"We cannot understand the meaning of Grace without understanding the concept of God."
This was the opening comment to my Method and Praxis class. It hit me like lightning and struck quite a personal note as well. This is at the root of our dysfunctional relationship with God. We don't truly take the time to know His character and nature, so therefore we cannot understand or see how He is working in our lives and in our world. All our unbelief and misunderstanding of who God is and how He relates to us and how we are to relate to Him stem from a warped perception of God. This may be because of upbringing; perhaps we had a poor relationship with our parents or a traumatic experience that produced a sense of God as an unfair, unloving, impersonal deity with no concern for our well-being. Perhaps we grew up in an ultraconservative household or religious community that caused us to view God as a vengeful judge waiting to strike us down if we do something wrong or make a mistake. Perhaps this experience has a created a sense of pharisetical "deed doing" to earn God's grace and forgiveness. Perhaps our past is so riddled with sins and mistakes that we feel simply unworthy. We understand that God is righteous and know we are unrighteous but miss that God is gracious, merciful, and overwhelmed with the desire to forgive us and make us whole.
All in all, God is misunderstood. Our human mind is incapable of comprehending this supreme entity that created and holds the universe in motion. So are we to grasp His grace and live in it if we cannot understand God? While God may be just outside our reach, He has revealed Himself in nature and in Scripture. We ARE able to at least in part come to some conclusions about His character, His nature, and His will through what we observe in nature and what He has recorded about Himself through the Scriptures. God can never be fully grasped by us and we should never expect to be able to put Him in a neat little box labeled "God". What He has revealed about Himself is for the purpose of enlightening us to His purpose for humanity. His purpose is this: to reconcile the relationship between God and man broken with the Fall of man and empower us to live holy, righteous, whole lives.
In our individuals lives God has purposes and plans as well. These are much more specific to the individual and built on the priciples of who God is, but not always cut and dry as far as deciphering them goes. That is why discovering the character of God is essential to discover yourself and your purpose in this world. I made the realization reading about the "Sacrifice of Isaac" in Genesis. (Note, there is no sacrifice committed in this story; the angel of the Lord stops Abraham and provides a ram for sacrifice).
We find the story in Genesis 22. The story is often expressed in terms of a "test" of Abraham's faith in God's promises. After God fulfills his promise to Abraham to have a child by his barren wife Sarah in their old age, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son of promise. Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East was often a blood sacrifice or a grain offering. In this case, God asked Abraham to make a blood sacrifice of his son. You would think Abraham's natural reaction would be to become indignant and angry at God. "No! This is the son you promised me! I'm not killing him!" End of discussion. But Abraham does something incredible: he obeys. More incredibly, there is no record that Isaac, probably a strong, healthy teenage boy at this point, fought his father when he went to bind him and place him on the altar of sacrifice.
The reasons behind both Abraham and Isaac's seemingly bizarre behavior is the same: each trusted their father (earthly in Isaac's case, and heavenly in Abraham's situation) and knew that their nature was contrary to carrying out this horrific activity. Abraham knew the character of God was one of faithfulness; God had promised him Isaac and Abraham had received Isaac. Furthermore, God had promised to make Abraham into a great nation through Isaac. Therefore, it is logical in Abraham's thinking that God would either stop the sacrifice or that God had the power to bring Isaac back to life. The narrative reads that Isaac, curious by the lack of a ram or sheeep for the sacrifice, asks his father as they climb the mountain, "Father, we have the wood and the knife for the sacrifice, but where is the lamb?" Abraham simply answers, "God will provide the sacrifice".
Isaac's faith and trust in his father, even as he's being bound to the sacrificial wood and his father is raising a dagger over his heart, is testiment to his faith that somehow his father has a logical, sane reason for all this! It can be assumed that there is a parallel faith between Isaac's faith in his father and Abraham's faith in God both based on a knowledge and witness of the character of each.
This story is a challenge to believer's today. We seek to know God's will without seeking to know God. Do we expect some sort of spiritual osmosis will happen by sitting in church or touching a Bible? Do we expect to know God if we are not spending time probing the pages of Scripture in order to decipher any hint of His nature we can? Do we expect to hear from him if our prayers are one sided demands and complaints or rather, if our prayers are non-existant? Our prayer life is our conversation with the Almighty. Our reading of the Word is the reading of divine love letters from our Creator, Master, and Redeemer. This is how we will know God's will; by knowing God. "Right theology leads to right living." But we are so quick to forget or ignore this reality. And we wonder why our lives are confused and life-less.
I once read a bumper-sticker that summed it up quite well: "Know God, Know Life; No God, No Life". We will never comprehend God in His entirety, but we will never even glimpse who He is if we don't pursue Him. And how we see God will determine the entire trajectory of our lives.
