As someone once
said, “We pursue Him until he captures us.”
And if God is more
than we can think Him to be, He may appear to us to be unpredictable. This supposed "unpredictability" is not a notion
tied to His immanence ( His divine nature), but rather to His communion with
man ----- how He expresses Himself in terms of function in our world and how we
perceive that function.
Think of the bus
accident that kills 7 while 30 survive
-- all disciples of Christ. The survivors will give praise to God, of
course, but what of those who died? And why the seeming inconsistency. While this may not be the answer folks are
looking for in times of great distress,
still, this is the best answer we
have to give:
He appears to be unpredictable solely because of His sovereignty and largeness. As our Creator,
He cannot be reduced by His creation. We can only stand in awe.
The believer is
fully capable of doing this. The unbeliever is not. If there is anything that divides one from the other, it is the
sovereignty of God. The believer will submit to it, in time, and the unbeliever
will rebel.
As believers, we must come to expect this apparent unpredictability. When
the creature is inconsistent, it is because of his humanness and the failings that are associated
with that circumstance, that is clear enough. But it may surprise you to know
that the inconsistencies of God, this unpredictability of which we write,
exists for the very same reason -- our humanity and the failings, our
failings, associated with that
circumstance (our humanity).
To be critical of God for a supposed failure to “act out
consistently” is not His failed
performance but our failed perception.
The call to faith brings us to crisis. Some turn and walk away
from God decrying, "He did not give to me in my time of need." The creaturely questions, "Why me," "Why this," "why now" and the most evil question
of all, “why not someone else” are questions
that deny His magnitude as we assert our preeminence over and against God. These are the devil's questioning. To
demand that the Infinite Great God Almighty somehow measure up to our finite
and limited expectations is the very essence of rebellion and the first fruit
of the displacement of God.
Think for a moment just how ridiculous is our demand to know and
understand; we who are finite expecting
He who is infinite to "measure up"
to our way of thinking? Is that even possible? Of course not. For God to be
consistent as we view predictability would be the result of the "dummying down" of our God. Do we want a
God who thinks as we do and , would that include those times when we do not
know what to think or what to do?
Praise God when we
go to Him not knowing what to say. He has given His Spirit for just such a
circumstance. His ways are not our ways neither His thoughts our thoughts.
Thank God for that !! What a mess we
would be in if that were not true.
A rewrite from
an article written in May of 2007. (Hail to the Unpredictability of the Great God
Almighty)
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