God is in many ways a mystery. The bible says it this way in Isaiah 55:8-9 (ESV):
8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
God is inscrutable. He is above human scrutiny. If we could understand God; if we could pin Him into a package that our minds could comprehensively define, then you can be sure that that would be a god of our own making. The clay cannot understand the ways of the Potter. The mind of Creator is, by definition, on an unfathomably superior plane to the created being.
I think we constantly need reminding of this. We too easily become arrogant and presume levels of enlightenment beyond our endowment. We become too sure of what God would and wouldn’t do; too convinced of our theology and doctrine; too secure in our denominational position. God does reveal Himself to us, of course, but be assured that what we know is far less than what we do not know.
The minute we become too sure of what we know is the minute that we lose our ability to receive the next revelation of God; to transition to the next season in God gracefully. You see, we never have it completely figured out. We read the historical accounts of the bible (with full knowledge of the end of the story) and feel that the way it all panned out would have been obvious to us had we been there, but consider this:
- John the Baptist actually witnessed the Father speaking from heaven and the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus as he baptized Him. Yet, when John found himself in prison and heard what exactly this Messiah was doing (or not doing) he asked, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” What Jesus was doing did not fit into his prophetic interpretation of scripture. And this was the great prophet John! Jesus said of John that among those born of women there had arisen no one greater than John the Baptist!
- What about the disciples on the road to Emmaus? Jesus had been crucified and there were rumours of His resurrection. They bemoaned, “…we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” A dying Saviour and an Israel still under Roman occupation was nowhere in their frame of reference of the Saviour.
What’s my point? God often defies our expectations of Him. We cannot follow Him through our human reasoning or academic study of the scripture. Only the Spirit knows God’s next move.
1 Corinthians 2:8-11 (ESV)
8 None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
To this very day, the Western world is bound in an intellectual approach to God mainly through the study of scripture. Studying scripture is good and necessary but without actively engaging the Spirit it is inadequate.
Those who have embraced mystery, often called mystics, have frequently been vilified by the rest of us. A spiritual approach to seeking God has often been misbranded as New Age. This tragic misunderstanding has cut off many from an abiding relationship with Christ.
I was recently reminded of the amazing access to tangible relationship with God that opened to me when I first came across the concept of Contemplative Prayer. A very well-respected mother of the faith expressed her appreciation of my contemplative position and I realized how much it had now become a part of me. When I first discovered the contemplative, it was rare to hear about it in mainstream Christian media but recently I have been hearing preachers mentioning names like Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Brother Lawrence and Madame Guyon and I have rejoiced. Contemplative Prayer is better known by our Catholic brothers and sisters and I would dare say it is something that they have that we all need.
Listen to Madame Guyon in her book Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ:
“You see, the only way to be perfect is to walk in the presence of God. The only way you can live in His presence in uninterrupted fellowship is by means of prayer, but a very special kind of prayer. It is a prayer that leads you into the presence of God and keeps you there at all times; a prayer that can be experienced under any conditions, any place, and any time… May I hasten to say that the kind of prayer I am speaking of is not a prayer that comes from your mind. It is a prayer that begins in the heart.”
This type of prayer is a way of life that is not very common but, in my opinion, an absolute necessity. However, my overarching purpose is not a contemplative prayer sales pitch but rather to unearth the mindsets that cause some of us to throw out ‘different’ viewpoints like contemplative prayer without any serious consideration.
I personally have found that every time I get comfortable with accessing God in a particular way or to a certain religious routine, God shakes things up. The life of a disciple, I have learned, is a commitment to constant movement. My revelation of God and how He works in my life is constantly evolving and broadening. The minute we become so rigid, so right, that God can’t change our doctrine, is the moment of departure from His will. Imagine if Peter had dismissed his vision of God telling him to eat unclean food. (The thought is not so far-fetched… Anything contrary to the Law (Bible) must be from the enemy right?) What if Abraham had said that God would never ask him to kill his son? Would a good God ask such a thing? I think if we honestly place ourselves in these stories, we might find that we are not so sure that we would have accurately discerned God. These pioneers of the faith had to follow God into uncharted waters, down paths that even seemed unbiblical initially. But they had faith; they trusted beyond human reasoning.
Even the Christmas story is a reminder that God comes to us in unexpected and unanticipated ways. Mary had to believe that she could conceive the Messiah by the Holy Ghost, something that never happened before in history. The Jewish world had to grapple with their King coming as a helpless child from an inauspicious family. Emmanuel, God with us, rarely draws close exactly the way we imagine.
Walking with an inscrutable God necessarily entails embracing the unknown even if it offends our understanding of God up to that point. Our mental understanding cannot be allowed to be the arbitrator of our trust and obedience.
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