I remember many years ago I was Skyping with one of my cousins. I wasn’t a huge fan of her at the time because she was quite arrogant, but she was also family so I put up with her for maybe an hour. In the middle of our conversation she stopped short—as if she was about to tell me something, but changed her mind. “What were you going to say?” I asked, curious. “Oh, nothing,” she said, rolling her eyes slightly, “I just don’t think a 12-year-old like you would understand.” She was 8. I look back at this conversation now and laugh, but at the time it was pretty insulting. Here I was, prideful and arrogant as well (but more on the inside than out), being told be someone two-thirds my age that I did not have the intellectual capacity to understand what she was about to say. She eventually ended up telling me, and although I don’t remember exactly what she said, I do remember thinking it was so stupid a 4-year-old could have understood. So why did she think I wouldn’t be able to? I’ll never know. I thought, "Who is this 8-year-old, to tell me, a 12-year-old with 4 more years of experience and intellect, what I can and cannot understand?" I wonder if this is similar to how God feels with us sometimes (minus my flaw of taking offense due to my pride). “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?’ But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God?” Romans 9:18-20a Who are we, human beings, to talk back to God? I think too often we look at God’s choices—His creation of hell, His election of some and vengeance on others, etc. and we think, “A good God wouldn’t do that.” Or we look at history and all the horrifying events that have occurred and we think, “A good God would never allow these things to happen.” Or we look at our own lives and how miserable we are at times and how nothing seems to go our way and we think, “A good God would never leave me this way.” But who are we to tell God what is good? Who are we to tell the One who is Goodness—the one after whom our world’s flawed version of goodness is modeled—that He is not in fact good? I think this rebellion is rooted in human beings’ natural tendency to think highly of themselves. We think that we are always right and we have difficulties accepting when we are wrong. So when we look at God and disagree with something He has done, we are too quick to assume ourselves right, or to rationalize some way that His obvious command is actually in line with what we believe. For example, countless verses in the Bible tell us to fear God. I remember reading those verses and thinking, “That’s insane. No way a loving God would want us to fear Him.” But that’s what it says. “Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Matthew 10:28 Does this mean we shouldn’t love Him and call Him “Abba, Father”? Of course not. The Bible says to do that too. But we cannot ignore the verses we don’t like and favor only the verses we do like. We have a wrathful, just God who has the power and right to punish those who go against Him. Just as much as we should love Him for forgiving us and allowing us to believe in Him, we should also fear Him for the terrifying power He possesses to destroy us if we disobey. Just think of every instance in which a person in the Bible came before God or one of God’s angels. How did they react? Did they say, “Hey God, I disagree with You on this. You should do things this way, because then You’d really be good.”? Of course not! They fell to their faces, trembling in fear. “'Woe to me!' I cried. 'I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.'” Isaiah 6:5 If Isaiah, a prophet of God who probably looked pretty much as close to perfect as a human can get in the eyes of believers around him, was certain the Lord would destroy him right then and there, how much more will we tremble in fear when we come before Him for the things that we have done as people who are not prophets—who struggle with even accepting that God asks more of us than to simply believe He exists?
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AuthorFighting complacency and advocating change in myself for the world around me. Posts by Date
February 2019
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