An Invitation (4)

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

        neither are your ways my ways,

        declares the LORD.

As the heavens are higher than the earth,

        so are my ways higher than your ways

        and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Yes, and this is a problem! Our world’s many religious expressions and conflicts reflect an arrogant human aptitude at creating God in our own image. I went through a difficult inner struggle with God related to my inability to lead a particular church into a vibrant self-supporting ministry to its community. Surely he would want this little church to prosper! Instead we had to close its doors. Where was God when we needed him? It shook my faith’s foundations—carrying on a theme from my childhood: why did my Dad have to die in 1960? Why was President Kennedy assassinated in 1963? Why was Martin Luther King killed in 1968?

I suffered on a small scale what ancient Israel suffered on a large scale. If God intended this little nation as a center piece to redeem the world from enslavement to evil and violence, why, in God’s name(!) did he allow them to be overrun by the violent Babylonian despot, exiled for two whole generations, while his favored city Jerusalem lay in ruin?

The answer begins in these short verses from Isaiah 55. God’s purposes and his ways are far beyond us. In the end, I had to accept that life’s meaning and God’s purposes are much grander than I can grasp. Faith, for me, is not so much trying to believe impossible things as accepting puzzling things beyond my understanding.

God is in his heaven and all is not well with the world. But he came down identifying with our suffering, breaking the underlying brokenness, promising that in his time justice and mercy will reign in his peaceable kingdom.