Stop trying to measure up to God; it’s your love He is seeking.  See the column below.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #845

January 24, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Drastic Measures

By Bob Walters

“And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as stars in the sky and countless as the sand on the seashore.” – Hebrews 11:12 NIV

We read it throughout the Bible: God does things bigger than we can understand.

This passage from Hebrews 11 repeats God’s astonishing promise in Genesis 17 to childless, aged Abraham and barren Sarah, repeated in Genesis 32 and Hosea 1:10, that they would birth a nation – Israel – that would save the entire world.  It would save the world because from Israel would come Jesus, the Son of God.  That’s big.

We can’t measure the things God does.  We think in earthly terms of finite value, comparing this to that, measuring, weighing, or considering one thing against another. Humans tend to be stuck in a metric context, especially the folks who “have their own truth” and thereby dismiss God’s bigness, goodness, completeness … and truth.

God’s truth defies explanation.  His love surpasses human understanding.  His righteousness is absolute, unyielding, and – we too often think – awful, unforgiving and filled with condemnation.  Everything we know, He already knows infinitely better.

Our pride – pride being the original sin – makes us wonder, doubt, and dismiss.

And yet here comes Jesus our savior, Son of God, through whom God created all things and the divine embodiment on earth of God’s favorite Creation, made in His own image: humanity.  Folks often scowl at God – and humanity – and go, “Really?”

Yes, God does big things.  Scripture tells us so in many ways.  But the truth of big-beyond-compare God often flounders in our boxed-in but arrogant human minds.  We want “big” and “good” we can understand, i.e., measure, predict, verify, and manipulate.  We mis-identify as “small-minded” God’s “big” and “good” that require, like Jesus, our faith, obedience, sacrifice, and personal commitment to love God and others.

Faith, obedience, sacrifice, and love are things, as they exist in the Divine, that fallen-but-expedient humans try to measure with evidence, lists, and checked boxes of spiritual to-dos. What happens then is that God’s truth is generally lost in the unforgiving swirl of human comparison, score-keeping, score-settling, fear, and of course, pride.

The best things – God’s things – can’t be measured or counted.  Just like the stars in the sky and the shore’s grains of sand, that is the constant message of scripture … if we’ll listen to it.  Consider the parables of Jesus that all tell irrefutable truth about the Kingdom of God, the state of mankind, the errors of Israel, and the mission of Jesus.

We try to tuck Christ’s truth into the small, intellectual, non-faith pocket of “good moral teaching,” attempt to measure ourselves against an impossible standard, and then doubt God. We are prisoners, Satan’s prisoners, of measurable quantity: evidence. God’s only measure is love’s quality.  Trust, obedience, and joy are its fingerprints.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” That is God telling us through Isaiah (55:9) not to measure Him by our earthly thoughts, standards, or values.  Jesus proves to us – by dying on the Cross – that true Godly standards are faith, love, joy, trust, obedience, and sacrifice, not by the human measurement of “What’s in it for me?”

Jesus says in John 3:16 that He came into the world because of God’s love for the faithful.  John 3:17 says Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn the world. Romans 8:1 says, “there is now no condemnation in Christ Jesus.”  

We are not condemned in Jesus, but measured by faith and love.  That’s big.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that guilt makes the forgiven controllable, not free.