April 17, 2015
Revealing
I’ve been writing and
publishing stories on visiting local churches since July of 2014, but I’ve
thought it curious that there has been very little feedback, either positive or
negative, from the pastors of those churches. This last week I gained some
understanding when a friend reveled his church was mad that I’d written about
their lack of greeting visitors. However, he went on to say, “But they’ve made
some changes [in greeting], so apparently they needed to hear what you had to
say.” I sympathize with their prickly feelings. I hate it when I’ve been remiss
in some area of life and someone reveals it to me before I see it for myself. “Ears
that hear and eyes that see— the LORD has made them both” (Proverbs 20:12 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----How big is revelation to us, thus making how important ears to hear and eyes to see? For many years the concept of revelation was bothersome to me. I was caught up in all the billions-n-billions-of-years malarkey and the man-from-monkey stories and the radiometric rock dates and carbon-14 myths, and on and on and on I was swirled in the turbulence of every stream of “capable research” demonstrating the laugh-ability of God’s revelations in the Bible. I could buy all that stuff since it was made the meaningful basis of my K1-12 education. “It’s what careful scientific investigation has revealed.” You know how many times that concept is placed before our minds in all shapes and sizes and different forms meaning to inspire thought in us that discovery-through-scientific-investigation has washed revelation-to-godly-men-of-old out to a deep, deep burial at sea.
-----But I wasn’t about to let go of revelation, though as bothersome as it was. God made sense. Billions of years and dinosaurs and monkey-men looked good from across the room. But right up close, that picture in all its fine details just didn’t fit together right. Under very close examination it looked to me like a jigsaw puzzle made out of pieces having all their little tabs rounded down to representative nubs, then fit together suspiciously different than what a picture might be had those finer details of the tabs been left to fit the pieces themselves.
-----From pondering for years that metaphor, the size and scope of revelation in any individual’s life became apparent to me. From his very beginning the individual receives revelation, like the swat on his backside for hitting his sister. The first time mommy pointed out the car window at that big brown thing while saying, “Cow, cow, that’s a cow,” was revelation. In our society, every individual is required by law to go through twelve years of public revelation. Even the “original discoveries” of great scientists, like Einstein, are propped up on the stages of mostly revelations to them coming from others who’d learned things before from others who‘d learned before. Have you ever seen any of these great scientists build all of the laboratories and do all of the research required to know by original investigation all of the points of science revealed to them in their K1-12 plus college, plus graduate educations? Of course not. Their great investigative achievements were never anything more than additional extensions made to what had been revealed to them before.
-----In a manner of speaking, some of their own investigative achievements were revelations. For revelation is what you come to know by observing something take its properly aligned fit amongst everything else. That ears to hear and eyes to see are from God is that truth has awareness. Truth known seems to have a magnetism for attracting bits of undiscovered information into perfectly fitting spaces of the puzzle.
-----But the desire of the heart to make its own picture destroys truth’s awareness, replacing it with deceit’s hones and files for tampering with the details. “The Devil’s in the details.” That’s cute. And wouldn’t you expect him to file and hone away any detail remotely revealing of him? Even more is God in the details. His revelation is all around us. It is in the order of the physical universe as well as the verses of the Bible. But for truth’s awareness to make revelations from details, the individual’s heart must desire details to fit themselves together in the heart’s hands off longing for the truth. A heart of desire for God has eyes to see and ears to hear the truth.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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