 The idea of people controlling things is actually a more complicated and subtle one than one might imagine. I mean, you might say that parents control their family because otherwise the children would run wild, but that control, as every wise parent and every well-brought-up child knows, is a much more subtle thing than the parents simply putting a fence around them and saying, you stay there and don't move, because the children are supposed to flourish and are supposed to do things and have initiatives of their own, eventually at least. And this is an ongoing, regular question. How do we control things? In a school, how do you control the children who you're wanting to teach to be independent thinkers and so on? Or if you want to control them in the sense of prohibiting them from doing or saying or thinking anything which you might find dangerous, then many of us would think that's a bit stultifying, a bit destructive and so on. So the word control, well, it's got a good meaning, it's probably got a bad meaning as well. When I'm driving down the highway, I need to control my speed. Of course I do, not just because I don't want a speeding fine, but I don't want to be a danger to life and limb my own or that of anyone else. But if somebody were to say, I'm going to control the way you drive the car, I would immediately feel, well, sorry, I'm supposed to be driving this car, thank you very much. So the word slides to and fro between having a good feeling and a bad feeling. When it comes to when God is in control, within the Bible itself, there are many, many places where it really looks as though right from early on, God was not controlling in the sense of being a puppet master, pulling the strings and making stuff happen. One of the most haunting phrases early on in the Bible is, before the time of the flood, when God saw all the wickedness of humans and it cut him to the heart, it grieved him to his inmost being. Now that doesn't sound as though God was then in control. And yet God had made the world, but he had made humans to be image bearers which meant to have responsibility for reflecting his will into the world. And if humans committed idolatry, they would be taking their orders from the idols that they were worshiping, which was, of course, what happened. But God having given humans responsibility doesn't then suddenly snatch it back as soon as it all goes wrong and says, OK, quite enough of that, you're all going to be puppets from now on. God has built into the universe the human possibility, both of genuine worship and of the false worship of idolatry. And that's why when we think of control, it can sound a bit like a deist God who is looking down and, to use that image again, pulling the strings, pressing the buttons, manipulating the levers to make things happen the way he wants them. And that really doesn't look like the God of the Bible. That doesn't look like the God we know in Jesus himself. After all, one of the things which is quite extraordinary about the New Testament's incarnational theology and all the New Testament, I believe, subscribes to the view that in Jesus the living God was personally present is that this incarnate God weeps. He weeps at the tomb of his friend in John 11. He weeps over Jerusalem in John 19. What is this about? Is his weeping somehow controlling the situation? No, it is lamenting over the situation. Jesus knows what he's going to do next, but he still laments. Somehow we have to build into our picture of God this sense of lament, this sense of the world having responsibility which it may abuse. And then the way that God controls the situation is not by calling in the numbers and by pulling people back and restraining them with ropes and so on, by coming into the situation in person to take the full force of the problem onto himself. In other words, the story of Jesus going to the cross is the story of the kingdom that is the sovereignty of God. And unless we're prepared to have the notion of control redefined around the story of the cross, then there's something seriously wrong. This is what happens in Mark 10 when James and John want to sit at Jesus' right and his left in his kingdom. And Jesus says, you have no idea what you're talking about. Don't you realize that whereas the Gentile kings lord it over their subjects, they exercise control as much as they can by bossing and bullying people around. Jesus says, we're not going to do it like that. The one who would be great among you must be your servant and slave of all because the Son of Man didn't come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. That is the redefinition of power, of control, of sovereignty. And it goes to the very heart of the New Testament vision of what it means to be human but then also of what it means to be God. So before we just facilely talk about God being in charge or God being controlling, we have to look hard at Jesus' teaching about God's sovereignty, God's kingdom, and see how that is redefined around the loving message of cross and resurrection. And that I think will rock us back on our heels a bit and make us be a bit more careful about our language.