Friday, October 21, 2011

The Unknown ...

Despite our prayers, despite our scriptures, despite the countless commentaries and books written by authors seeking to help us; there are some questions that simply remain unanswered.  Not just mysteries of the universe or existence, but sometimes personal questions or situations that do not seem to make sense, and require an answer, though none are evident.  How does a person of faith contend with the great unknown?  It is easier to follow doctrines and ideologies about spiritual matters that form our faith, but harder to contend with an unanswered question that directly impacts our day to day lives.  Surely the Christ whose ministry was one of active love, involvement, and concern for the smallest among us, would not leave us without an answer for any great length of time.  But sometimes that is exactly what happens.  What should a Christian do about it?

When there is no doubt that God exists, when there is surety about His character being one completely composed of love; unanswered questions, the unknown, the future, the next step can still remain a black as night.  Prophecy tells us what lies ahead in general terms, but seldom is aimed directly at me.  Biblical principles can greatly help me in making a decision, provide guidance, and keep my decisions in accordance with the love of Heaven; but they say little about my choice of career, immediate health concerns, or my choice of a mate.  They provide guidance, oversight, values, but rarely specifics.  Most specific guidance is found in what not to do, rather than what to do.  When confronted with a question that affects our lives, we seek the Lords response in His word, in His still small voice, and on our knees.  But when His word provides no specific answer, or perhaps multiple answers, and His voice seems silent, we are left with only patience to face the unknown.  It does not diminish our belief in God’s existence, or His love, but it does provide us with a cause for concern.
The unknown often brings with it a sense that we lack faith, or perhaps that our sins and evil thinking cloud our judgment and make us unable to see what the Lord would have for us.  We doubt ourselves, if not our God.  And the unknown remains.  The patriarch Job faced a series of calamities in days of old and questioned what he had done to warrant his fate.  He wondered aloud why God would punish him, as from his point of view, he had done nothing to deserve what had befallen him.  He never doubted God’s existence, nor did he doubt the integrity of his own actions, but he could not resolve why his life had turned out the way it had.  He lost wealth, he lost children, he lost health, but he did not lose faith.  Nor did he find the answer he sought, he suffered in silence.  His friends could offer him no comfort.  His wife encouraged him to curse his God and die, to end the suffering.  He did not.  He maintained his faith, and eventually he was able to converse with God about what happened to him.  But even in that conversation God’s “answer” was not to Job’s liking.  God simply reminded Job, that He was God, Job was not.  Job’s life was restored to him in greater measure than what he had lost, but even in this there was no real answer from God.
You and I know why this happened, because we have the benefit of reading the story of Job in scriptures, with the author’s vantage point of an argument in heaven between God and Satan over the faithfulness of His servant Job.  Job’s life was a focal point in a much larger question before the universe – why does one trust and serve God?  Satan proposed the God’s love and blessings were the motivation for service, Job proved otherwise.  And he proved it in darkness.  Job proved it in the unknown, in the unanswered, in the NOT knowing.  Job could not be told of his part in the larger question without influencing his outcome.  Job could not be assured that his life would one day be restored, nor that he continued to enjoy the tender favor and love of God.  Job had to suffer alone.  Job had to face calamity, and the unknown, and decide for himself what he was going to believe, or who he was going to trust and serve.  It was not fun.  It was not pretty.  It was darkness, isolation, pain, with no end in sight.  In this condition, Job made and reaffirmed his choice.
Sometimes Satan brings much calamity into our lives, even when we did nothing we know of to bring it to our door.  We do what we think are the right things.  We believe what we think is truth, and follow our God, hoping for His blessings.  Yet Satan enters our lives and presents us with darkness and the unknown.  With luck, our condition is not ever as bad as Job’s was, but for some of us the pain feels as great.  But as we suffer, we continue to hold to our belief that God is with us, even though we cannot see Him, or perhaps hear Him.  We can know from the story of Job that God is always with us, even when we do not understand.  But this assurance does not always lift the blindness, or illuminate the path we need to take to move forward.
