Brandon Steenbock

Our Inexorable God

When the storm comes, you can’t fight it or stop it. You just take cover.

These last couple weeks our area has been slammed with two separate blizzards. School was canceled, roads were closed, and folks were advised to stay inside and stay warm. Much of the activity of our town – and most of the state, for crying out loud – shut down as people sought shelter from the storms.

Not that this is new for us in Minnesota. Winter brings the blizzards, summer brings the thunderstorms and tornadoes. Just another week on the celestial plains. But as such, we are familiar with this simple truth – when the storm comes, you can’t fight it or stop it. You just take cover. Who can stop the wind? Who can hold back the snow and rain? Who can fight against the lightning or tell the tornado to turn back?

The storm is unstoppable. Uncontainable. Inexorable.

Yet, there is one with mastery over the storm. As a man, he once lay sleeping in a boat while a storm raged on the sea all around him. His followers woke him, fearing for their lives and hoping beyond hope that he could do something. “Quiet! Be still!” he commanded, and the winds obeyed. The waves ceased. The storm was stopped.

If the storm is unstoppable, what must we say about the one who is actually able to put a stop to it? This is truly the Maker of heaven and earth. This is the one who sends the storm winds flying and calls them back again. This is the Master of all creation. This is God.
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If we cannot stop the storm, could we ever hope to fight him?

God has promised that a day of reckoning is coming, when he will bring more than just snow and rain, thunder and lightning, wind and cyclone. He has promised that he will shake the pillars of heaven, sweep the stars from the sky, darken the sun and melt the moon, and all the earth will be laid bare before him.

Who will stop that final storm?

Unlike the storms that we face here, though, there’s no need to take cover when God comes. We don’t need to flee for shelter from his impending, inexorable presence. If God is truly unstoppable, then that means that whatever he intends to do, he will accomplish without fail. That same Jesus who calmed the storm on the sea made it his mission to save mankind. I love the way Luke records in chapter nine that Jesus “resolutely set out for Jerusalem,” or, as another translation puts it, “set his face toward Jerusalem.”

The Master of all creation, the stopper of the storm, was unstoppable in accomplishing his goal of destroying the power of sin, death, and the devil. His grace could not be stopped.

As we enter another Lent season the storms of these past weeks have been a fitting reminder of the power of our inexorable God, whose unstoppable grace saved us all.

Brandon serves as Young Adult Minister at St. Mark Lutheran Church, De Pere/Green Bay, WI. He's married to Nikki, and together they have two sons. Passions include talking about Jesus, literature, and coffee.

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