Of Saints, Sinners, and Spiders
Sometimes, I find myself thinking strange thoughts. Surely I’m not alone in this? Like the man at the height of Paul’s argument in Romans 9, I am at times tempted to ask of God, “Why hast thou made me thus?”—though, not in the way you might at first think.
The Potter & His Clay
When I became reformed in my theological convictions, gently led there by the Spirit through His word, I wrestled with the doctrine of God’s sovereignty for only a short time—at least compared with others who had similarly come face to face with this reality. Only, I think at the time my understanding must have been primarily intellectual.
Indeed, I fear it was, for I had my share of doubts and struggles on many other points that exposed the shallowness of my understanding. For one, I went through seasons where my assurance of salvation rode upon what seemed a razor’s edge—I knew God is sovereign, and I knew that God is love, yet how often I doubted His sovereign love for me.
I admit these doubts make little sense in light of what I claimed to believe about God, but so it was. I suppose sometimes the mind and the heart need time to align. But praise God that He is sovereign over even our doubts, unbelief, and slowness of heart to take Him at His word (though, of course, we must always repent of our unbelief). And here we stumble over another strange string of thoughts: How is it that we can so vehemently defend the doctrines of grace, all the while failing to take them to heart for ourselves?
But concerning God’s sovereignty over the seen and the unseen—of which my and every conversion is a part—I am thankful that His word has always been clear, consistent, and for my part, easy to believe.
I don’t mean to boast with this admission; in fact, quite the opposite. Burdened—or perhaps blessed?—with an extraordinarily tender conscience from an early age, I found it no hard task to surrender my soul to the truth that the Triune God foreknew me, predestined me, called me, and saved me of His own free, happy will (lapses in assurance notwithstanding). I never wanted to become a Christian; and so when I finally placed my faith in Christ, I knew it had nothing to do with me or my efforts. It could only have been the sovereign work of God in my heart.
Indeed, before I ever became Reformed, or even aware of the doctrines of grace, or had any language with which to describe what I knew to be true of my conversion, I was well aware of the fact that I was saved from God, by God, and for God—from His wrath, by His grace, for His glory.
And in that way, perhaps it’s not so strange a thought in the end—why, after all, is it such a curious thing to us that God should be utterly sovereign over His creatures? The far stranger reality is that sinful, rebellious creatures should be saved from the just wrath of a holy God to begin with. Indeed, the great mystery isn’t that many perish, but that any are saved at all. This is among Paul’s arguments in Romans 9, wherein he, in ready anticipation of sinful man’s response to God’s sovereign choice in predestination and election, shuts the mouth of the man who would protest that God is in any way unjust to do precisely as He pleases with His creatures:
“But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?” (Romans 9:20-21).
Saints and sinners emerge from the same lump of clay. God, far from being the author of sin, graciously saves some for glory and passes over others for just destruction, leaving them in their enmity against Him. Whatever else can be said of this doctrine, it remains a fact that sinners reject God because they want to. If God did not act first, no one would be saved.
This is a hard truth, but the truth all the same. In response to God’s grace in election, may all our wrestling lead to wonder and praise, done in faith to the end that we allow God to be God. Let us not be as those who congratulate ourselves but, as Spurgeon once said, rather lie humbly at the foot of the cross and wonder that we are saved at all.
And yet, the question I find myself asking now and again isn’t so much one of, like the man in Romans 9, “Why hast thou made me thus?” (as though God were unjust) so much as it is “Why did God save me at all?” (the thus in this case being His great kindness towards me in raising me to life with Christ).
And for that matter, why did He make me in the first place? I don’t mean this in terms of His purposes for my life, but rather in the simplest way possible—Why did God, in His infinite wisdom, bring me into being? He doesn’t need me, my talents, my companionship, or that of anybody else. God needs nothing. Yet He chose not only to create, but to redeem. And not just redeem, but bless immeasurably more than can be asked or imagined, so much so that He has brought those who were once sinners into His own household through Christ Jesus.
As I said, strange thoughts. But I suppose the answer to each of these questions, in large part, can be answered by Psalm 115:3—“Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.”
Arachnophobia
I was struck full force by these strange thoughts only shortly after my wife and I got married. Our first home was a cozy little basement apartment in the country. Entrance into our apartment was made through a side door in the garage, followed by a short flight of steps onto a landing. Beyond the landing was our front door, and beyond that, our humble abode.
However, before going on with this story, I have to make a confession: I hate spiders. I have little shame in admitting it at this point, mostly because everyone from my mother, to my wife, to my in-laws is not only well aware of this fact about me, but softly mocks me for it—indeed, my father-in-law even had a line about it in the speech he gave at our wedding.
Whether this hatred, which borders nigh on a phobia, is owing to the fact that I grew up in the woods where spiders were a frequent, though unwelcome, houseguest or to the Shelob scene in The Return of the King, I cannot say. But what I can say is that I am supremely thankful the Lord made me a man in His own image and not a fly.
