A man at Bible-Study last night made the observation that he had been briefly involved in the prophecy understandings of Scripture years ago, and even had some belief in the conspiracy theories of Illuminati or other groups controlling a great deal behind the scenes. As he is an engineer (like most of my friends in retirement, it seems) I half-expected him to offer some numbers-based or probability-based reason why he thought these explanations unlikely now. I should know better.
His actual reason was "Even if these things are true, God is still in control." I have only a slight problem with that. When someone says that to mean the large spiritual overview, that It Is Well With My Soul, or "this world is not my home" they are quite correct, and no matter how bad things get here we can trust God for the ultimate outcome. I think another idea does creep in a bit, with many Christians, including my friend. Terrible things happen in many places, and we cannot count on it all coming right in the end in this world just because it will do so in the next. When presented with that distinction I think most Christians excepting the committed Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn sorts would get the theologically solid answer. Yet I think some of the Christian Victory teaching does color the emotional approach of many believers. And they get it from the pulpit, more often than not. If we do live into the last days it is likely to be very unpleasant.
But what really struck me was that his personality would not sustain the paranoid interpretation. He considered these ideas, he had cultural support for believing them, they provided an explanation for some of the evil in the world, but in less than a year he no longer believed them. It fits my frequent reminder here that paranoia (or depression, or anxiety) precedes our explanations and rationalisations of them.
In my experience, Christians who say "God is in control" mean God will not allow anything really bad to happen. It seems to me that the book of Revelation was written correct this belief, and also most secular books of history. Nothing could be more obvious than that God does allow really bad things to happen. Revelation tells us that these bad things are indeed part of a plan, but also that the aim of the plan is a great tribulation, which is to say suffering and sorting, of mankind. The belief that God will take care of thins is, more often than not, the modern myth of meliorative progress dressed in Christian clothes.
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