God Is Bigger Than the Boxes We Put Him In, Part 2

Part 2 of 2. Read Part 1 first

In Part 1, we looked at a teaching that sounds perfectly reasonable: before God can give someone revelation, that person must first become meek. Psalm 25:9 speaks of God guiding the humble and teaching them His ways. It describes those who are receptive to His guidance; it does not make humility a universal condition for every occasion on which God chooses to speak.

We then followed six people through Scripture: Pharaoh, Laban, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Saul, and Caiaphas. Each received some communication from God, and in none of these accounts do the biblical writers point to the recipient’s meekness as the thing that made it possible. Some of them were plainly proud.

So where does that leave meekness?

Meekness Still Matters

I want to be clear about something.

None of this diminishes the importance of meekness.

A person unwilling to learn is unlikely to benefit much from instruction. Pride blinds us to our faults. It makes correction difficult and turns sincere disagreement into a personal insult.

Scripture has plenty to say about that.

Proverbs 11:2 (KJV) tells us:

“When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.”

And James 4:6 (KJV) reminds us:

“God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”

We have every reason to cultivate humility before God.

But I hesitate when someone turns a principle governing our response to God into a condition governing God’s freedom to act.

It may be entirely proper to tell someone that meekness is necessary if he wishes to learn God’s ways faithfully. That is a statement about the disposition of the learner.

It is another matter to announce that unless someone first becomes meek, God cannot communicate with him.

That statement attempts to tell us what God is supposedly unable or unwilling to do in every circumstance.

And the biblical accounts we’ve considered make such certainty difficult to defend.

There is also a practical danger here.

When we turn biblical principles into mechanical procedures, our relationship with God can begin to resemble the operation of a machine.

Insert the correct spiritual conditions, pull the appropriate lever, and receive the expected result.

Meekness produces revelation. Faith produces this result. Prayer, if performed according to the proper formula, produces that result.

Of course, Scripture teaches us to trust God’s promises and take His instructions seriously. There is no reason to doubt that obedience matters.

But God is a living, purposeful Being. He is not a machine that responds to the correct combination of spiritual inputs.

Nor has He promised to explain every decision He makes.

I wonder how often we forget that.

God Has Never Needed Our Permission to Surprise Us

Isaiah 55:8–9 (KJV) contains a familiar statement:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

These verses are often quoted as though they were a convenient way to end any difficult theological discussion.

Someone raises a reasonable question, and another person replies, “Well, God’s ways are higher than ours.”

Discussion over.

But Isaiah deserves better treatment than that.

In the surrounding passage, God calls the wicked to forsake their ways and return to Him, promising abundant pardon.

What stands out in the text is God’s mercy. His willingness to forgive exceeds what human beings might ordinarily expect.

The passage therefore gives us a concrete example of God’s ways challenging human assumptions.

That is a far more useful lesson than using the verse to avoid difficult questions.

Paul reaches a similar point in Romans 11:33 (KJV):

“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”

Paul had spent considerable effort reasoning through God’s dealings with Israel and the Gentiles.

He had not abandoned logic, careful reading, or theological reasoning.

Yet his study led him to recognize that God’s wisdom exceeded his own comprehension.

I rather like that combination.

Serious reasoning, accompanied by the humility to recognize its limits.

We need both.

Theological frameworks can be useful. They help us organize biblical teaching, recognize connections, and identify genuine contradictions in our understanding.

I use them myself.

But a framework is only as reliable as its handling of the biblical evidence.

When Scripture contradicts a proposition we’ve constructed, Scripture is not the thing that needs correcting.

That ought to be obvious.

Oddly enough, it isn’t always how we behave.

Would We Expect Less of Our Heavenly Father?

There is another consideration that I think deserves attention, one that brings this discussion a little closer to home.

Think about your own father, or perhaps your experience raising children.

Did your father speak to you only when you were agreeable? Did he wait until you displayed the proper attitude before offering advice, correcting your behaviour, or warning you about something dangerous?

I rather doubt it.

Sometimes we were stubborn. Sometimes we were argumentative. And occasionally, if we’re willing to admit it, we were downright brats.

Our fathers spoke to us anyway.

In fact, some of the most important conversations a father has with his children occur precisely when those children are least inclined to listen.

A loving father doesn’t necessarily wait for his child to become teachable before speaking. Sometimes he speaks because the child needs correction. Sometimes he warns because he sees danger the child cannot yet recognize.

And sometimes he simply speaks because he loves his child, even when that child’s behaviour leaves a great deal to be desired.

Now consider what Jesus taught about our Heavenly Father.

