God-Logic

SCRIPTURE:  But without faith it is impossible to [walk with God and] please Him, for whoever comes [near] to God must [necessarily] believe that God exists and that He rewards those who [earnestly and diligently] seek Him. Hebrews 11:6 AMP

THOUGHT: When I was in seminary, instead of thinking of theology as the study of God, I began to think of it as studying God-Logic. I don’t know where that came from, it certainly wasn’t a professor! It’s just what the word says when I look at it.

We have our logic about how things should go, and, to be fair, it’s gotten the human race into a lot of trouble. You’ve heard people say, “well, if I ran the world…!” That’s people logic. Even the most brilliant theologians can study God for a lifetime and still not understand God-logic. When Scripture says “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:9),” God is attempting to explain why we don’t (and likely won’t) understand where he’s coming from – hence the life of faith.

I know that makes some people upset. We like to understand how things work. As little kids, some of us liked to take things apart and put them together again. Some of us grew up thinking if we knew things we could control them, or keep ourselves safer.  That doesn’t work with God. We can’t necessarily understand him, we surely can’t control him, and he isn’t, to our logic anyway, a guarantee of safety. To love and serve him is more a guarantee of risk.

The good news, the gospel news is that we are invited to know the triune God. Jeremiah 9 speaks of both knowing God and refusing to know him: “Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they refuse to know me, declares the Lord (v. 6).” By contrast, “’let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the Lord (v. 24).” Emphasis mine.

God-logic says that if we dare to draw near, believing that he exists and that he is good despite our not understanding everything, we are on the journey of faith. Without that kind of stepping out, it is impossible to please God, and therein lies the conundrum of God-logic.

PRAYER: Oh God, to be invited to know you is the privilege of my life. Yes, it takes faith, but the invitation pulls me forward into that life, where I may not understand you completely, but I find you are very, very good.