If you are a Bible reader, a Christian, a participant in the goings on of modern church life you will rapidly learn of the promises of God. These will be expounded out of the scriptures and interpreted by teachers and preachers.
Out of these millieus pour words like faith, concepts that link belief to getting. Then life hits and despite belief the hoped for thing does not arrive and automatic emotional reactions flit in and out of our conscious. Notions that God did not hold up his end of the bargain may bang up against our intellect, our pastors, our hopes. Most get a little less enthusiastic about this belief-process.
The population of God-wanderers will shift as this process happens. Some will seemingly stupidly continue to believe and believe and believe proclaiming all manner of irrationalities. Many will plod along a middle-course planted by mismatches of hope and gain. Some will go agnostic and others will full atheist dismissing religion with varying degrees of success.
A helpful notion came to me today while reading in A.B. Bruce’s The Training of the Twelve and the referenced sermon of F.W. Robertson The Illusiveness of Life. The notion is that we interpret God’s promises through our own imaginations and hopes. We want something and then one way or another find a Bible-promise, a God-promise that our psyche links to that something. We believe this thing which in essence we have self-assembled. We hear something spiritual and get an illusion.
Here is a question for us: Does my imagination force God’s action?
Here is another question: How do I react when my imaginations don’t bear up?
It turns out that it can be pretty easy to be mad at God for these things. Often we will be too worried to actually come out and say it, but those thoughts can self-assemble just like we mismatch our hopes to God’s promises.
The proper approach is to properly cordon off our imaginations. Accept that through faith we will gain the blessing of God as he in his perfection provides. Abraham’s journeying in Canaan was always just that; never was it a possessing. He gained wealth and family but no large tract of Palestinian land. He did gain maturity in his walk with God. Blessing came God’s way and blessing it was. For us we need to be careful with our God-imaginings. Let him bless as he surely will. We must not growl at God out of our misconceptions.