Luke 11:11–13 (KJV):

"If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?

Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?"

Notice Jesus’ reasoning.

He begins with the ordinary experience of earthly parents. Even imperfect human beings understand something about caring for their children. They know how to give good gifts.

Then Jesus asks us to reason from the lesser to the greater.

If imperfect earthly fathers know how to care for their children, how much more can we trust our Heavenly Father?

That is a remarkable way to teach us about God.

Now, I recognize that Jesus is speaking specifically about prayer and the Father’s willingness to give the holy spirit to those who ask. We should respect that context. The passage does not promise that God will communicate whatever we want, whenever we want, regardless of our disposition.

But surely Jesus’ reasoning reveals something about the character of our Heavenly Father.

Would we imagine that an imperfect earthly father might speak patiently to a stubborn child, while our infinitely wiser and more loving Heavenly Father is somehow unable to communicate until we have achieved the required measure of meekness?

Is God less capable of dealing with His children than we are?

I find that difficult to reconcile with Jesus’ teaching.

And here is where the distinction matters.

A child’s stubbornness may prevent him from appreciating his father’s instruction. He may misunderstand it, resist it, or ignore it altogether. Meekness certainly makes a difference to how instruction is received.

But the child’s attitude does not determine whether his father is capable of speaking.

Of course, we cannot simply transfer every feature of human parenting to God. Human fathers are imperfect, and God’s dealings with His children are governed by wisdom far greater than ours.

I wonder whether we’ve become so concerned with identifying the conditions under which God communicates that we’ve overlooked the character of the One doing the communicating.

He is our Father.

And that ought to count for something.

The Trouble With Having God Figured Out

I suspect the attraction of theological formulas is that they offer certainty.

And certainty can be comforting.

We want to know how God works. We want principles that can be taught, remembered, and applied. We want to make sense of difficult passages and explain why things happen as they do.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that desire.

The trouble begins when we cease distinguishing between what Scripture explicitly teaches and what we have inferred from it.

A genuine biblical pattern becomes an absolute rule. An inference acquires the authority of a commandment. Before long, we are defending something far more restrictive than the passage from which it supposedly came.

And because we’ve grown attached to our explanation, the biblical exceptions become annoyances to be managed.

Perhaps Pharaoh must secretly have been meek.

Perhaps Laban possessed some spiritual qualification we’re not told about.

Perhaps Nebuchadnezzar had satisfied a condition before receiving his dream.

Perhaps Saul’s prophetic experience belongs in a separate category that conveniently leaves our original claim untouched.

Some of those possibilities may be worth investigating. We should not dismiss distinctions that genuinely arise from the texts.

But neither should we keep adding qualifications merely to protect a conclusion that Scripture never required us to reach.

At some point, intellectual honesty demands that we reconsider the original proposition.

Maybe the biblical principle was sound all along.

Maybe our mistake was in making it absolute.

And that brings me back to meekness.

Perhaps the Box Is Ours

There is a certain irony in all this.

We may become so convinced that meekness is a necessary prerequisite for receiving revelation that we resist the very passages which challenge that conviction.

We insist that the learner must be willing to be corrected, while refusing to reconsider what we’ve learned.

Surely that ought to give us pause.

Meekness involves more than accepting instruction from people with whom we already agree. It includes a willingness to examine our own conclusions, especially when Scripture presents evidence that makes them uncomfortable.

I am not suggesting that God acts arbitrarily, that biblical principles are unreliable, or that doctrine is somehow unimportant.

Quite the contrary.

I believe sound doctrine matters too much to allow our favourite explanations to become substitutes for the biblical text.

God has revealed His character, His purposes, and His promises. We ought to take that revelation seriously, which means allowing the whole of Scripture to inform our understanding, including the passages that do not fit neatly into our expectations.

Pharaoh, Laban, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Saul, and Caiaphas are all part of the biblical record.

Their experiences deserve to be heard.

And if those accounts require us to qualify something we’ve been teaching for years, perhaps that is exactly what we ought to do.

I don’t imagine we will ever exhaustively explain why God acts as He does in every circumstance. There is much He has revealed, and much we still have to learn.

But I would rather live with a question Scripture leaves open than offer a confident answer Scripture doesn’t support.

After all, the purpose of studying the Bible is to understand God more faithfully, not to become increasingly skilled at defending our own explanations of Him.

And perhaps the greatest test of our meekness is what we do when the Word of God challenges something we were quite certain we already understood.

God has never been confined by the boxes we’ve constructed for Him.

We might do well to stop mistaking those boxes for the boundaries of His Word.