Pilgrim Soldier

Yesterday and today I’ve had a bit of a revelation. Our minds are simply too small to understand God, so we might as well stop pretending we do.

It’s not as if I didn’t already know that God’s mystery is too much to understand, but it suddenly dawned on me that we talk as if we understand Him totally. One of the biggest problems with Evangelicalism is that there is a tendency to act as if God is our best friend. This sort of mentality makes the step to acting as if we know His will and His thoughts very small.

Yet the Bible makes it very clear that He is very different to us. We all know Isaiah 55:8-9 where God declares that His ways and thoughts are higher than ours. Certainly some of the things He does are prone to go contrary to everything we expect to happen.

Despite this we still have a tendency to act and speak as if we are totally aware of what God is going to do in any given situation. Strangely though I’ve noticed that in the majority of these cases God tends to conform to our own ideas. We seem to have fallen into a habit of using God as a sort of divine trump card that can be drawn to make our argument impossible to argue against.

Maybe this is a fault of our theology, or our teaching. I honestly don’t know! I do know that for many years I have longed to have a deeper understanding of God that embraces elements of the Orthodox understanding of the Mystery of God. I look at the Christian mystics of history and see within them an understanding that they are able to glimpse something deeper about God whilst accepting they can never fully know Him. I’m sick and tired of a religion that has all the answers to life’s questions and never really seems to accept that some things happen for a higher purpose that God chooses not to reveal.

God is mysterious! Sometimes His ways seem absolutely crazy and sometimes He doesn’t give us an answer to why things happen! To have an answer all the time leaves no room for faith!