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'Christ in You...'
by Dale Krebbs
Do you sometimes struggle to comprehend God - why He allows certain things? Why he allows unimaginable suffering, and catastrophic events? A radio and TV commercial from years ago concludes: "inquiring minds want to know" - a true observation indeed. Sometimes it is tempting to ask "where was God" in this?
Why does it seem that some people live a charmed life - healthy, prosperous, unperturbed and undistrubed. As the melody goes, everything is "going my way" - for them. that is...Is there an answer for what sometimes seems to be the unanswerable. If you try to use human logic, even after collecting all the relevant info that is obtainable, you often end up where you started - the same questions, doubts, frustrations, and in an agony of futility. Many will not believe unless they know it all.
Subsequently, they reject God and what He has to say about himself, or simply ignore the whole issue, and go about living life their way, as though there is no God if they cannot know all about Him, or see Him, or reach out and touch Him. If they would only believe, they could. They would see God in everything. Literally everything. The miracle of each breath they take. The birth of a baby. The majesty of a flower, a cloud, and rain. The list of proofs is endless.
Someone once said to me when I was very young, after learning that I was committing to understand God and the Bible, "...why, you can't do that! If you try to understand the Bible you will go insane!" I'm still trying. And so far I'm not certifiably insane. True though, we will never "understand" God except to the degree that He allows and wills. Any more than that, we could not exist. We could go insane.
The finite can never comprehend the infinite. Some things we must just accept. Sometimes, it is best to be still in our little mud puddle of living. The more we agitate, frustrate, and stomp around in our mud hole, the murky and dirtier it gets. What are we to do? A short answer - one that probably more of heard - just "let go and let God". Oversimplified perhaps, but in essence often the best course of being and living. God has plainly said that it is futile to attempt to fathom His reasons for doing and not doing:
"Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have love, pity, and mercy for him, and to our God, for He will multiply to him His abundant pardon. For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts." - Isaiah 55:7-9.
His ways are past finding out.
God never intended for mankind to know everything about Him, what He plans, all His ways and His plans to do in the future. He gives little hints, and small evidences here and there - enough that motivate us to wait, be patient, have faith in Him, and above all - love Him. Faith is believing in what you cannot see, and yet you are somehow convinced. Letting God be God is actually the bedrock of real faith. It is trust that is enabled by God Himself via the Holy Spirit.
"Now faith is the assurance (the confirmation, [a]the title deed) of the things [we] hope for, being the proof of things [we] do not see and the conviction of their reality [faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses]." (Hebrews 11:1 AMP)
We must agree to let God be God. In this awesome process of "letting go" and "letting God", amazingly we slowly - ever so slowly - become like Him, even the One we could never completely understand. But as the Apostle said, the time will eventually come when we will understand and know even as we are known. In His way, and in His time. In the meantime, may you never doubt God's love for you, and instead trust Him - with every hurt, every doubt, with every unanswered question, and what seems to be conflicting evidence to your mind, and every unanswerable observation in your life and in others.
He understands - He knows what He is doing. It is good. And it is ALL who believe in His Son, so we can be with Him in glorious splendor forever. With everything in your life and mine He is pleading: TRUST ME!
Can you believe without seeing - for a little while?
"For our knowledge is fragmentary (incomplete and imperfect), and our prophecy (our teaching) is fragmentary (incomplete and imperfect). But when the complete and perfect (total) comes, the incomplete and imperfect will vanish away (become antiquated, void, and superseded). When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; now that I have become a man, I am done with childish ways and have put them aside. For now we are looking in a mirror that gives only a dim (blurred) reflection [of reality as in a riddle or enigma], but then [when perfection comes] we shall see in reality and face to face! Now I know in part (imperfectly), but then I shall know and understand fully and clearly, even in the same manner as I have been fully and clearly known and understood by God]."
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