Christians, We Are Not God-Experts

Did you know that we Christians are not God-experts? I think it's good to remind ourselves of that from time to time. The Gospel is a wondrous thing, and it truly is a key to understanding the God of all creation, but even to speak of "understanding God" is to venture the slippery slope of pride. You'll remember how God put an end to all that sort of talk in the case of Job and his friends. He addressed them with 62 pertinent questions that they couldn't answer. One gets the impression that he might have gone on asking questions like that forever. Thankfully, Job got the message after #62.

And I might as well add that we're not love-experts either, we Christians. I truly desire that I could boast of our love, but I find I can't do so without many serious reservations. We have failed too often, too willfully, so that such a boast would only ring hollow. We are not so good at loving as we'd like to think. Indeed, we are not so good at it that the "worldlings" are flocking to our meetings. This is a matter not for boasting, but for repentance.

And, by the way, we are not Word-of-God-experts, either. The most learned Bible scholar that has ever lived, though God may have given him deep understanding by human standards, by God's own standard he is but a child learning his abc's. Let us therefore enter into the Word with the humility of a beginner, tasting the wisdom of God and keenly aware that each new particle of knowledge only proves to us how much more there is that we do not understand.

Jill Caratinni writes,

There is something vital in knowing that there is much that we do not know. It keeps us grounded in reality. It keeps us looking to the one who wills to be known. Says the LORD, "Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." (Jeremiah 33:3)

Christians, in heaven we will be learning forever. To learn now, in this life, to learn well, is to receive a foretaste of our eternal destiny. Let us learn and love in the power and grace of the Spirit, but let all our knowledge be tempered with the heart-cry, "Lord, I understand, but help thou my deep ignorance."