The Comfort of a God You Can’t Control

A Sunday devotional on Daniel 4, from the song “Sovereign One”

We spend most of our lives negotiating for control. We plan, we hedge, we grip. We pray, sometimes, the way we file requests, hoping to get the outcome approved. And underneath it all runs a quiet assumption so common we never say it out loud: that God, if He is good, owes us an explanation.

Two kings in scripture ran that assumption all the way to the end of the road.

Pharaoh gripped. Ten plagues, ten chances, and each time his heart hardened. And scripture says something our modern ears trip over: God was sovereign even in that hardening, so that His name would be declared in all the earth. Paul, retelling it in Romans 9, refuses to soften it, and answers our objection with a question: who are you, O man, to answer back to God?

Nebuchadnezzar boasted. Standing on his palace roof over the greatest city in the world, he said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built… by the might of my power?” While the words were still in his mouth, the kingdom left him. The most powerful man alive spent a season eating grass like an ox, his mind taken, his glory gone. The song puts it in one line: a beastly mind was all his own.

And then comes one of the most beautiful verses in the Old Testament:

“At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up my eyes to heaven, and my understanding returned to me; and I blessed the Most High.” — Daniel 4:34 (WEB)

Read the order of that sentence slowly. He looked up, and his mind came back. Sanity returned with worship. The king’s reason was restored not when he regained his throne, but when he finally saw who sat on the higher one. And the name he blessed in that moment, the Most High, is the name this whole ministry is built on. Not the Most Manageable. Not the Most Explainable. The Most High.

What Nebuchadnezzar confessed next is the hard center of the song. He “does according to his will… and no one can stay his hand, or ask him, ‘What are you doing?’” Or as the chorus sings it: all as You please, none ask You why. Let’s be honest: that is a frightening doctrine, right up until the day it becomes the only comfort you have. Because here is what absolute sovereignty actually means for you: your rise was never in your boss’s hands, your health was never finally in your own, your future was never in an economy’s or an election’s or a diagnosis’s. Every hand you fear is a hand He rules. A God small enough to answer to us would be far too small to hold us. The same doctrine that wounds our pride is the only one strong enough to carry our fear: You bring us low, You lift us high… yet in Your hands, we are remade. The bringing low and the remaking are the same hands. Ask Nebuchadnezzar, who came back from the grass gentler, saner, and worshiping.

So this week’s invitation is Nebuchadnezzar’s move, made daily: lift your eyes. Name the thing you’ve been gripping, the outcome you’ve been managing, the why you’ve been demanding, and practice the old king’s confession over it: He does according to His will, and His works are truth, and His ways justice. You are not surrendering to chaos. You are surrendering to a throne.

Pray with me: Sovereign Lord, we are fragile, dust and clay; defenseless, Lord, yet still we pray. May Your grace, a shield so strong, keep us safe where we belong. I lay down my demand to understand. Teach me to lift my eyes. Amen.

That prayer borrows the closing lines of the song. If you’d like to end this time in worship, sing Daniel 4 with me here: https://youtu.be/jdJsOrJIRGQ?si=vNXHEl2xKcjlzF7A

For the week: What outcome are you gripping most tightly right now, and what would “lifting your eyes” over it look like, practically, this week? Where has God brought you low in the past in a way you can now see was remaking, not ruin?

I’m Joel. I write worship music and Sunday devotionals to help people see God more clearly and draw closer to Him. My music, and everything else, lives here: https://medium.com/@mosthighchannel/about