God told us, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways" (Isa 55:80). We seem to have made a practice of proving His point. Consider an easy example. The Old Testament prophets gave all sorts of information about the coming Messiah -- some 300 prophecies. Yet, when the Messiah arrived, the Jews had no idea that He was going to die, or that He was not the Conquering King, and so much more. They had the information and simply missed it. Didn't take it in. Didn't see it. They were short-sighted.
We're really good at that today. We read, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20) and think, "Oh, people with less money and food inherit the kingdom." He wasn't talking about that "poor." He was talking about the "poor in spirit" (Matt 5:3). Poor, yes, but not our kind of poor; a spiritual poor. Jesus said He was fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy to "the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed" (Luke 4:17-21), and we think of the people we know who are poor, captives, blind, and oppressed. Jesus was talking about the spiritually poor, the spiritual captives, the spiritually blind, the spiritually oppressed. (We know this because He did not solve all those problems when He was here, but He did solve the spiritual problems at the Cross.) We read, "For I know the plans I have for you, declares YHWH, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope" (Jer 29:11) and think, "Oh, cool, we're going to get rich!!", forgetting His thoughts are not our thoughts and we keep thinking He's like us.
I'd imagine most of us can think of a whole lot more examples of seemingly straightforward things said in Scripture that turn out to clearly be something else ... something more. That's why we need the Spirit. Natural man does not understand the things of God (1 Cor 2:14) and is blinded by the god of this world (2 Cor 4:4). Thinking God's thoughts after Him doesn't come naturally, but we who are born of the Spirit have the Spirit to lead us into all truth. We should be cautious in reading God's Word too simply. It's not hard, but it's not necessarily natural, either. (And isn't it funny that a lot of those who claim the simplest readings of some of these texts also deny the reliability of Scripture?)
The notion that YHWH just might see things differently than we do, and that He just might see more than we do, seem like it never enters some people's minds.
ReplyDeleteI'm in a class right now going through the 5 Solas, and in Sola Fide, one of the objections listed as that simply declaring people righteous doesn't make it so. And if that is all God did, they'd be right. A judge can't simply deem you innocent when all the evidence says otherwise. The crime must be punished, which happened on the cross.
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