The following was written several days ago, but posting was delayed due to The Great Ice Storm of 2007. We’re still without internet, but much more fortunate than many who still after four days have no power. More on that later…..
It’s 4am, and I don’t want to be awake. But I am. Lord, sometimes He talks to me at the most inconvenient times! Several days ago, Brian came to me with book in hand and said “You gotta hear this.” That’s a frequent occurrence in our life. What he read me stuck in me, and I drug out of bed a little bit ago hoping he had underlined it in the book he was reading. Here is what I found:
A preferential option for teaching in parables indicates that Jesus did not see the action of God in this world as capable of being defined strictly, or confined within the ordinary categories of human experience. It is not so easy for us to accept that the ways of God transcend our powers of reasoning. We anticipate that, with enough diligence in collecting data, we can define all events in terms of cause and effect. Whether we like it o not, divine intervention in human affairs can be described only obliquely: by allusive language, poetry, and similitude. Such activity belongs to another order of being. Any attempt on our part to measure, explain, and predict what God does is necessarily deficient. That is why revelation is necessary and why the interpretation of Scripture is so difficult. In the presence of the Holy, we quickly become aware that our rational mind is a much blunted instrument, of its nature unable to analyze or describe the divine and, in any case, too often subverted by instinctual desires to perform at its peak. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” (Isaiah 6:5) All that we can do in our moments of enlightenment is to look and to see, to wonder and admire. We can never comprehend or encompass God. And there is, more often than not, a divine darkness cocooning God’s deeds on earth that makes them unsearchable by mortal intelligence.
–Michael Casey , Fully Divine, Fully Human
God’s ways are so incredibly different than our ways that they cannot be described or communicated merely in a rational, intelligent way. We can only learn God’s ways, and comprehend what the Scriptures are trying to teach us, as a result of living it. Truth can only be imparted as we open ourselves to it and then experience it by living. The Scriptures, and particularly the teachings of Jesus, then become multi-layered jewels of truth. As we begin the magnificent journey of a life devoted to knowing God, we read our Bibles and are thrilled with the realization of truth. But going through life’s experiences, the pains and delights and drudgery and sometimes bafflements, and pressing on to seek to know God and truth, we again open our Bibles and find the ancient text filled with brand new things. Charles Colson says, “Thinking and living are bound together. We think in order to know how to live, and we learn what’s true from living.”
And remember what Jesus told Nicodemus, “Unless a man is born again, he cannot even see the Kingdom of God.”
There is a particular Scripture that has given me much hope this year, I find myself clinging to it, just a phrase actually in the midst of one of Paul’s long sentences, found in the first chapter of the letter to the Colossians—”…. the gospel, which is continually bearing fruit and increasing in all the earth .” I need to know that bit of truth, am wonderfully comforted by it, that the Good News which Jesus proclaimed a couple of millennia ago has never ceased to be at work, continually increasing and making progress in seeing this fallen world set to rights. That the seed of the Gospel is growing up to be not only the “biggest tree in all the garden” but the one that overtakes the entire garden! I want with every ounce of my being for His Kingdom to come, and His will to be done in all the earth, just as it is in the heavens.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened.” Everyone knows you can’t see yeast once it’s been mixed into the bread dough. It doesn’t take much, just a pinch, but that yeast affects all the dough. And while we’re all about individuals one by one coming into the true knowledge of God, that doesn’t diminish the huge need for our world, our culture, to be reconciled to its Creator. As those two thousand years have marched by, we have seen that reconciliation taking place, through the establishment of hospitals, schools, advances in human rights, care of the poor, and a myriad of other things. I believe that all the good being done around the world is the result of the influence of the Gospel—even individuals in our society who claim NOT to be Christians have been influenced by the leaven—they can’t help not to be. The great salvation program God began when He sent His Son into the world is so much bigger than we humans have realized, and it truly is bearing fruit and increasing in all the world. And someday soon, all the world will be leavened.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on EARTH as it is in HEAVEN, Oh Lord! And some day, we’ll cry out with a loud voice, “The Kingdoms of the world have become the Kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!” Hallelujah, amen and amen!