(2) He doesn’t meet our expectations.
The Lord often works in ways that we don’t understand. I’ve heard some Christians say, “My life would have been much better today if I didn’t follow Jesus in my youth. Look where it’s gotten me.”
In my book Finding Organic Church, I wrote about the Catch-30 crisis. There comes a point in all our lives where we reassess the major commitments we’ve made in early adulthood. And we either dig in deeper or we detrain.
Isaiah says that God’s ways are higher than ours. The Lord works on levels that we cannot fathom. But He works all things for our good.
“Why hasn’t God answered this prayer? Why didn’t He fulfill this promise? Why did He let this happen to me? Why did He let this happen to him or her? Why is God silent when I need to hear Him most?”
These are the questions that plague the mind of the serious believer.
If you’ve not yet met the God who refuses to meet all your expectations, you will. And how you react in that day will reveal whether you are worshipping Jesus Christ or Santa Claus. It will show whether or not you love God more than His promises (or your interpretation of those promises).
Job said, “Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?”
Would you still serve the Lord if it sent you to hell?
Recall the three Hebrew children. They lived lives loyal to their God. And the pagan king gave them an ultimatum: “Worship the golden image or else you’re going to die in my fiery furnace.”
Their answer is telling: “We’re not going to serve your gods or worship the image. The Lord is able to deliver us from your furnace and He will deliver us. But even if He doesn’t, we still will not bow the knee to your gods.”
What attitude. What posture. What faith. “God will deliver us. But even if He doesn’t, we will still follow Him.”
Those words contain thunder and lightning for every child of God.
If I can use an illustration, we mortals are living on pages 300 to 400 of a 2,000-page book. Only God can see the whole book—the entire story. And He has given us the ability to see only pages 300 to 400.
We have no capacity to understand what’s on pages 1 to 299 or pages 401 to 2,000. We can only speculate and assume what’s in them. Hence we create all sorts of intricate theological systems to explain mysteries we don’t understand.
The Lord doesn’t show us all His plot twists. So life comes down to trusting in the Lord rather than trying to figure out His ways through our finite, limited understanding.
Yet with one another, we can better discover and understand what’s in pages 300 to 400 and thereby learn to live more effectively within them.
Mary of Bethany didn’t understand why Jesus didn’t come to heal Lazarus. But she trusted Him nonetheless. Let us learn how to trust a God we don’t fully understand.