God

I belong to a movement that I may have started and of which I may be the only member. The movement is called Don’t-Knowism. Put simply it means that I acknowledge that I don’t know the answer to many, perhaps most, of the questions that Christians love to discuss. I may have an opinion, but I could be wrong.

Don’t-Knowism is a very comfortable place to be.

 Let’s face it. We Christians don’t know everything. We can’t know everything. The important thing is that we don’t need to know everything and we certainly don’t need to pretend that we know everything.  God does know everything and we trust him to look after us and to make good, just and loving decisions.  Our present and our future are perfectly safe in his hands.

God gave us, his human children, enquiring minds.  We love to think about things, speculate about things, make up theories about things and discuss things. This is very good. However, since the early days of the church, many of the issues that Christians have debated have been, perhaps, not very important. The topics have often been about how God makes his decisions or who will be saved – topics that we cannot know the answer to because God is sovereign.  He doesn’t make decisions according to rules that we humans can define or even comprehend.  Nonetheless, debates on these issues have sometimes gone on for centuries and have sometimes become violent. Very violent.

I believe that the devil uses this tendency in humans to distract us from the things that God wants us to focus on.  We get tied up in discussion of these topics when we should be focused on Jesus’ very clear instructions on what we should be doing.  We talk and argue amongst ourselves when there are an awful lot of people very close to us who need to hear the words of Jesus and need to be loved and discipled.  It is particularly evident that many of Christianity’s brightest and best spend much of their time researching and discussing obscure points of theology and doctrine when they could be assisting and guiding the many, many people who need help right now.

Here is a quick test which can help us to tell whether a contentious topic is important or not.  Imagine that an angel appeared, sent by God, and told us the absolute truth about the topic under discussion. How much difference will knowing the truth about the topic make to the way we live our lives today and tomorrow?  If the answer is “none at all”, or even “not very much”, then the topic is probably not worth spending a lot of time on – and it certainly isn’t worth getting angry about. 

Another test is whether there is disagreement among Christians about the topic.  If it is an issue that devout sincere Christians disagree about, then it is an issue that God has decided not to clarify, and therefore it probably isn’t that important.

I often say, when involved in a discussion on some point of theology “I can tell you what the truth is. The truth is that we do not know what the truth is.”

Let’s just admit that there are, and always will be, a lot of things that we don’t know and accept that we probably don’t need to know them.  Then we can get on with the important stuff – following the teachings of Jesus.

God is a good parent. A good parent recognises that every one of their children is different and therefore a good parent will not treat all their children in the same way or expect them to behave in the same way. A good parent rejoices in the differences between their children. We are all on different paths but we are all the children of the one true God.

God is a good parent. A good parent recognises that every one of their children is different and therefore a good parent will not treat all their children in the same way or expect them to behave in the same way. A good parent rejoices in the differences between their children. We are all on different paths but we are all the children of the one true God.

A good parent is not afraid of questions. In fact a good parent rejoices in their children’s inquisitive minds. God is not afraid of any question that may come up in his childrens’ minds, because God knows the answer to every question.  If God is not afraid of any question then we do not need to be afraid either.  If a Christian feels that a particular question should not be asked, then I would suggest that they may be afraid of the answer. If God is not afraid there is no reason for us to be afraid.

 

A good parent loves their child at every moment of its childhood, but always wants to see the child grow.  I believe that God loves us at whatever stage we may be, but he also wants us to grow and mature.  As his children we should not stop growing. We should always be growing, every moment of our lives.  How do we grow?  We pray, we listen to God speaking, we reflect, we share our thoughts with other Christians and we listen to their thoughts.  Then we pray, listen and reflect some more.  This enables us to find the individual path along which God is leading us.  And God promises us that if we stray to the right or left we will hear his voice telling us the right way to go. (Isaiah 30:21)

 

God is sovereign – this means that God has absolute power and his decisions and actions cannot be wrong. There are a number of passages in the Old and New Testaments that make it very clear that God is Sovereign.

Here are some of those passages:

• Job Chapters 38-41 where God points to his role as creator and challenges whether the understanding or creativity of a mortal human can match his own.
• Isaiah 40:12-28 is somewhat similar to Job 38-41. The sovereignty, majesty and power of God are represented as being completely without equal.
• Jesus’ parable about the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). This is a passage that reminds us that God’s sovereignty is not only absolute; it can be very uncomfortable. Jesus tells a story in which the owner of the vineyard, clearly representing God, behaves in a manner that seems to human logic to be completely unfair. He pays his workers exactly the same amount whether they have worked all day or whether they have only worked for about an hour. He even pays those who have worked the shortest amount of time first, leaving those who have worked all day until last. Yet he defends his actions by saying that he paid the workers exactly what he said he would pay them. He also asks whether there is any question about his right to do as he likes with his own money.

The important point is that God is absolutely sovereign and human beings will never be able to make sense of all his decisions or identify rules that govern his behaviour. Yet, throughout the history of the church, that is exactly what many Christians have tried to do.  Mostly, it is a waste of time. The devil wants us to believe that we can identify the rules or procedures that God follows and the devil wants us to waste our time in trying to do so when we have much more important work to do. 

The bottom line is that we need to remember that God is God – and we are not.