We have become so man-centered that we must remember who manages the harvest. J. Herbert Kane does an excellent job helping us understand God opens and closes doors. Read and enjoy.

Open and closed doors involve a great mystery; but God has explained the mystery in the Scriptures. After his great discourse on the history of Israel, past, present, and future, the apostle Paul exclaims, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ... For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory | for ever” (Ro 11:33-36).

We are living in an anthropocentric world where man is the measure of all things. The whole world, so we think, revolves around a center of gravity called man. Little by little God has been pushed from the center to the perimeter. What the church needs today is a fresh look at what the Scriptures have to say about the sovereignty of God. Surely He knows the end from the beginning and is even now working all-things after the counsel of His own will (Eph 1:11). He has a plan and purpose for the Jews, the Gentiles, and the Church of God (1 Co 10:32). And when things get out of hand, He is able to make even the wrath of man to praise Him (Ps 76:10). When his sanity returned after seven years, King Nebuchadnezzar had to acknowledge that the Most High does “according to his will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand, or say to him ‘What doest thou?’ ” (Da 4:35).

If we have difficulty in accepting this point of view, we should not be surprised. God has already warned us: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Is 55:8-9). Should we be surprised if now and then Almighty God, Maker of heaven and earth, does something that our puny, finite minds cannot fully understand? To understand everything God does, we would have to be God.

It doesn’t require much faith to believe in the sovereignty of God when the world situation is under control and everything is to our liking. It is when things go wrong and life breaks down that the Christian must take his stand on the Holy Scriptures and believe that in some mysterious way he cannot fully understand the purposes of God are being worked out according to His perfect plan.

The China debacle in the late 1940s was a heart-breaking experience for the thousands of missionaries there at that time. It was unthinkable that Chiang Kai-shek, a devout Christian, should be defeated by Mao Tse-tung, an avowed atheist whose hatred for religion was well known. Had God taken a poll of missionary opinion, almost to a man the missionary body would have supported Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. But God acted on His own without consulting the missionaries. And the result? By 1953 all of the missionaries were out of China. It was a bitter pill to swallow. The missionaries shook their heads. They could not believe their eyes. At least one mission leader had a nervous breakdown. The largest single mission field in all the world was closed to Christian missionaries. Worse than that, the institutional church has all but been destroyed. It takes great faith to believe that God has been in control of the situation in China during the last twenty-five years. But that is the verdict of Holy Scripture; and we had better believe it.

 J. Herbert Kane, Understanding Christian Missions