Sometimes I wish I didn’t think so much.
I wish I wasn’t so analytical, so skeptical. I often find myself questioning others’ motives, statements, assertions, and values. It’s a consequence of living in a culture where “truth” changes as quickly as the weather, where little seems dependable or trustworthy. My analytical skills protected me as a child and serve me well as an adult.
But sometimes, they hurt my relationship with God.
Instead of looking at things through the eyes of a loving God who wants the best for me, I tend to see through a glass darkly colored by the evil around me. And that has major consequences for my relationship with God.
I wish I were more like David when he penned Psalm 34. In it, he writes, “I sought the Lord, and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears…This poor man cried, and the Lord heard and saved him from all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, and rescues them” (v. 4,6-7).
Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? But’s the simple superscription at the beginning of this chapter that throws my brain into its analytical tailspin. It says, “concerning David, when he pretended to be insane in the presence of Abimelech…”
Did you catch that? David saw God’s deliverance in his (David’s) acting insane. The Bible tells us that David, “acted like a madman around them, scribbling on the doors of the gate and letting saliva run down his beard.”
Gross, but effective. And after David wiped the drool off of his chin, he wrote a psalm declaring God’s love, faithfulness, and deliverance. To him, the inspiration to act like a patient at an asylum was just as much God’s providence as parting the Red Sea. God delivered. The means by which deliverance came didn’t matter.
And that’s where my analytical, skeptical, orderly brain gets me in trouble.
I know I need God’s deliverance. Only I want it in ways that make sense to me. But when I read Scripture, God’s deliverance and presence show up in the craziest of ways, if you’ll pardon the pun. Most of the time, God shows up in ways that just don’t "make sense."
It didn’t make sense that the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt would be a bumbling, stuttering man with anger issues.
It boggles the imagination that the people of Israel would go to battle against Jericho with some torches and clay pots and march around the walls of the city looking like a bunch of fools.
It goes against logic that a shepherd would become Israel’s king. And that this mighty king would be known as a man after God’s own heart, even though that heart was guilty of lust, adultery, and murder.
There’s no common since in Naaman being healed of a skin disease by taking a bath in nasty, dirty river water.
It was beyond description to bring deliverance through a baby born to pregnant peasant teenager who’d never had sex. To give the message of that birth through a bunch of unclean, dirty shepherds who were more used to talking to sheep than talking to people.
It didn’t make sense that Jesus would go through Samaria instead of around it. That he would talk to a woman at a well, a woman whom everyone else had discarded, ignored, and marginalized until she was more than happy to go it alone.
And it challenges every logical thought that God would deliver humanity by allowing His only Son, the heart of His heart, to be tortured beyond recognition and to be murdered on the most horrific device known at the time.
It doesn’t make sense that He loves me. My analytical mind doesn’t get it. I don’t understand it.
But it’s not about my intellect. I think (?) that God often works in unpredictable ways so that I can’t put him in a box or believe the lie that I’ve somehow figured Him out.
And I am learning that no matter how He chooses to work or to show Himself, and no matter what the outcome looks like at the time, I can trust that His actions are always a reflection of His heart toward me. A good heart. A perfectly faithful heart (Isa. 25:1).
And that’s enough for me. At least it is today.
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