My daughter has a sign that says “If plan A doesn’t work out, the alphabet has 25 other letters.” While I love the persistence this inspires in her, the truth is that God has no other plans because He needs no other plans.
Jesus is God’s plan A. He has always been the plan. When sin entered the world, God didn’t have to scramble to come up with a solution. The Old Testament law wasn’t plan B and Jesus’ death on the cross plan C. Jesus had been God’s plan from the beginning.
On the day of Pentecost, Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, told the crowd, “You followed God’s prearranged plan. With the help of lawless Gentiles, you nailed him to the cross and murdered him” (Acts 2:23). Jesus knew this was His purpose – He told the disciples “that he, the Son of Man, would suffer many terrible things and be rejected by the leaders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed, and three days later he would rise again” (Mark 8:31). The betrayal, the trial, the beatings, the execution – none of them were a surprise to Jesus. After all, the prophet Isaiah had foretold all of the things that would happen to Him hundreds of years before His birth (Isaiah 53). How could Isaiah have known these things would happen if God hadn’t already planned them?
We’re bound by time and can only watch it unfold, or look back at what has already been. But God is timeless – He sees all of it, in its entirety, in the same instant. At the moment of creation, God saw not only the beauty of the Garden of Eden, but also the darkness of the Garden of Gethsemane. He saw not only the fall of man, but the triumph of the Son of Man. He saw the earth’s beginning, and He saw its ending.
God is not making things up as He goes along – His entire plan, all His work, was formulated at Creation. When He pronounced it good, He was looking ahead through all the ages yet to come and declaring the goodness of all of it. Of you. Of me.
Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave him great pleasure. Ephesians 1:4-5
God loved us before we were a twinkle in anyone’s eye. He loved us before we did anything to deserve being loved. He knew every way we would hurt Him by our sinful selfishness, and He loved us anyway. Why? Because His love for us is greater than our offense against Him. Because He doesn’t want to exist without us. We are His children and we give Him great pleasure.
Your life is God’s plan A for you, too. You may feel like it’s taken some unexpected twists and turns. But God isn’t scrambling to figure out how to fix the mess you find yourself in. Nothing that has happened or will happen to you is a surprise to Him. You were part of God’s good plan from the beginning. He made you with purpose. He designed you with the blueprints in hand, laid out the pathways of your life to lead you to Him, and stashed everything that you would need at each place along the journey that you would need it.
As God’s plans unfold before you, may you walk with confident hope. You aren’t following someone whose vision is as limited as your own. You are trusting in One with unlimited vision, who has seen what you have not yet seen, and who is able to say, Trust me. Keep going. It will be alright.