I sat at the stoplight, hands clenching the steering wheel as I listened to the car radio. The news broadcast hit my brain like staccato notes: Middle East, invasion, war. My heart raced and my stomach turned as I thought through all the ramifications of a world-changing event.
I was an information enthusiast, listening to news reports as I drove around my sales territory every day. Over years of driving, coverage of world events regularly gripped me: the Challenger explosion, the Black Monday stock market crash; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War; the S&L crisis of the 90s; the Oklahoma City bombing; September 11 and the subsequent wars; the 2008 housing market crash; the West African Ebola outbreak. The list goes on and on.
World news has not improved. If the above events don’t resonate, you will no doubt remember the 2020 worldwide pandemic and a summer of riots that made the world look perpetually out of control.
We are certainly not the first civilization to watch kingdoms shake, though we know more than all the generations before us thanks to the 24-hour news cycle. Our world, both public and personal, always seems to be spinning toward chaos.
For years I absorbed it all, carrying every event deep in my body, a constant visceral tension held in place by fear. I said my prayers for the state of the world and tried to keep my own life in order. But, despite my deep faith, one question remained in the back of my mind: Was anyone actually steering things?
Then, during a Minor Prophets exegesis class in seminary, I noticed something that shifted my thinking and released me from the grip of fear.
In Zechariah 1 and 2, an angel reminds the prophet that Israel had broken its covenant with God. God’s response was to impose the covenant curses clearly outlined by Moses in Deuteronomy 28. Many of these curses read eerily like what Israel experienced: enemy nations coming from afar, sieging their cities, deporting their people to be scattered among the nations. Israel’s exile was not an improvised punishment; it was God’s prophesied answer to covenant breaking.
But the angel notes that God was “angry but a little” with Israel (Zech. 1:15). His covenant response was measured and purposeful, with a desired result: that Israel would return to Him.
Then the angel tells Zechariah that God is very angry with the conquering nations because they “furthered the disaster” (Zech. 1:15). Their actions exceeded the punishment that God intended, surpassing the Deuteronomy 28 curses. The nations indulged their own cruel natures beyond the expressed purpose of the God of the Universe.
And God took note.
A second angel delivers God’s response: “for he who touches you touches the apple of His eye: ‘Behold, I will shake my hand over them, and they shall become plunder for those who served them’” (Zech. 2:8–9). God will punish the conquering nations because they acted outside the boundary of His express will.
Immediately I was struck by this realization: God brings His purposes about even as powers that neither know nor serve Him pursue their own agendas.
Even when the world looked out of control, it was not ungoverned. The nations and events that struck fear in my heart during the daily news cycles were not outside the hand of God. No matter how much the world pushes, it cannot push past God’s oversight.
Two hundred years before Zechariah, the prophet Isaiah spoke to Israel: “‘I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isa. 46:9–10, emphasis mine). When God declares “the end from the beginning,” that’s not a theological abstraction. It means that every event on my crisis list, and every event before it in history, was already known to God. He had already determined the end that would serve His holy purposes and plans.
How can I be certain of this? Because He says, “My counsel shall stand.” The Hebrew word for “counsel” is powerful and rich. God’s counsel is His intention, purpose, and plan that has a specific outcome with wisdom as its foundation. It’s the word of a sovereign king that cannot be overruled, revealing God’s active authority over a situation, not a passive permission. This does not mean God approves of or authors evil. Rather, even human rebellion cannot thwart His purposes.
And the verb for “stand” brings even more depth: His counsel is prevailing and enduring. In Scripture, something that stands is established and cannot be toppled.
When God says, “My counsel shall stand,” He is saying that He had a plan before the crisis even existed, that He has a plan during that crisis, and that He has one on the other side of it as well. God is not watching events from His throne and approving them as they happen. Even when evil and suffering enter the world through human rebellion, God is neither absent nor defeated. He remains at work bringing history toward His purposes.
Nothing is a surprise to God.
In Numbers 22–24, while the Israelites are in the wilderness, Balak the king of Moab hires Balaam, a well-known seer, to curse the Israelites so that he will be able to defeat them in battle. Three times Balaam unsuccessfully attempts to curse Israel but instead delivers a blessing. His final oracle contains a stunning prophecy that a star will rise from Judah and crush Moab, exercise dominion over the area, and cause utter destruction (Num. 24:17–20).
The irony of this story is that Israel has no idea this is even happening. They are camped in the plains of Moab beyond the Jordan at Jericho. On the mountains above them, God overrules Balaam’s attempts to curse Israel and brings blessing for them.
How often are we camped out somewhere, unaware of what God is doing for us, what He is deflecting, what He is bringing forth to bless us? No matter how many news cycles we watch, we cannot perceive the unseen hand of God directing even difficult events toward His good purposes. This truth does not remove grief, confusion, or loss. But it reminds us that even in those places, we are not abandoned to chaos.
The Balaam narrative is for those of us who fear that forces and world events working against us are stronger than the God working for us. They are not. They cannot be.
And yet, Israel had stumbled and grumbled through the wilderness for decades. They did not earn God’s protection. He guarded them from threats they did not see because He is a covenant God who keeps His promises. He will do the same for us because we are also in covenant with Him. He can turn curses into blessings not because we earned them but because He is committed to us.
This does not mean we won’t experience difficulties; we know we will. But God can take those and bring good from them because nothing is beyond His redemptive power. For example, I still carry the scars of breast cancer. But I look at it through the filter of how profoundly my relationship with God, as well as my husband, grew and deepened as a result of that diagnosis. There was suffering, but that hard season changed so much for the better.
The greatest picture of the good that God can bring from the worst comes from the life of Jesus. At the time, His brutal death appeared catastrophic to His followers. But that was overturned when God raised Him from the dead. Jesus overcame death. Those who placed faith in Him would receive salvation from God—not just a temporary life change but an eternal one. For me, the cross is the best example of how our great God is able to bring about His good and perfect plan through even the most unimaginable circumstance.
“Nothing is a surprise to God,” is the rock I cling to when another news cycle, a personal crisis, even death, threatens to destabilize me. I cannot fix the world, nor can you. But anchoring myself daily in the truth that God’s plan is good, wise, and established enables me to change how I react to events as they hurtle towards me.
This shift in thinking loosened the tension and fear that gripped me for decades. Now I view world events with this outlook: “Let’s see what God will do with this.”
But there is more to this shift. When we view the world through the filter of God’s counsel, not only do we benefit, we become a stabilizing force in the world around us. When our faith is anchored in the wise plans of God, we can care deeply about the world that He created for us to steward (Gen. 1:28) without being consumed with fear or worry over it.
And this is not because we have answers. The world will always have its crazy. But we have placed our trust in the One whose counsel will stand when all else falls.
These days my response when the unexpected occurs is: “This is not a surprise to God.”
Prayer: Father, we praise You that You are a God who keeps His covenant. Help us to place our faith in Your wise plans and purposes. Anchor us in Your redemptive counsel when events in the world, or in our own lives, grip us with tension, fear, or sorrow. Teach us to look for the unseen blessings, to lean into Your Word instead of the headlines of the day. Father, strengthen us to be unshakeable in the face of world events, to be a people grounded in faith. Help us to teach others to look at the world and remember that nothing is a surprise to God. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