It does make one wonder why a God who is so careful to protect His word to us, and so involved in our lives as we daily submit to Him, would still leave us with unanswered questions, and unknown issues.  When we face these situations we always believe that God will answer us, even if it is not yet.  But how long is too long?  How long did Job have to wait?  Job’s conditions changed, but his answer never came.  Moses waited 40 years tending sheep, and then another 40 years wandering the desert, and still did NOT enter the Promised Land.  Abraham waited till he was nearly 100 years old before being given his promised heir.  Noah waited 120 years toiling on a boat on dry land for a phenomenon called rain that had never occurred before.  Enoch was over 300 before leaving our world for Heaven without seeing death.  Clearly our ideas of immediacy do not match Gods.  Imagine how Abraham continued to age, and wished he could have his son, in order to play with him, teach him, and love him, while he still had time; but year after year passed with no heir.  The children of Israel had already spent 360 years in slavery in Egypt before Moses rose up and slew the Egyptian.  Instead of freeing them, he fled for his life.  They waited for his return for another 40 years.  Young men became old men, still kept in hard bondage as Moses tended sheep in Midian.  Every day spent under the lash, was no less painful, no less immediate.  I am sure some older folks who wished to see freedom died before Moses could return.  Yet for His own reasons, God delayed the return of Moses for 40 more years.  Our ideas of “when” we need an answer are not always in sync with Gods.
So why does God allow us to face the unknown?  The question is fundamental to faith.  We can trust to facts, science, our eyes, our ears, our senses, our logic – or sometimes in spite of all of those, we can trust in God.  Sin began with a choice to trust in the brilliance of our minds, versus the counsel of God.  Lucifer did not trust that what God told him about the pursuit of serving self would lead to where it did.  He trusted himself, his own wisdom, his own logic, the brilliance of his mind, and he was wrong.  God was right, not because the facts were evident, they were not.  God was right because He is God.  He is always right.  What makes sense to us is not always the correct answer.  What seems logical is not always what is right.  In order for us to never experience evil again, we will have to learn to let go of our own superiority and trust God instead.  We need to allow God to be God.  And that means like Job, we must decide to follow God’s wisdom despite a lack of answers, despite what is contrary to common sense, despite what outcomes we experience.  We must trust in God’s love even when pain is all we see.  Because God is love, and everything we experience has a part in the story that is needed, even if it is not evident.  Our wisdom, our logic, our common sense, our sensory organs are simply not enough.  For evil to remain extinct for eternity, we must learn that God alone can be trusted, NOT us.
It is easy to trust in God when what He asks of us, lines up with what we want, or what makes sense.  God tells us to flee persecution and we are fine with that.  He tells us to seek His protection and we are fine with that.  But when He tells us to love our enemies and turn the cheek to someone who just knocked the heck out of our other one, we somehow are not quite as fine with that.  When He tells us to build a boat to avoid a flood we have never seen, that does not make sense.  When He tells us to literally sacrifice our only son on an altar to Him, a crime for which He normally allows Israel in later year to be invaded for, that does not make sense.  When He tells Peter to step out of the boat and walk on water, or tells His followers it is better to die believing in Him than live denying Him, those things make less sense.  They defy logic.  They defy reason.  And therefore they form a conscious choice to believe in a God that is a God, and define our place in the universe as created beings, subservient, less wisdom, less logic, less truth.  We are inferior to God, whether we like it or not.  This is something Satan refused to accept, trusting himself, instead of God.  And evil was born into the universe.  But to rid the universe of evil, all of creation must accept that only God is God, and only His words can be fully trusted.  No more will one third of the angels ever follow another liar into doom.  No more will another world be set with a tree of temptation to follow a competing ideology than Gods.  No more, because from now on, all will rest comfortably following the counsel of God – even when it does not appear to make sense, or go along with what we want or think.  This is the basis for the end of evil.  This is the basis for the extinction of evil for all time.  And it is the only way to keep affliction from rising a second time.
The unknown should be a welcome friend to us.  It is OK to content with the presence of the uncertain, the unknown, and the seemingly bleak in our existence.  It is not a lack of God we see, but the manifestation of His trust in us, to face the unknown and seek Him anyway; to trust in Him despite what we experience, and our complete lack of knowledge about the outcome.  For God Himself, in the form of Christ set our example in this too.  When Christ hung upon the cross of Calvary, He did not know if having been so stained with the weight of our sins, if the Father could ever accept Him back into His presence again.  Christ faced the unknown.  Not just a temporary what if, but a question that could keep Him forever separated from His own Father.  It was the biggest unknown any being could ever face, and He faced it for us.  He loved us anyway.  He died for us anyway.  He chose to love in spite of the unknown, and we are saved as a result.  How can we expect to participate in the process of salvation without the trying fires of the unknown in our path, to validate our decision to follow God despite what we do not know?  How can we truly say we trust God, if we are never faced with a situation with which we do not have control?  Let us welcome the unknown, and rest in our decision that to follow God in spite what we do not know, is ALWAYS the right decision.  It is the one we will repeat for eternity, and it can begin right here and right now.  Outcomes do not matter, but trust does.  Let us always trust God over ourselves, or our insecurities, for He is faithful to us every time – especially when there is simply no answer.

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