Lean Not On Your Own Understanding

 "Trust in the Lord with all your heart
And do not lean on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5)

This is my "life verse."  I have spent a great deal of time over the years focusing on those first words - "trust" and "all" especially.  It's that second line that trips me up.  When God has said one thing, and my eyes see something else going on, it's hard to remember that "it ain't over till it's over" and God doesn't always take a direct route to the end result.  And there's a reason and a purpose for that.

For some reason probably related to that second line, I noticed a recurrent cycle in my reading of the Old Testament: God performed miracles, then made promises, and His people didn't believe those promises despite His faithful past, they went their own way and sinned, suffered the consequences, repented, and then the whole cycle repeated itself again.  Despite God always making good on His promises, His people looked instead to what they saw with their eyes and chose not to believe Him.  They grumbled against Him when things looked impossible.  I don't think it's coincidence that He brought those instances to my attention.

I interrupted my normal Bible reading schedule to jump to the book of Luke in celebration of the Christmas season.  Right away, in the first Chapter, I noticed something related to this - two back-to-back contrasting examples of how to react to God's promises of the seemingly impossible.

Zacharias and his wife Elizabeth, both elderly, were told by the angel Gabriel that they would have a son.  Gabriel also visited a young virgin, Mary, and told her she would also bear a son.  Zacharias heard this news knowing his wife was too old to bear children, and asked for proof.  Mary heard this news knowing she was a virgin and asked how it was going to happen.  

Gabriel saw fit to explain the process to Mary, but often we don't get that explanation, only the instruction to "lean not on your own understanding."  That's hard.  Sometimes it's really hard, when our eyes - and often the people around us - tell us the opposite.  God is cognizant of our humanness and our imperfect faith, but we pay a price when we put more faith in what we see over God's promises.  The Old Testament examples show that, and Zacharias lost his ability to speak until the promise was fulfilled.  And there's always a blessing when we are able to trust the Lord even when our circumstances might indicate otherwise.  Mary found favor with God and is most blessed among women.  God is always faithful.  He keeps His promises.  Always.  Even when we can't see how.

God and Suffering

 I was reading a book that attempted to explain why good people sometimes suffer.  It was a good lesson to me that if a Christian is looking to read something enlightening about God (besides the Bible), reading a book that is written by a non-Christian is not going to be helpful.

The basic premise of the book is that our God is NOT all powerful, and He struggles against evil like the rest of us.  But - we can take hope and comfort that God can sympathize with us just the same.  Hmmm.  Not sure how a god with no power can provide any sort of hope whatsoever.  Besides, I struggle with the notion of a God who can create the world and everything in it being powerless over it, among other things. 

The other striking thing about this book is that it summarized various books and passages in the Bible.  I don't claim to be a Bible scholar.  But in reading it through on my 4th time now, I have a reasonable idea of what's in it.  These summaries provided in the book took me by surprise - nowhere did I recall what these summaries claimed, so I got out my Bible and took a look again.  And, guess what?  Nowhere did I see anything even similar to what the author was asserting.  How a person could read these verses and come up with the conclusions that the author did was mind blowing.  Take home message:  Never, ever rely on someone telling you what the Bible says.  Read it yourself, and you'll know.  

There are three things to remember:

1) God IS all-powerful. 
2) God IS all-knowing.
3) God loves you dearly, so much that He came to earth to take the punishment for your sin, so you wouldn't need to.

In the Bible, God says we don't think like He does.  We'd all be God if we could.  There's much to this universe and to this existence of ours that we are not going to understand.  But we believe in the One who does understand.

There are many reasons we suffer on earth.  It shapes us - He holds us tightly through it, if we let Him. We come out of it differently than we went into it.  Sin is part of earthly life because Satan is here.  We have free will to be sinful if we wish, and unapologetic (and unforgiven) if we choose that as well.  One person's sin hurts others - that's a fact.  We don't sin in a vacuum.  Sometimes the suffering we do gets our attention, and refocuses us away from something harmful.  I don't believe that God necessarily causes our suffering (it's part of allowing us free will) but He'll help us through it, stop it when it is time, sustain us through it, and bless us despite it.  Yes, God IS omnipotent, loves us tremendously, and allows us to suffer, all at the same time.