Don't Mess With...

It seems strange that I am poised to finish my fifth semester of seminary. It seems like just last week that I began classes bright-eyed and excited about how much I would learn about God and understand him more. That attitude did not last long, by the first Greek exam I think I realized that seminary was no Sunday School class, although some classes give disappointing hope that it is, but that seminary was going to drain me both mentally and physically. Shortly after the realization that seminary would not be any walk in the park, my hope of understanding God began to fade as well. This was not because I did not learn about who God is, but because I did learn about him, and realized that there are aspects of God that I cannot reconcile.

The difficult issues of my Christian walk before I came were mostly centered around God's sovereignty. However the issues which I thought could be solved only led to more difficult questions, namely the active and passive will of God. The question became how can an all-powerful being allow something to happen, if he knows that it will happen and can stop it than how is that passive? It is at least actively passive. I sought to understand it, as some form of anthropomorphizing God's character. God's active will seems most troubling in the particularity of his mercy, as shown in his showing mercy to some and wrath to others, based on his own choosing.

This same question of the particularity of God's mercy is discussed in Romans 9 as Paul explains that God loves some and hates others, he will save some and harden others such as Pharaoh. Paul then conjours up a hypothetical objector to this idea. The objector rightly questions how God can do this and still find fault in those who are destined to reject him, because no one can resist God's will. Paul's answer is an answer that has troubled me since I first read Romans 9. "O man, on the contrary, who are you to talk back to God." I always thought it meant that Paul had no answer and responded to the difficulty by only saying that man cannot know.

I now realize that I did not complerely grasp what is happening in this verse. Paul's inference here "O man" is being used idiomatically to say that we are mere men. Thus a mere man cannot talk back to his maker. Now that I have begun to move past my arrogance, which blinded me from seeing what the text was saying because I felt slighted by Paul's response, it has become clear that Paul is not trying to say that man cannot answer the question of God's particulariry but is instead making a statement of what he is willing to messs with. In the grand scheme of theology and anthropology Paul is saying that he would rather mess with man's understanding and position, rather than God's character.

Having been through a few years of seminary now I realize that I cannot understand everything about God, and that no one will ever be able to grasp the fullness of God. With this in mind I have come to agree with Paul that I will not mess with God's character. I will affirm his attributes, but I cannot not ,in any right mind, question who he is. So that now as I consider the difficulty of God's mercy being only shown to those he has chosen, I submit that there is something lacking in my ability to understand, because of my finitude and his infiinitude. I would much rather say that I cannot fully grasp God than to say that there is something wrong with who he is. For even God's foolishness is wisdom to me.