God's Plans Can't Be Cancelled

We live in a world where anything can be cancelled. A dinner reservation. A subscription. A wedding invite to that one cousin who brings her opinions along with her casserole. Even Aunty Merlyn’s spot at the wine tasting, if she starts announcing that the ginger wine “isn’t as strong as it used to be.”

But there’s one thing on this earth that has never once successfully been cancelled, postponed, or quietly un-invited: God’s plans.

Isaiah found this out the hard way — or rather, the easy way, since he didn’t have to do the disannulling himself. He just wrote it down: “For the LORD of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it? and his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?” (Isaiah 14:27, KJV)

Disannul. That’s 1611 English for “cancel.” Two thousand hundred years before cancel culture had a name, the Bible was already telling us it doesn’t reach that far up.

Solomon says the same thing a few books over, with slightly less drama: “There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless the counsel of the LORD, that shall stand” (Proverbs 19:21, KJV). Translation: you can draft as many five-year plans, backup plans, and Plan B’s and Plan C’s as you like. His plan was never on the ballot.

So here’s God, in the caution sign of my imagination, pointing a hand at you and me: “You are not powerful enough to cancel the plans I have for you.”

Not your bad week. Not your bad decade. Not the four seasons you spent locked out of the plan you thought you were promised. Not even you, on your most self-sabotaging day, holding the biggest pair of scissors you own.

I’ve tried to cancel a few of God’s plans in my time. Mostly by ignoring them very loudly. It never worked. The plans just waited, patiently — the way a pot of duck moile waits on low heat for you to stop being dramatic and come stir it.

So if you’re waiting on something you can’t will into existence and can’t cancel your way out of either — take the verse. It was disannul-proof then. It’s disannul-proof now.

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