The Sovereignty of God & Forgetting Your Bag at the Walmart Checkout Line
The Lord is the God of even the most minute details.
“If God is real,” asks the skeptic, “or at least if He’s good, then how could He ever allow bad things to happen to good people?” Indeed, this is a profound question. It gets at the very nature of this God that certain people who go to church like to talk about. Why do bad things happen? Was God too ignorant to know that things would go very poorly for us earth-dwellers when He spoke the world into existence? How silly that would be! And yet, we are told that God is all-knowing (theologians like to use “omniscient” to capture God’s all-knowingness) and all good, and here we are in this world of genocide, tsunamis, and awful traffic. Surely these two things cannot be true at once. So, the argument concludes: Either God is unreal or He is not good.
This case that the skeptic lays out seems pretty persuasive. I, for one, have experienced bad things in my life, so it's not very hard for me to relate with this sentiment. I may have never suffered through something as horrific as some unfortunate souls have, but I know I go through things that certainly can’t be described as good. Am I supposed to believe that “good God Almighty” created the world fully knowing or even ordaining that not-good thing I just went through recently? Yes.
To say the presence of evil negates the existence of a good God is an intellectually lightweight hypothesis, to say the least. If there is no God or if there is no good God, then what’s the point of talking about any of this? Who’s to say what’s good and bad? You might not like that I want to mug you for your lunch money, but why should I care if there is no God? Without any God, I can do as I please, and you can’t even say that it is bad. Who says it’s bad? You can only point to other homo sapiens, and I am one of them too. What’s bad to you is my good. God is dead, and He probably was never alive in the first place. And ya know, you only live once. So, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Thus you have this foolish and dark world of the atheist. He might not necessarily want the world to be like this, but no one made him God, so he doesn’t get to tell me that it can’t be.
The same is true if God is not all good. If God is not all good, then what is all good? Nothing. There’s not a thing that can fill in that gap. So there really is no good after all, and God is not not all good, nor is he not not all bad. One can immediately say how illogical this is. Either God is all good, or good doesn’t exist at all and we can just live and let die.
As it turns out, God is all good. It is by His standard that we can call anything “good” or “bad” in the first place. And yes, the all-good God knows exactly what He was doing when He created the world. As He said through the prophet Isaiah, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7 KJV). If there is “good,” then there has to be “bad.” There has to be a contrast. As N.D. Wilson points out, you wouldn’t have anything painted on a canvas if you take all the contrast out, and Pride and Prejudice would be pointless if there were zero character flaws. This is the world that God has created and ordained. This is God’s story, and we can choose to either please and glorify the Author of our individual stories or to rebel against Him. But either way, God will go on writing the story. His sovereignty extends to all—even the most minute details that a master novelist would fail to even think of. Yeah, bad things, horrible things happen. But why do we even deserve any good things to happen to us at all?
Allow me to share with you that not-good thing I had to deal with that I mentioned earlier.
I am in my car on the way to Walmart for a quick errand. I am driving at over 50 miles per hour in a small city that exists in the middle of the dry desert. The wind is brutal. The sun is scorching. Ravens flap their wings all over the place and perch on some random overhead power line. The roads are not great to put it gently.
I arrive at Walmart and find a parking spot that’s not too far away from the entrance. Nice. What’s even nicer is that I bump into several people I know while I’m at this corporate supermarket. I pick up my groceries with relative ease. No wild goose chases had to be made to find what I’m looking for. I soon have my shopping cart full of everything I need.
It’s almost lunchtime, so I think I might as well order ahead at Taco Bell. They have an awfully nice “Build Your Own Cravings Box” for $7.99 that is apparently an online exclusive as I’ve been told on their site—a very appealing option for those of us who are not yet rich. I order this soon-to-be deliciousness in my palate and proceed to the checkout line.
I wait in a short checkout line. All the self-checkout lines are closed (self-checkout, you see, is only for Walmart+ members at this location because no one other than them can be trusted not to steal the stuff that they are buying). Once it’s my turn in line, I place all my items on the conveyor belt. I have a very nice cashier who rings up all of my groceries and bags them for me. After paying with my credit card, the friendly cashier tells me, “Take it easy boss.” To which I reply, “Thank you.” With the bags that I put in my basket, I head back to my car, load everything up, and head to the nearby Taco Bell. My order is ready within a minute of my showing up. With my Taco Bell and a Mug Root Beer in my hands, I drive back to my current residence.
