“Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked?”

The writer of Ecclesiastes studied the seasons of life,

He learned when it was time for this and time for that.

He watched the way people worked and played.

He saw how they lived and how they died.

He invites us to consider God’s work in the world, and then he asks a rhetorical question.

So, how would we answer him?

Who does have the power to straighten out what God has made crooked?

The answer, of course, is no one.

Things are the way that God wants them to be; we do not have the ability to overrule the Almighty.

When we talk about something “crooked,”

We are not referring to something that is morally out of line, as if God could ever be the author of evil.

Instead, we are talking about some trouble or difficulty in life we wish He’d change but He doesn’t.

It happens to all of us.

We struggle with the physical limitations of our bodies.

We suffer the breakdown of personal or family relationships.

We have something that we wish we did not have,

We do not have something that we wish we did.

Sooner or later, there is something in life that we wish to God had a different shape to it.

What is the one thing that we would change in our life, if we had the power to change it?

God has given each of us a different situation in life.

Thomas Boston wrote:

“There is a certain train or course of events, by the providence of God, falling to every one

of us during our life in this world: and that is our lot, as being allotted to us by the sovereign God.”

We all have our own lot in life, and we all have things in our lots which we wish that we could change:

In that train or course of events, some fall out cross to us, and against the grain;

and these make the crook in our lot.

While we are here, there will be cross events, as well as agreeable ones, in our lot and condition.

Sometimes things are softly and agreeably gliding on; but, then, there is some incident which

alters that course, grates us, and pains us… .

Every body’s lot in this world has some crook in it… .

There is no perfection here, no lot out of heaven without a crook.

“What God sees meet to mar, “we will not be able to mend… .”

But we are not fatalists! Instead, we frame our situations in terms of the sovereignty of God.

We have to submit to our Maker and Governor, under the crook in our lot.

We are under the power of the sovereign and omnipotent Ruler of the universe.

We do not have the power to edit His plan for our lives.

But far from driving us to despair, the sovereignty of God gives us hope through all the trials of life.

We do suffer the frustration of life in a fallen world.

God’s Word says that we suffer these things by the will of a God who is planning to set us free

from all this futility, and who is working all things together for our good

Rom. 8:20, 28

So we trust Him and deepen our affection for Him in Prayer.