Marching Forward

I will admit it. I’ve procrastinated every time I sat at my computer and stared at the blank blog page. I will admit to feeling apprehensive about this journey through Genesis. And I know why. It’s because of all the questions I encounter when I read the first book in my Bible.

Maybe, just maybe, that’s ok.

The book of Genesis doesn’t provide all the answers to our questions. It challenges us to ask the unanswerable questions. But perhaps it is in the journey of asking and pondering that God pushes us to want to know Him, to experience Him, and ultimately trust in His character.

It appears to me that God reveals truth to a heart when it is open to learning but He does so on a personal level in His perfect timeframe. Hence, our overall confusion when we try to find our answers from other people.

Along the way of searching for truth, we discover that there are some things, God has refused to explain because they must be experienced personally. And then there are those things that will remain a mystery on this side of heaven. Regardless, I trust that all knowledge belongs to Him.

Lois Tverberg writes, “A Westerner opens the Bible and wants to prove God’s existence and construct a theology to explain God’s nature. We would call that ‘knowledge of God.’ But in Hebrew, to ‘know’ someone was to be familiar with him through experience and relationship, as a wife knows her husband. ‘Knowledge’ assumes devotion and loyalty and includes intimacy.”

Our western culture has trained us to think using linear logic. And our logical deductions build upon previous deductions. For example, if I can prove that A=B and B=C, then of course A=C. We decide that anything outside of this logic cannot possibly be true.
Sadly, this deduction can actually limit the way we can know God. Our inclination becomes to reject rather than trust anything that we can’t explain.

For the original Hebrew audience, their thoughts were not linear, but circular. They understood God to be beyond human comprehension and logic. They relished the mystery of Him. They were not interested in proving His existence. They wanted to experience His presence.

I think we have to retrain our brains to yield final authority to the biblical text rather than trust human logic. I think it would be foolish to discount possibilities simply because I don’t understand.

Rabbi David Wople says, “Making sense of everything is not an obligation or even a possibility. Acceptance of mystery is an act, not of resignation, but humility.”

Perhaps wisdom looks a lot like admitting, “I don’t know the answer and I’m ok with that. I know the One who does know the answer.”

So I am marching forward.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…And God said…

God is infinite and self-existent.

He is the uncreated Creator. He created beginnings and endings. He created boundaries of time and space.

He is sovereign.

He was, He is and He will always be.

God speaks.

Questions to ponder:

Do I withhold my trust because of my insistence upon answers? Is that pride?

Am I willing to let go of logic in my pursuit of experiencing God?

Am I listening?