As I said, our first apartment was not only in a basement, but also in the country. The old maxim that says “You are never more than three feet away from a spider at any given time” was perhaps never more true than it was in our little home. In Ontario, we have a handful of unpleasantly large, hairy, and swift spiders that, though harmless, are most unfortunately native to our province. I don’t know exactly which of these spiders frequented our home (they weren’t long enough for this world to get a good look), though I am convinced it was likely an unhealthy alliance of all three.
After arriving home late one evening, before we even turned on the lights that illuminated the staircase and landing still cloaked in darkness, another shadow crept over me. Perhaps I am being overly hyperbolic, but when I say that I sensed something in the darkness below us that night, I mean it in the same way that you know when you are being watched. “I guarantee you there’s a big, fat spider down there,” I breathed to my wife in the darkness.
Sure enough, upon flicking on the lights, there stood—for indeed it seemed to stand—a large, heaping mass of eyes and hairs and legs, shimmering black against the pale concrete like some dark, bottomless puddle. To this day, it remains the single largest spider I’ve ever seen inside a man-made structure outside of, perhaps, the zoo. Barring coming down the chimney or using the garage door itself, I have little clue how such a creature even entered our home.
And given I was now the man of the house, and that it was mounting a defensive on our front door, I was left with little option other than to hurl the largest item I could wrap my hands around down the steps and at the beast. After that, and a few well-placed smacks with my shoe, the spider met its gooey-green end.
Of Spiders & Men
The mass of dead spider, now more of a mess than anything, persisted on our doorstep for several days as a grim reminder of the previous night. This was much to the displeasure of my wife, for it was indeed some days before I cleaned up the remains. The rather strange thoughts that prompted this story to begin with first came to me as I passed by the spider on my way in and out of the house in the days that followed.
“Why, exactly,” I thought to myself as I passed the twisted heap, “did I react in such a strong way to a simple spider?” It was loathsome to me, sure, but it presented no threat to my wife or me. Apart from startling me with its presence, it in no way offended me, least of all sinned against me. And yet, without even a passing consideration of alternative options, I stomped it out of existence. What gave me the right to do so? Are we not both creatures? What power, if any, do I hold over another creature, no matter how insignificant or loathsome it might appear?
Far from wanting to delve into philosophical drivel, there is nonetheless an important theological question here, however abstract. Namely, in the final analysis, what actually makes me distinct from that spider?
A large part of the answer is that, unlike the spider, I have been made in God’s image, crowned with dignity, moral responsibility, reason, a will, and immortality. Even so, creatures we both are, and creatures we will always remain. The highest angel in Heaven and the most loathsome spider on Earth are both at an infinite distance from God; so much so that the angel is actually far closer in kind to the spider, as a creature, than it is to God, the Creator. However great the distinction is between a spider and me, we are both of us together even further removed from the glory of our mutual Creator.
The fact that I am a man and made in the image of the everlasting God has everything to do with God and nothing to do with me, for even men doomed to an eternity in hell shall nonetheless remain as men, however depraved and gruesome. In fact, in his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards makes the point that the man or woman who refuses to repent and remains outside of Christ is far more vile in the sight of God than any mere spider can ever appear to us:
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; His wrath towards you burns like fire; He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in His sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in His eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended Him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet ’tis nothing but His hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.”
How often we identify ourselves with the One holding the spider, rather than with the spider itself. And yet, when such a loathsome creature is in our power to either save or to destroy, how swiftly we jump to destruction. Indeed, how very unlike God we are.
Had God left me in my natural state outside of Christ—leaving me to live on in willful rebellion against Him and then judge me eternally for it—He would have remained perfectly loving and just. God does not owe me, or anyone, mercy. If He did, it would cease to be mercy and instead be in accordance with merit. At no point could I cry out with an accusation against Him—“Why hast Thou made me thus? Why hast Thou dealt with me so?” As an enemy of God, I had far, far less right to life and breath than that monstrosity I killed, or any other insect any one of us may have ever squashed without so much as a second thought. It was we image-bearers who sinned against God, not the spiders. Yet it was for the salvation of men that the Son of God became a man. He did not die for the spiders, or even the angels, but for us.
If God made me a spider or decided not to make me at all, He would have been none the worse off. But here I am: not only an image-bearer, but a son of the Most High, born of His Spirit, and washed by His blood; the husband to a beautiful, godly wife and the father to a healthy, happy little boy, with only the best, in Christ, yet to come in the New Heavens and the New Earth. Who am I to ask of God, “Why hast Thou made me thus?” when I have far greater reason to ask, in thankful, joyful wonder, “Why hast Thou made me—and foreknown me, and chosen me, and called me, and loved me, and justified me, and promised to glorify me—at all?”
Strange thoughts, indeed. I can only thank the Lord for dealing far, far more mercifully with me than I did with that creature in front of my door—a creature I all too closely resembled only a short time ago. Far from crushing me, God opened the front door of His great house to me. He then proceeded to tame me, wash me, clothe me, and crown me with the family name, finally sitting me down to dinner with the rest of His children at His very table.
Photo by Mhmd Sedky, Unsplash
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