January 24, 2014
Chosen
Every once in awhile
we’ll look at another person through our spiritual glasses and think, “You just don’t get it.” It’s intriguing
that God doesn’t give all of us the same sight, even though we all have the same
written Word. On the third day God raised Jesus, but rather than being seen by
all people, Jesus was seen only by, “…witnesses
whom God had already chosen…” (Acts 10:41b) In my college class, Historical Christian Belief, I continue
to struggle to understand the writings of theologians, both past and present.
Even though they back up their theory with Scripture, their thoughts make no
sense to me…I just hate it when I’m the one who just doesn’t get it!
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Gail;
-----Maybe you’re not the one that doesn’t get it. When I was a pre-schooler I thought my big brother was going off to school everyday where kids sat at their desks and sorted mail. I don’t remember if I was disappointed or not, but a couple years later I experienced school myself and learned differently. I became fascinated with how the little stacks of coins could both be counted and represented by numbers, and how the stacks could add together to the same totals as their representing numbers did. I guess being a boy, I discovered that anything could be taken apart, yet the relationships between the scattered parts would be maintained by their mere shapes, sizes, and material consistencies. I guess it was thusly that I fell into an analytical approach to life where I believe everything can be understood by its meaning as a whole, further understood by the meaning of its parts, and yet even further understood by the meaning of its whole as a part of the more of its surroundings. I think it was from this perspective that I realized my being a mere part of a more was not just ok, it was amazingly glorious to the Lord.
-----As just a part, I have to agree with Paul. All I can know is in part. Yet the genuine love of God is that He expresses through hints in His creation and through language in His Word the important parts to know. So then, even though we know only in part, we can indeed know the important part of the important parts. Everything else to know is gravy. And what a wide and scrumptious variety of that there is for us!
-----Unfortunately, all good gravy takes excellent talent to make. And knowledge does not just happen in the head when the eyes fall upon whatever. What comes to mind is from belief. And belief is this concoction of partly knowledge (not always well cooked,) partly presumptions where knowledge thins out some, and partly fantasy where the mind wants to believe what knowledge has never told or even hinted. Knowledge is a database. Belief is the shape knowledge is forced to take in order to bear meaningful relationships with the rest of an individual’s parts as pressed together by the bigger whole of which he himself is a part, bearing in mind that this bigger whole is in itself just that individual’s personally experienced subset of everything experiencable by everyone. Though God makes fundamental parts of it clearly knowable (Jesus is the Christ, head of the church, obey your leaders, study, pray, repent, etc., etc.,) even they are just parts to know which a soul’s greater unknowns, plus the myriads of its unexamined propositions, plus it’s current pressures and joys and agendas altogether ply into beliefs and attitudes less understandable to others who have a different set of unknowns, unexamined propositions, pressures, joys, and agendas plying similar knowledge into dissimilar beliefs and attitudes.
-----We are more than incomplete. We are imperfect. Yet we are highly complex. It is a volatile mix between us unless we sufficiently understand that Christ knows every part, every detail, down to the very last qu of each of us and how everything thereof relates both to the individual and amongst all individuals interacting. And when we come to realize that this is not merely knowledge to Jesus, but empathy far beyond what we could begin to imagine, that is, His actual feeling what we feel (…in as much as you have done it to the least of these My brethren,) it is then that I believe we are prepared to understand the importance of forbearing one another. For if He is willing to forbear our tremendous failures to know us to the core, we should attempt to at least imagine each other as being loveable. And even though you yourself are the only one whose beliefs you most totally get, at least you are getting it of one whom the Lord totally, completely gets. It's good to have in common with Him!
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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