Have You Figured God Out Yet?

Why is it when we think we’ve mastered a skill or suppose we really know someone, there’s suddenly a curveball thrown our way that challenges all we thought we understood or had buttoned up so perfectly? This is my experience with walking with God. Whenever I’ve learned enough of His nature and character and leading to begin writing a book as an expert, He throws me three strikes and I’m back to falling on my face to worship His majesty and complexity.

Mark 6:45 “Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of Him to Bethsaida, while He dismissed the crowd.”

Just when it seems like the disciples were starting to get used to Jesus’s ministry methods, here in Mark 6 Jesus sends the disciples ahead of Him by way of boat, while He stayed behind. This would have been the event that shattered Peter’s training videos on “What Would Jesus Do?” or Philip’s book called “Step-by-Step with the Radical Rabbi”. How can Jesus send the disciples ahead without Him? This was an unorthodox move, but they quickly discovered that this is exactly how God prefers to work.

Jesus never really laid down a perfect pattern to be followed or a system to be capitalized and turned into a twelve-step process. Think of the inconsistencies! Anytime they approached a blind man, all bets were off. Sometimes Jesus touched their eyes (Matthew 9), other times He spit in the mud and rubbed it in their eyes (Mark 8) and still other times He simply told the blind man he was healed (Mark 10). When out on boats, sometimes Jesus would tell them to launch out into deep water to catch fish (Luke 5), and other times just to throw the net on the other side of the boat (John 21). In the same way, when the children of Israel were crossing large bodies of water, sometimes the staff went in the water (Exodus 14) and other times the leaders did (Joshua 3).

The point is that you may have been walking with God for any number of years and seem to know the way God works, the way God provides, leads, speaks, and directs. Though God is immutable and never changes (Malachi 3:6), He does work in a variety of ways and whenever we get puffed up in our experiential knowledge, He has to humble us so we rely and trust in Him. We are called to walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7) and often God will work in ways we have not been acquainted with so we will trust not in our wisdom and understanding but watch the gloriously unique ways He can direct our paths!

Have you figured God out yet? His ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55), and whenever we assume we have become an expert, we like Job should humbly admit, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”(Job 42:3). His ways keep us watching, wondering, waiting, and trusting.

-Pilgrim