Games People Play – Chess - 27th June 2008

Yesterday, I talked about poker and the seeming randomness of the game. We have looked at other games through the week and drawn comparisons in life to how they are played and what lessons can be taken from them.

Chess is probably one of the greatest games of strategy that we have. I first remember hearing about chess and making a limited attempt to understand it when Gary Kasparov and Victor Korchnoi battled it out to be world chess champion in the early 1980’s. . These guys were thinking way ahead in the game and understanding different strategies and the impact of them, not great TV but you could see the way that the game was all-consuming to the exclusion of everything else around them. There are, I am told, set series of moves for different strategies of attack. I am wondering what the ‘Mason defence’ would be – probably ill thought through, wrong and unsuccessful, I suspect, based on my last game of chess.

Going back to yesterday’s verse, to me, this is God’s chess game. And the great thing is, he knows all the moves and he doesn’t even have to think about different strategies because he has the master plan.

If you think about it for a minute, that is an awesome thought. For each one of us, God has a plan and knows how it will develop. We humans have limited minds and understanding and the fact that God has no limit on this front is great.

That doesn’t give us the remit to try and catch God out – for he knows in advance when we will try and do that. And that’s my point today, doing stuff to try and catch God out doesn’t work. Jonah had a go at this when God asked him to go to Nineveh; he headed off in the other direction, which God knew would happen so God had a plan to get him back on track.

On that note, have a great weekend, whatever your plans are!!