Opus 2025-201: Wake-Up Call

Over the weekend I had a little bit of a calm down.  I was spouting off with my usual assurance and intellectual “insight”.  It turns out that I was wrong.  I was so sure of myself, but I was wrong.

That got me to thinking about how often God uses situations to slow us down and make us think.  As usual, I try to think of some kind of a biblical example, where the Godhead put somebody on the short stick.  The one that came to mind was when Moses was bringing water out of the rock and instead of speaking to it, as God told him, he took his rod and struck it like he had the last time.  As a result, Moses was not allowed to cross over into the promised land 40 years later.

I always thought that was a bit of an overreaction.  After all, it was just one strike, one time, and his whole life‘s purpose is upset.  This makes me stop and think of my opinion of God and my evaluation of His personality and realizing that my analysis just doesn’t fit.  I don’t see God as a petty, small time operator who has to throw his weight around to get any respect.  I came to the conclusion there must be more to the story, maybe much more to the story.

As I have written other places, I think there is a lot that God did not cause to be recorded in His salvation history.  We know John said that Jesus spoke books full of information that had not been written down.  If it was true of Jesus, why not Moses?  And I think this is a pattern.  Think about, for instance, the prophets.  Think of Jeremiah.  Jeremiah wrote his book over the years.  I don’t know how many different prophecies Jeremiah made in that book but since it only has around 60 chapters and some of his prophecies go on for several chapters, I would just guess, or estimated, maybe 20.  You can read over everything he had to say in the book in a short period of time.  Didn’t he say anything else the rest of the time?

I think this just goes to demonstrate how God is patient and waits for people to, shall we say, dig their own grave.  He gives them plenty of opportunities to get it right.  Israel had hundreds of years of disobedience and defiance before God finally dealt with him.  I think in the same pattern,  Moses probably made a lot of mistakes, after all he was human, before God put the hammer down.  Perhaps Moses wouldn’t listen until forced into a corner.

I think that’s true in our own lives too.  God is incredibly patient.  If He wasn’t, we would have all kinds of holes in our roof because of the lightning strikes.  As it is, He gives us plenty of chances to respond and to repent.  We should be glad about that.  We should also take those times when we run into a wall as a moment to stop and think and ask ourselves, “Is this just one of those things where is God trying to tell me something?”

It could be either one. And we need to be open to either one.

homo unius libri