The Story So Far
Back to The Spiritual Essentials
Our Lord is a teacher who hands his class a textbook he knows everyone will find confusing and will misunderstand. He is unconcerned by this because he specializes in one-on-one teaching. He longs to personally take each of us through the book, explaining portions of his choosing until they not only become highly meaningful and precious to us, but life-changing. This does not mean, of course, that we will fully understand everything in the book. He gives the same textbook to both his newest and his most advanced students. What a tragedy it would be if on earth we ever reached the point of fully understanding the Bible! There would be no more new discoveries for us and little more growth.
Since the Almighty is in every way superior to us, we must be willing to tolerate mysteries – even mysteries that highly offend us. We discovered that an additional reason for mysteries being inevitable is that God has seasons for so many things, and divine enlightenment is no exception. Yet another reason for divine mysteries is that the Lord uses them to test our hearts. When Jesus walked this planet, the mysteries included what seemed unintelligible teaching and the way he perplexed and offended people by seeming to be a Sabbath-breaker and thus a breaker of God’s Ten Commandments. It’s essentially the same today. The Bible still seems peppered with moral dilemmas, unintelligible teaching and offenses to the intellect.
Just as Jesus could have removed offenses in his ministry, so God could have removed offenses from Scripture. Instead, they are cleverly embedded in the Bible to filter out people whose god is their mind, whose moral standards are their own invention or who want to serve not the King of Glory but some predictable god who is so pathetically small that even they can figure him out. There are people who let God be God and there are those who want to be God’s God. There are those who are willing to trust the perfection of God’s wisdom and integrity and there are those who, like the devil himself, think they are better than God.
Consider Jesus saying people must consume his flesh and blood. He refused to explain, even though people left in droves. I’m reminded of Richard Bach’s quote: “If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it’s yours, if it doesn’t, it never was.” Those who truly believed in Jesus would cling to him no matter what. Everything in the Christian life hinges on faith, and faith grows best in the dark.
In reality, what people considered to be the low point of Jesus’ ability to communicate divine truth was astoundingly brilliant. By referring to eating his flesh, Jesus was delivering a profound truth cleverly packaged in a such an unforgettable way that if they followed Jesus for long enough the saying would eventually be detonated by additional facts and explode into meaning for them.
Although we must not be offended by spiritual mysteries, we must not tolerate them to the point of defeatism, where we despair of ever understanding them in this age and so stop asking God and seeking. A know-it-all attitude is such a killer of spiritual growth that it should be feared. Equally deadly, however, is an I’ll-never-know attitude. The two attitudes often combine into a spiritually numbing I-know-all-I’ll-ever-know approach to certain biblical truths. No matter how dry we feel and how long the wait, we must keep asking and seeking. Your name is on God’s calendar.
Nevertheless, as Jesus said about himself: “By myself I can do nothing” (John 5:30). We don’t even know what to seek (we need some truths far more desperately than others) nor how to seek. So we must look to the Lord even for help in seeking. Everything in the Christian life is done in intimate partnership with our Maker.