Asking the right questions

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” –Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV)

God would not be much of a god if all the details of His methods and His plans were within our grasp. We need a God who is bigger than ourselves, and we have One. Yet even in His power and sovereignty, He desires connection with His creation. So what God has done, and continues to do, is provide enough evidence of His existence and His character to allow us to know Him on some level.

He does not overwhelm us with a forceful show of authority that leaves us with no choice, for to do so would eliminate our ability to respond to Him authentically. Instead, He offers an invitation – clues to pique our interest and draw us into enough understanding that we can make a decision on whether or not we will trust Him. If we say yes, He begins to reveal more….

The psalmist declared, "The heavens declare the glory of God!" Paul picked up the theme in Romans 1. The thinking human mind, when witnessing the wonders of nature, has to ask where it all came from. What are the odds that everything observable came into existence from nothing and fell into place accidentally? If we concede there is some grand design orchestrated by a “higher power” – something or someone beyond this plane – we can start to ask what kind of person or entity that power is.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. –Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)

Who is He? What is He like? What does He value? As we ponder that, it comes to our attention that all humans (with a small minority of sociopathic exceptions) have inside of them an innate sense of right and wrong. Culture may shape that. We may not all agree on where the line is. But the fact that almost all of us have that internal line suggests that someone with a conscience has placed at least the seeds of that conscience into humankind.

Now the curiosity is further aroused. If there is a “Creator God” and He cares about good and evil to the extent that He placed that impulse in us, where do we go to learn more about Him? Does He have expectations of us? What, if any, type of relationship are we to have with Him? There is a plethora of sources to enlighten us, all vying to provide the most plausible answers. Dozens of religions and cults, hundreds of philosophies, and scientific theories galore that seek to reduce all we know and discover to quantifiable natural processes.

Walking through those options is an exercise for another day. My own research to date (extensive though admittedly not exhaustive) suggests the Scriptures hold the single most coherent and consistently verifiable explanation of the origin and purpose of life as we know it. Of course, this leads to additional questions, some of which we will begin to unpack next week….

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. –Acts 17:26-27 (NIV)