Puzzling Faith (Friday Devotional)

 

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord.

- Isaiah 55:8

When I was in college, I developed a routine—every morning I would grab one of the library’s free copies of the New York Times, open up to the crossword puzzle, and work through as much of it as I could. Mondays I always managed to solve the whole puzzle in less than half an hour, Tuesdays I could usually finish in double that time. But by Wednesday, the puzzle had reached a difficulty level I never quite managed to master without cheating, and by Friday I was lucky to get 2 or 3 of the answers unaided.

Maybe you have a favorite puzzle of your own—a word search, Sudoku, Boggle, or some other game to keep your mind moving and provide some amusement in dull moments. There’s something about the human mind that loves solving puzzles, cracking codes, and finding the answers to riddles.

Unfortunately, that inclination can lead us to misunderstand our relationship with God and misinterpret how we know His will for us. For many a well-intentioned Christian, God’s will is something hidden in a labyrinth of Bible verses, something they can uncover if they dig through enough esoteric passages and decode enough prophecies. Instead of seeing the Bible as God’s Word to His people, they see it as a puzzle to be solved.

Doing so betrays a fundamental arrogance, a misguided belief that knowing God fully and having all our questions answered is something which happens through study and cleverness instead of something that will come by God’s grace on the other side of eternity. What we must humbly remember is that God is higher and greater than we are, that as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “for now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.”

The good news is that, while God is “unsolvable,” he is not unknowable. The Lord has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, who shows us the character, priorities, and power of God. It is by knowing and following Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, that we know God.

When we come to terms with that reality—that we are called to know God relationally rather than understand him intellectually—we find something far greater than the satisfaction of cracking a code: the joy of fellowship. It is then that we truly understand that God is not a puzzle to be solved, but a Lord to be loved.