We heard the craziest news today.
In truth, the news didn’t affect us directly, but indirectly. For once, it felt like we weren’t at the center of the storm, but on the shore rather, watching someone we were rooting for get their boat spun like a top amidst some wild winds.
How well we know that ache.
That old blindside ache.
It’s thinking you know what God and everyone around you is up to, and finding out it was not at all what you thought–but maybe your worst fear coming true instead.
It’s your stomach turning when you sit down at the table to eat. Like butterflies, but the bad kind. The kind you only get from heartache, or betrayal, or bottomless disappointment. It’s waking up in the morning having forgotten it all for the first few split seconds… only to have it come back upon you like waves of a nightmare. No, it really happened.
When we heard the news today I was reminded at once of something J.I. Packer says his book, Knowing God.
If you can, try to read through it all, without skimming or grazing over:
“…we feel sure that God has enabled us to understand all his ways with us and our circle thus far, and we take it for granted that we shall be able to see at once the reason for anything that may happen to us in the future.
And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God’s secret councils is shattered.
Our pride is wounded; we feel that God has slighted us….
Behind this morbid and deadening condition often lies the wounded pride of one who thought he knew all about the ways of God in providence and then was made to learn by bitter and bewildering experience that he didn’t.
This is what happens when we do not heed the message of Ecclesiastes.
For the truth is that God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.” (Knowing God, p. 106)
Packer uses a word for God that has stuck with me all year long.
Inscrutable.
in·scru·ta·ble.
1. impossible to understand or interpret.
Maybe it’s not true for everyone but Packer had me pegged. I get closer and closer with the Lord and I learn more about Him and I see His the wisdom in all the ways He deals with me, and without even realizing it, I start to feel like I’m “on the inside” so to speak. Like He and I have this thing, I know what He’s up to, and I know what He’s doing and I’m sure I know why He’s doing it…
And then everything swerves left, and I’m blindsided.
I thought we had something… I say to the sky. I thought we were on the same page.
The truth is that my good almighty God is inscrutable.
His ways are higher than my ways and I have 1000% not got Him figured out. Outside of what He’s already revealed in His word, I do not know what He’s doing, and I do not know why.
Good plans crumble, evil people rise to the top, godly people get hurt, and the best of intentions sometimes avail to nothing while schemes of the wicked are carried out without a hitch. Inscrutable.
So how can we move forward?
How can we make decisions and carry on and seek to do God’s will when we haven’t the slightest idea what He’s actually up to?
Here is a list I got from Packer, who himself got the list from Ecclesiastes.
This is what we can do. This is the way of wisdom:
1. Fear God and keep his commandments (Ecc. 12:13)
2. Trust and obey him, reverence him, worship him, be humble before him, and never say more than you mean and will stand to when you pray to him (5:1-7)
3. Do good (3:12)
4. Remember that God will some day take account of you (11:9; 12:14)
5. So eschew, even in secret, things of which you will be ashamed of when they come to light at God’s assizes (12:14)
6. Live in the present, and enjoy it thoroughly (7:14; 9:7-10; 11:9-10)
7. Present pleasures are God’s good gifts. Though Ecclesiastes condemns flippancy (7:4-6)
8. God clearly has no time for the superspirituality which is too proud or too pious ever to laugh and have fun. Seek grace to work hard at whatever life calls you to do (9:10)
9. Enjoy your work as you do it (2:24; 3:12-13; 5:18-20; 8:15)
10. Leave to God its issues; let Him measure its ultimate worth; your part is to use all the good sense and enterprise at your command in exploiting the opportunities that lie before you (11:1-6)
*Knowing God, p. 107
It’s a good list to get us started. What He wants us to know He has already revealed to us in His word, and what He doesn’t want us to know we will only make ourselves sick trying to find in signs and scriptures all out of context and sleepless nights trying to “piece it altogether.”
You may, along with me—-the next time you are straining to see the future or wrecking yourself trying to figure out God’s big “why” for what He’s done in your life lately—-try saying this word.
Whisper it to the ceiling, while you lay on your bed at night.
Whisper it to the stars while you stare up at the heavens..
Inscrutable.
He’s completely inscrutable, and He knows what He’s doing.
And he “doeth all things well.”
Trust Him.
Jess Davis 