God's Different Way

 

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

He came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him.  He came to his own people, and even they rejected him.  But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God.  They are reborn—not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God.  So the Word became human and made his home among us.  He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness.  And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.  John testified about him when he shouted to the crowds, “This is the one I was talking about when I said, ‘Someone is coming after me who is far greater than I am, for he existed long before me.’”  From his abundance we have all received one gracious blessing after another.  For the law was given through Moses, but God’s unfailing love and faithfulness came through Jesus Christ.  No one has ever seen God.  But the unique One, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart.   He has revealed God to us.  John 1:10-18

Elsewhere in Scripture God tells us His ways are different than anything we can imagine: 

For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.  Isaiah 55:9 

John the Baptist understood that about God, at least to the point that even though Jesus was chronologically born after John, his cousin existed long before John.  That is a kind of “math” that defies our human explanation.  And that is precisely why God had to appear in flesh-and-blood in a manger.  Even then, God’s own creation didn’t get it; God revealed God, and we rejected Him.

In hindsight, we humans can do things one of two ways with the stuff that confuses us…especially those things about God’s different way of doing the math.

1.    We can distort truth and reconcile it to our way of thinking, or

2.    We can live more honestly, see more clearly, accept our limitations, and bow before Heaven’s throne.

Those are our choices.  However, humanity’s “normal” way of dealing with God-truth is so abnormal to the way humankind were created, it is absurd to imagine.  It is as if Nimrod, builder of Babel’s tower ^{(see Genesis 11)} completed his work, like a mouse having ascended his mountain, (sitting on an elephant’s head), assumes he rules all he can see.  

  

Such is limited human thinking, merely scraping the bottom of Creation’s barrel.  What is so amazing about God is, despite our mouse-on-an-elephant’s-head caricature of mankind’s foolishness, that of denying our Godly heritage – a descent into delusion – God still chose gracious condescension to lift-up the very species which rejected His gift.

For You Today

Delusional mouse or child of a gracious king…what a choice!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

For other posts on this text see Catch and The Fullness of Time