REFLECTIONS

January 14th, 2018

Blessed is he... whose hope is in the Lord his God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them—The Lord reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations.

Psalms 146:5-6, 10

Understanding God

“Never fail to question the truth of what you fail to understand…,” Fredrick Buechner wrote through the voice of one of his fictional characters. I’ve read the devotional he wrote several times through the years without notice of the depth or wisdom of his advice. It says, pay attention. Neither accept nor dismiss the possibility of the truth of something simply because you don’t understand…

It’s easy to disregard or disbelieve when we don’t understand. But if understanding is a requirement to believe, then existence of God would be dismissed.

Understanding God—why should we expect to? God lives in a different realm—a time-free space beyond human experience or imagination. The sound waves of his voice are too long for human ears to detect, and his time is not measured by Earth’s rotations or trips around the sun.

God speaks to us through the human words of Jesus, if we bother to read them; and through the hushed voice of the Holy Spirit which we often confuse with our own thoughts. So, it’s not God’s silence that’s the issue. It’s the volume control of our hearing aids needing adjustment.

But more than not listening for God, we don’t understand God. That’s because we can’t. We weren’t created to. We may have been created in the image of God, but we are not God any more than Barbie and GI Joe are human.

So, here’s all God wants us to understand. He is bigger and more powerful than we can comprehend. He is everywhere, always. He created the heavens and the earth and all that’s in it. He loves us. So believe. That’s understanding enough to love him back.

But wait. I stopped Buechner’s quote too soon. Listen to the whole of it, “Never fail to question the truth of what you fail to understand…for the world is filled with wonders.” Some choose to dismiss God as fiction because they don’t understand his wonder. Indeed, God is one of them.

Indeed, God is the best explanation of them all.

You are the light of the world,

Richard +

www.reflectingthesavior.org.


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