Once the words are nestled in the places “ordained” for them—“ordained” is a wonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntactic structures—they are tied by ligatures of relationships to one another.
— Stanley Fish in How to Write A Sentence
“Ordained” is a wonderful word, too, for describing God’s relationship to what occurs in our world. It points to the logic behind what happens; it means there is a reason for every circumstance. If history was ordained, there was purpose in it. If the future is ordained, there will be meaning to it.
Some balk at using “ordained” for what God did in eternity in regards to creation and what happens in it, thinking it too strong a word. Some mistakenly suppose that if we say that God ordains something, he must be the immediate cause of it or the one who directly does the deed, but this is not so. When used for God’s relationship to an event in history, “ordained” simply means that he put it in his plan. Some ordained events he did himself, solely by his own hand, but others he knowingly permitted for good reason.
An ordained history is a history of ordained causes and effects, “tied like ligatures of relationships to one another,” tugging forward toward a planned completion. It’s the same for the future, because the future is only history yet to be. A God-ordained future gives sure hope, for it is a future that will finish as intended.
If the events of my life are ordained by God—and they are—then my life has meaning. Or to look at it from another direction, if the hardships in my life work to conform me to Christ’s image—and they do—then God has at least one reason for them. And if there is a reason, there is ordination.
“Ordained” is a wonderful word that points to the logic of the universe, including its history and its future. It’s a wonderful word that points to the purpose of my life. There is hope in “ordained.” It is promises fulfilled and plans accomplished, in the past, in the future, and in my life. And in sentences, too.