Insecurity

A couple of days ago the post here focused on 1 Corinthians 10:12, that if we think we stand we are about to fall.  Let’s expand that a bit…

Isaiah 55:8 – 11 tells us that we are not ever going to understand everything about God.  We can’t he is infinite and eternal, us, not so much.  He created us.  He created everything around us.  All of our scientific enquiry is attempting to understand what He spoke into existence.  The notion that we are going to understand what He has done is at a significant level, absurd.

He has chosen to reveal Himself to us.  He did it in two ways.  First through inspiring men to write about Him in languages that have vocabulary and grammar that contain rational propositions that we can study.

Second, He gave us His Son.  He came and lived among us and demonstrated what God’s nature and character was like.  We did not like what we saw, so we killed Him.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years.

We still have what He inspired men to write.  But we also have His Spirit, whose job it is to reveal that we really do need Him, and to lead us into understanding the truth He left us.

But there may be a problem or two.

As we begin to embrace what He has revealed about Himself in the Word He left, through His Spirit He poured out, at times we may think we have got it.  We may be pretty sure we understand something, so well in fact that we begin to build our faith on that understanding.  That puts us in a rather precarious position.

We have already said here that His thoughts are above ours.  That being the case it is certain that I will never completely understand even the things I think I know.  As Paul says in Philippians 3:15, I have to keep pushing.

In the past months I have seen or been told of several examples of people who stood on their understanding.  When what they held to be true was challenged, they either reacted emotionally and distanced themselves from those who may have been questioning their positions, or else they became overpowering evangelists for their position.

Neither behavior seems to be a proper reaction.  In Romans 12:3 – 13 we read that God has given us gifts.  Those gifts are meant to build each other up.  The tacit message is that we need each other.  We need each other’s insight to understand more fully what the Lord has revealed about Himself.

When what we think we know is challenged, our reaction should be, perhaps, rather than to defend or restate our position, to ask for the Biblical basis of the position that has seemingly countered what we think is true.  If that information cannot be given, we are outside the boundaries of the intent of this post and we may deal with that another time.

If it is given, our response should probably be to look intently at the evidence given to see if there is something we can learn.

I would submit that to respond any other way is to respond in insecurity.  Our security should not be based on what we understand about our Lord, but on Him.  Stipulating that He is infinite, our understanding of Him will be necessarily limited and thus continually in need of adjustment.

He does not change.  In that is our security.

Our understanding of Him should continually grow, we cannot ever be satisfied.  As John the Baptiser said, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”  (John 3:30)