This was the opening comment to my Method and Praxis class. It hit me like lightning and struck quite a personal note as well. This is at the root of our dysfunctional relationship with God. We don't truly take the time to know His character and nature, so therefore we cannot understand or see how He is working in our lives and in our world. All our unbelief and misunderstanding of who God is and how He relates to us and how we are to relate to Him stem from a warped perception of God. This may be because of upbringing; perhaps we had a poor relationship with our parents or a traumatic experience that produced a sense of God as an unfair, unloving, impersonal deity with no concern for our well-being. Perhaps we grew up in an ultraconservative household or religious community that caused us to view God as a vengeful judge waiting to strike us down if we do something wrong or make a mistake. Perhaps this experience has a created a sense of pharisetical "deed doing" to earn God's grace and forgiveness. Perhaps our past is so riddled with sins and mistakes that we feel simply unworthy. We understand that God is righteous and know we are unrighteous but miss that God is gracious, merciful, and overwhelmed with the desire to forgive us and make us whole.
All in all, God is misunderstood. Our human mind is incapable of comprehending this supreme entity that created and holds the universe in motion. So are we to grasp His grace and live in it if we cannot understand God? While God may be just outside our reach, He has revealed Himself in nature and in Scripture. We ARE able to at least in part come to some conclusions about His character, His nature, and His will through what we observe in nature and what He has recorded about Himself through the Scriptures. God can never be fully grasped by us and we should never expect to be able to put Him in a neat little box labeled "God". What He has revealed about Himself is for the purpose of enlightening us to His purpose for humanity. His purpose is this: to reconcile the relationship between God and man broken with the Fall of man and empower us to live holy, righteous, whole lives.
In our individuals lives God has purposes and plans as well. These are much more specific to the individual and built on the priciples of who God is, but not always cut and dry as far as deciphering them goes. That is why discovering the character of God is essential to discover yourself and your purpose in this world. I made the realization reading about the "Sacrifice of Isaac" in Genesis. (Note, there is no sacrifice committed in this story; the angel of the Lord stops Abraham and provides a ram for sacrifice).
We find the story in Genesis 22. The story is often expressed in terms of a "test" of Abraham's faith in God's promises. After God fulfills his promise to Abraham to have a child by his barren wife Sarah in their old age, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son of promise. Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East was often a blood sacrifice or a grain offering. In this case, God asked Abraham to make a blood sacrifice of his son. You would think Abraham's natural reaction would be to become indignant and angry at God. "No! This is the son you promised me! I'm not killing him!" End of discussion. But Abraham does something incredible: he obeys. More incredibly, there is no record that Isaac, probably a strong, healthy teenage boy at this point, fought his father when he went to bind him and place him on the altar of sacrifice.
The reasons behind both Abraham and Isaac's seemingly bizarre behavior is the same: each trusted their father (earthly in Isaac's case, and heavenly in Abraham's situation) and knew that their nature was contrary to carrying out this horrific activity. Abraham knew the character of God was one of faithfulness; God had promised him Isaac and Abraham had received Isaac. Furthermore, God had promised to make Abraham into a great nation through Isaac. Therefore, it is logical in Abraham's thinking that God would either stop the sacrifice or that God had the power to bring Isaac back to life. The narrative reads that Isaac, curious by the lack of a ram or sheeep for the sacrifice, asks his father as they climb the mountain, "Father, we have the wood and the knife for the sacrifice, but where is the lamb?" Abraham simply answers, "God will provide the sacrifice".
Isaac's faith and trust in his father, even as he's being bound to the sacrificial wood and his father is raising a dagger over his heart, is testiment to his faith that somehow his father has a logical, sane reason for all this! It can be assumed that there is a parallel faith between Isaac's faith in his father and Abraham's faith in God both based on a knowledge and witness of the character of each.
This story is a challenge to believer's today. We seek to know God's will without seeking to know God. Do we expect some sort of spiritual osmosis will happen by sitting in church or touching a Bible? Do we expect to know God if we are not spending time probing the pages of Scripture in order to decipher any hint of His nature we can? Do we expect to hear from him if our prayers are one sided demands and complaints or rather, if our prayers are non-existant? Our prayer life is our conversation with the Almighty. Our reading of the Word is the reading of divine love letters from our Creator, Master, and Redeemer. This is how we will know God's will; by knowing God. "Right theology leads to right living." But we are so quick to forget or ignore this reality. And we wonder why our lives are confused and life-less.
I once read a bumper-sticker that summed it up quite well: "Know God, Know Life; No God, No Life". We will never comprehend God in His entirety, but we will never even glimpse who He is if we don't pursue Him. And how we see God will determine the entire trajectory of our lives.
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