A Wonderful Plan
For God so loved the world that He gave John 3:16
World – When Bill Bright introduced the now-famous phrase, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” he captured the spiritual desperation of the time. In that day, life seemed purposeless. At the end of the industrial revolution, we all felt like cogs in the vast, corporate machine. We needed to know that God cared about each of us – and that He had individually important roles for us to play. If we mattered to God, then we really mattered.
But theology must be done in each generation. Today, Bill’s famous phrase faces a problem. Watchman Nee recognized the problem years before Bill Bright articulated the vision. Every development touched by human beings can always be turned into a self-sustaining endeavor. We are more than capable of shifting our dependence from the Spirit to the system. It appears that we took the idea of a wonderful plan and converted it to a personal goal. Instead of seeing God’s purposes surrounding our lives, we started looking for our purposes assisted by God’s care. We made God the means to our ends. We forgot that the verse does not say, “For God so loved me.” It says, “For God so loved the cosmos (the Greek word),” a concept that reaches well beyond me, my generation and my desires. We need to retrace our steps and pay attention to the real words, not the ones we see at football games.
Cosmos does not primarily mean “the world.” The primary meaning of the word is order. It is a term for the regulation and disposition of a deliberate arrangement. God loves His order. He loves the way that He planned things to be. He loves the work of His creative effort. God is a God of order and He longs to bring the entire created order back to its original design, freed from the chaotic disruption of sin. When we translate this word as “world,” we move the focus from God’s entire, ordered creation to the realm of our human occupation. We reduce the grand plan of redemption from a cosmic scale to a human scale. Suddenly, it appears as if God’s grand plan revolves around me! From there, it is an easy step to think that God is really my personal genie, ready and willing to help me achieve the wonderful plan for my life. We need a much bigger perspective.
God loves you and His wonderful plan includes your life. On the plane of humanity, God’s plan is to bring about ordered community, under His sovereign rule. We are invited to become members of that community. God wants to include us in what He is doing. Today, in a step away from the individualism of a previous age, we are challenged to move toward the organic whole of redeemed creation. The critical issue of our age is not individual importance. We have had fifty years of individuality therapy. What we need now is a body concept rather than a view of the parts. We know how to be individuals. But we don’t know how to belong to something bigger than ourselves. God loves the cosmos, the divine order of things – something so carefully fit together that every part belongs to every other part – something so big that only God can see its full design. Wouldn’t you rather be included in that than go on living your neat little isolated life?
