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The study of God’s Word is essential to our spiritual growth, but reading the Word is not enough. We must study the Word and hear what God is saying. And if you talk to the text, the text will talk back to you.
The study of God’s Word is essential to our spiritual growth, but reading the Word is not enough. We must study the Word and hear what God is saying. And if you talk to the text, the text will talk back to you.
Psalm 73
Here’s another secret that throbs inside the chest of a man. I’m almost scared to say it out loud, but here it is: There are instances when I or we feel God is simply not godly enough. The Psalmist, Asaph, stood flat-footed initially and told the truth about what he saw going on right under God’s seemingly questionable godly nose.
Yes, that’s right, there are times when God miserably fails to line up with our human expectations of Him, and that includes our need for Him to cooperate with our desire to see Him execute devastation when we think it ought to be so. Yes, at times, the simple truth is that God’s godly version of His godliness fails to satisfy our sometimes carnal expectation of what He ought to be. The sometimes disillusioned questioning of our hearts sounds something like this:
We ask, how can we, as men, TRUST a God who allows injustice after injustice to crackle, crunch, creep, and crap around our feet without rapidly straightening things out with a clap of thunder from His supposedly mighty hands? After all, how credible is divine might when it is kept in pretty wrapping paper while all hell is seemingly breaking loose in every tribe and nation?
Genesis 3
In Genesis 3, God spotted Adam’s “raggedy butt” tiptoeing through the underbrush of the garden forest (hiding). Yeah, Adam had triggered an unpleasant need to be confronted by God because he had been an affront to God. Look, can you see him? Even if you can’t see him, I can see him quite clearly, and the reason I can see him is because I can easily see myself in him! I can see myself stupidly ducking and dodging under branches and dumbly trying to escape the peering, transcendent eyes of Father God. I can see my slumped shoulders carrying the moisture of fresh sin that’s dancing upon and dripping from my sin-burdened shoulders. I can see the dark smoky clouds of carnal thought seeping and escaping from the tunnels of my ears. I’m catching glimpses of the red spots on my eyes that stem from my visual fixation on multiple things that are unholy. I can see a faint stained imprint of female-shaped buttocks on the center of the palms of my hands, and they got there because I often grabbed and held them with all my Mandingo might, even though they weren’t mine to grab. I can see kernels of vain thought popping from the center of my brain because I previously bought into the jacked-up delusion that I was the master of my destiny.