I take all my groceries inside, and I enjoy my lunch. I can’t remember now if I thanked the Lord for the food when I ate, but I am grateful to Him nonetheless. After gobbling up all the fake Mexican goodness, I start to unbag my groceries. Then, something begins to enter my mind. I wonder where those other things are that I also bought. I double-check the bags, and what I am looking for is no where to be found. I check again in the trunk of my car and receive a confirmation: I forgot to take one of my bags at the checkout line. Not good. No, not at all.
Well, I did what I had to do. I took my receipt, got back in my car, and drove my way back to Walmart. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears was playing on the radio. I certainly wasn’t ruling the world at that moment. Instead, it is God Who is ruling the world, and He still was even when I had to drive back to Walmart to get the stupid groceries that I forgot to put in my dumb shopping cart.
I got back to the Walmart, and I soon found the same cashier again. He immediately knew why I was there. He told me I could just pick up my items again or go to customer care. I decided to go to customer care. Waste of time. They just took my receipt and told me to ring up the items again. So, I quickly grabbed the groceries I needed and went back to the checkout line. I waited for a few minutes, but my friendly cashier saw me and just gave me a bag without ringing anything up and sent me on my way. “Take it easy boss,” he told me again. Once more, I replied, “Thank you.” So, I took the rest of my groceries home, made it back to my residence safely, and so concluded this chapter of my story.
Look, what I went through was by no means the worst thing to happen to mankind. I simply forgot a bag and had to drive back to Walmart to retrieve my forgotten items. The extra trip will probably cost me a few bucks at the Arco gas station at most. Again, not the worst thing that could happen, but it was definitely not a good thing that happened to me. I wasted time and lost a little bit of gas. But, did the all-good God really create this world knowing that bad things like that would happen to me? Also, did He really just write this chapter of my life? Yes, yes, and yes.
The Lord is the God Who creates light and darkness, peace and evil. He is “the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of Lords” and all “dominion” belongs to Him (1 Timothy 6:15-16 ESV). He does whatever He pleases (Psalm 115:3).
Me forgetting to grab my bag at Walmart sure as heck wasn’t outside of God’s sovereignty. The fact that this somewhat bad thing happened to me under the Almighty’s sovereignty doesn’t negate His goodness or existence. I might not like that I had to drive back to Walmart and think that I didn’t deserve to go through that, but I really didn’t deserve the car I was driving, or the Taco Bell I had for lunch, or even the air I was breathing. I have no good apart from the Lord (Psalm 16:2) because nothing good lives within me (Romans 7:18). Left to my own devices, I will reject what is good, especially the all-good God (Romans 1:21). If I’m not good, then nothing good should be happening to me. But God gives me good gifts anyway.
This awesome, sovereign God Who gives me both Taco Bell and unobservant eyes that miss my other grocery bag has placed me here in this story of the world. I have a role to play that I do not yet understand. But what’s really profound is that God didn’t just sit up in Heaven toying with His creation as He worked on His own, even longer version of War and Peace. He stepped into His own story.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14 ESV). The Author of the universe Who holds everything together by the power of His words placed Himself into His own creation and lived as one of us. And guess what, bad things happened to the One Who was all good! “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8 ESV). The Lord chose to experience pain and suffering in this world that He created and exercises sovereignty over. He chose to suffer for us. “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18 ESV). It was through Christ’s suffering, death, and Resurrection that we, who are totally devoid of goodness on our own, could be reconciled to God. The Lord of Heaven and Earth was nailed to a cross and took on the punishment for all our sins and then rose triumphantly from the grave so that He can redeem us from our sins. Through Christ’s sacrifice, eternal life and forgiveness of sin are offered to all who believe. Because He went through the worst bad that has ever happened in the history of the universe, he made the greatest good that can ever be experienced accessible to us. Someday, we will be reunited with the all of God’s goodness and live forever in His pure light if we just put our faith in Him. How glorious! What kind of God would do that? An all-good God that’s Who.
We will experience trials and awful things in our lives, but we get to decide how we will respond to these situations. We will each play our part in God’s story. We have been given unmerited grace that extends beyond the salvation found in the gospel. We all have the common grace of life. So, we can either choose to reject God and stay lost in our own abject depravity, or we can turn and serve the gracious, sovereign God, Who holds your whole story in His hands. Which character are you going to be in God’s awesome epic?