fully enjoy him and his mercy, as we were designed to do, and he knows the only way we’ll do that is if we’re consigned to a fallen, disobedient, sinful world where we’re forced to cling to him and his mercy.
God has a wonderful plan for your life. You just don’t see it yet.