daily java

Daily Java: The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple. (Psalm 119:130)

You want to understand something and it is elusive. It keeps moving away from you. Maybe in school it was math, or a language, or something that you wanted to understand. You keep searching for the key, that elusive point, what is called the Aha! Moment, that moment at which you say, Aha! and understand it. But you can’t seem to get it.

Then one day when you are not really trying, something dawns on you and you understand. Many times you didn’t because you just tried too hard. All your pushing, your probing, your attention was just too strong.

For it to make sense you had to step back and look at it in a more simple way. When you do, and when you go back to the basics and hit it that way, you begin to understand it and then, the Aha! moment.

So goes the word of God. You cannot understand it. You can try all you want to and read and research, learn the Greek and Hebrew, read the early church fathers, strain and write and everything else, but you will not understand it. It is impossible for the human mind to conceive of what the divine mind has written.

But then – you step back, you ask for divine guidance, you allow God’s Spirit to work in you and you put aside all of the stuff you have learned. You set aside the homiletics, the Critical Introductions, the commentaries and you allow God to enlighten.

And Aha! it is unfolded and there is light.

In a story about the apostle Paul, one writer gave a picture of Paul learning about Jesus during that period between his conversion on the road to Damascus and the beginning of his ministry. Her picture was that he would read and study and meditate all day. Then at night while he was asleep, he would wake up with his Aha! moments. Then he would understand.

Only after he quit trying to force the knowledge into his mind could he grasp it. After all, it is the word of God, not of man. And only God can explain what he has to say.

It is real arrogance to assume that by sheer rote study and exegesis that you can grasp the mind of God. It is the same arrogance that led the people in Genesis 11 to build the Tower of Babel. We will build a tower and walk up to God and say hello. God says no, you won’t and all of a sudden, everybody speaks different languages.

God says, my thoughts are different than yours, my mind is greater than yours, my explanation is deeper than you can come up with yourself.

It is hard enough to understand what my wife means sometimes. The differences between the thought patterns of men and women are enough to write books about. And we are all created beings.

How much more would the difference between the created beings and the Creator?

Only God can explain God. And he will only do it when you approach him with simplicity and the desire to learn.

Then there is light.