Instead they’re saying that he’s my best villain yet. They don’t know I put some of my own worst qualities into Jack: the overwhelming need to be right about God, for example. I spent a lot of years believing (as Jack does) that if I just lived a “right” Christian life, God would bless me. Always. If I had trouble, God would point the way out of it. My faith would help me shine through the character-building trials. I would always come out on top.
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| photo credit: Maciek Pelc |
Here’s the problem with this way of thinking:
(1) It locks God away in a box.
(2) It emphasizes me instead of Him.
(3) It lacks humble awareness of my own humanity
Again and again, I am confronted with my capacity to be very, very wrong. Sometimes trouble gets the best of me. Though I cling to faith and ask God for wisdom, the best choices are not always clear. The longer I persist in my faith journey, the fewer answers I seem to have about the way God works in the world, and the more mistakes I seem to make.
And the more I have to trust Him.
At such moments a person who doesn’t want to abandon faith can make a choice: She can turn away from her own understanding and learn to get comfortable with the mysteries of God (as we are advised to do in Proverbs 3), or she can go off the deep end, as Jack did, insisting that human understanding is the pinnacle of godly living.
It sounds silly to state it that way, doesn’t it? I don’t want to be Jack. But in order not to be Jack, I have to be comfortable walking with God and admitting I don’t understand everything about Him. It’s a limitation of this life:
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror,” Paul said. “Then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).
Does it make you uncomfortable to admit what you don’t know about God? Why or why not?
