A personal, mental approach.
I may dare to type thoughts about God making mistakes and the like, but there is a thing I care not do. I do not dare to raise my fist and God and declare his decisions to be erroneous. My thoughts in some manner need confessed and addressed, but the thoughts themselves are merely precursors to anti-God rebellion.
One part of my mind behaves like Job’s wife saying things like, “Just come clean, tell God he screwed up, move on, accept the consequences and be done with it.” The bigger part of my brain rebels against that rebellion. Remember Ephesians 3:10 from last week’s lesson? Here it is along with some verses that lead up to it.
8 To me [Paul], though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, … 9 … to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, 10 so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 3:8-10–ESV) [emphasis mine]
I am confident that at some point this great consternation of mine will be dissolved in God’s manifold wisdom. Those in the heavenly realm may now see it. I have to wait a bit. So in my mind, there are Job’s-wife type agitators, but they do not dominate. They just speak up like burps at the dinner table or the smacks of one who chews with his mouth open.
A Beautiful Mind
The week I taught this my wife and I were alone at our lake house college and a church retreat having our children. “Shall we watch a movie? Yes.” From that conversation we chose the biopic on John Nash. I had never seen it, and my wife having seen bits and pieces of it wanted to see it in full. There are three pseudo-characters in this movie: Charles Herman, William Parcher and a young girl named Marcee. If you have seen the movie, you will recall that these are John Nash’s schizophrenic manifestations, his hallucinations.
The story of John Nash is interesting because of its pathos. It draws much of its compelling nature from John Nash’s life-long battle between reality and his own experience of it. Charles, Marcee, and Parcher may only reside in his mind, but like some Google-glass overlay, Nash’s mind fits them into or onto Nash’s real world.
Why I have injected Nash into a lesson on predestination and choosing relates to how Nash learns to cope with his hallucinogenic extras. He tells them goodbye and then volitionally ignores them. By taking this approach, he stays out of his interactions with them and better becomes a part of the wider human experience. They never really go away, but they do shift to the periphery.
Circling back
I have no extras. I hear no voices, but questions evoked from the scriptures do occasionally challenge my faith. They are the rat-like smirks, the “Job’s-wife” type agitators. It seems that they never really go away, but their involvement in my thoughts does diminish. By faith, I choose to believe that at some point clarity will come.
There are many things that we do not understand both in this life and the next, but the vital approach is to wait patiently until the understanding comes. Sometimes this requires more patience than we might possess. An eye to the scripture, a prayer to God, and a doggedness to keeping the mouth shut while awaiting the revelation are of enormous value.
The daily slog
So there is my attempt at the explanation of suffering and God.
My approach is to fight against the devils and my own mental lamps whose heat oscillates at me phrases like, “Be mad at God.” Daily I must not pick up that heat. I am confident in God that he will reveal to me when the time is right the wisdom he has had in all of this. I may hate it, but I will wait for it. Such a statement sounds cleaner than it is. In my mind, it is a far more down-and-dirty wrestle. I walk around in here with mud on me from those matches. God sprays me with a hose here and there so it is streaky mud, but mud nonetheless.
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