“ Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."
— Isaiah 29:14 (NIV)”
Response
One of the biggest challenges to my spirituality has been my insistence on making sense of everything. I am highly analytical and (usually) logical and there are passages in the Bible that seem to go against that frame of mind. There are some things (Noah's ark and human genetic diversity come to mind) that I have a hard time just taking for granted. I want to understand how those things are possible given what I read in the Bible and so far I haven't been able to.
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I wrote a few days ago about how we as Christians are called to minister to needs of the world when at the same time we are so far from perfect ourselves it's hard to imagine we're equipped to do such a thing. Jesus didn't have that problem — He wasn't motivated in his actions by money (greed), envy, lust, or pride…
Something happened at the Fall that turned sin into a kind of pleasure; it narrowed our minds to center the world around ourselves and the selfish desires of our hearts. At the same time humans began to need the ministry of others, we lost the ability to provide for that very need. Although I don't think it's much of an excuse for slothful believers, I do believe our predisposition to sin is part of what defines us as humans today.
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In the same way (and this is the point to my sidebar) I'm beginning to see our insistence upon things making sense in our minds before they can possibly be true as a part of what separates us as humans from God. Perhaps this is what people mean when they say I should have a childlike faith in the Lord. I believed in gravity before it made sense to me; I believed that my mom was my biological mother and my dad my biological father before I had empirical evidence to support it; I believed in God before I'd ever cracked open a Bible for myself.
As we get older, and particularly as we enter the intellectual atmosphere (and cultural/religious diversity) of college it becomes harder and harder to believe with our minds some of the things we read in the Bible.
God defies reason and logic. These are things we have devised to help us make sense of the complexities of the world we interact with. Humans use reason and logic to get a glimpse of reality; God doesn't need such tools to see truth. And so faith goes against our nature — we can't (hard as we try) wrap all the mysteries of the Bible up into a nice little logical package, and I believe that is why so many of the brilliant people I meet are nonbelievers. It's a tragedy.
For me, challenges to my faith have been the things bringing me closer to God over the past few years. When I came here (to Orlando) my faith was admittedly weak. It's the challenges from my non-Christian friends and from the STATUS pastors that re-ignited my passion for Christ and my hunger to know Him more every day.
I don't have to understand everything, but I probably won't be able to stop trying either. And I'm okay with that. Reconciling doubt is, ironically, what keeps my faith alive and growing.