Linked Notes & Sermons

God's Strategy Has Always Been the Unexpected Response

4 min read

Hook / Opening

Every difficult situation is designed to receive a particular response. Betrayal expects betrayal back. Abandonment expects withdrawal. Death expects despair. What if God’s entire strategy — from the Garden to Golgotha to today — has been to give the one response the situation is not designed to receive?

Scripture

Matthew 26:39 — “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

Luke 23:34 — “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Romans 5:8 — “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Matthew 11:3 (John the Baptist from prison) — “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

Main Points

Point 1: The situation at Golgotha was designed to receive resentment

Jesus had every reason to feel it. Four thousand years of preparation. A mission larger than anyone could comprehend. Abandoned by every disciple. Betrayed by a friend. Mocked by the people he came to save. John the Baptist — the man who had seen the heavens open — wavering from prison, asking “Are you really the one?”

Resentment would have been entirely human. It would also have been Satan’s victory. Because resentment would have confirmed the logic of the situation: power wins, hatred wins, the zero-sum game wins. If Jesus resented them, then death won — not the body, but the heart.

What Satan had no counter for: “Father, forgive them.”

See: jesus-victory-was-refusing-resentment-not-avoiding-death

Point 2: God’s response across history has always been the unexpected one

The cross wasn’t God’s plan A. Matthew 26:39 is Jesus making a final plea — Father, you changed course for Moses, for Nineveh. Is there still another way? God’s ideal was for Jesus to be received and to establish the Kingdom on earth. When the foundation collapsed, God gave the secondary response: the cross as the condition that could at least secure spiritual salvation.

But even in secondary course, God’s response is unexpected. You don’t respond to the murder of your son with forgiveness and resurrection. That’s not how the situation is designed to go.

See: cross-was-gods-secondary-course-not-plan-a, god-grieves-as-a-parent-not-just-judges

The pattern: crisis → expected response → what God gives instead

Point 3: The same strategy applies to us now

The Unification movement faces its own Gethsemane moment. Legal pressure in Japan and Korea. Leadership challenges. The temptation — the expected response — is to disengage, to distance, to survive by avoiding.

The unexpected response: become a pillar. Not through reaction or politics, but through concentrated daily devotion. Prayer that comforts God rather than petitions God. The response the situation is not designed to receive.

See: movement-crisis-requires-devotion-not-escape, breaking-a-cycle-requires-a-response-the-cycle-cant-absorb

Illustrations

These smaller examples aren’t distractions — they show the same principle operating at human scale, making the cosmic version legible.

Application

What is the situation in your life right now designed to receive from you? Bitterness? Withdrawal? Giving up?

What would the unexpected response be?

Not the obviously wrong choice, and not the obviously safe choice — but the one the pattern has no strategy for. The one that looks like love when love is impossible. The one that looks like presence when flight is rational.

That’s where God shows up. That’s where the cycle breaks.

Closing

Return to the cross. Not as the end of the story, but as the moment when heaven’s strategy became visible. God didn’t give death what death expected. He gave it the one thing death couldn’t absorb.

That’s still the strategy. And we’re invited into it.

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