"God is in control" shouldn't be an excuse to do nothing

If I hear one more "well, God is in control" from a well-meaning Christian...

Here's the thing.

God was in control when Hitler came to power. And yet we still consider it wrong that Jews and Romany and people who were the 'outcasts' of society were slaughtered like they were less than cattle.

God is absolutely in control, but His control and His power does not require us to tamely stand by and watch others suffer injustice.

The book of Zechariah is God's prophecy to the kingdom of Edom. Where is Edom? you might ask. Well, the truth is that God destroyed it as a nation a little less than a couple of thousand years ago. The Jews have spread across the whole earth, and so has Christianity, but nobody identifies as an Edomite in these days.

The thing is, the Edomites watched the Babylonians and Assyrians ride into Judah and Israel and slaughter them, then take the best of what was left and ride away. They watched from their hillside cities, knowing what the dust and the distant flash of sunlight on weapons meant. And then they went down to the lowlands where Judah and Israel had been, and they basically raided the remnants who'd been left behind.

And so God punished them.

The Babylonians and Assyrians were, indeed, God's plan for dealing with the sin of Judah and Israel. But the fact that Edom didn't even try to intervene? God held that against them.

What if Drump’s election is God’s plan for showing out the Christians whose ‘faith’ is mere words and shows of prayerful piety without action against the bigotry and cruelty inspired by Drumpf's message of division and the silence of the religious right? What if all the deaths by gun is God's signpost that it's not enough to have 'thoughts and prayers', but that action is required.

As faith without works is dead, so prayer without action is meaningless. Remember, Jesus acted first – performing miracles, healing, tending, and teaching – for three years before he died on the cross to save us for our sins and it all became clear; so too, it is in our actions that people see God, and in our prayers that God works in others. It's only when God works in hearts, and when our actions show His love, that the message of the cross become clear to those who don't know or understand it.