There are all kinds of people out there who claim they know the perfect system that’ll make us rich. You see them advertising all the time. They’ve got the perfect system for beating the stock market. They’ve got the perfect system for betting on football games. They’ve got the perfect system for how to win at blackjack. They’ve even got the perfect system for picking winning lottery numbers. They claim to have some kind of secret knowledge, to know stuff that nobody else knows, and they’ll let you in on the secret—for two easy payments of $19.95 each, plus shipping and handling.
I’ve always wondered why, if these people know so much about it, they don’t just use their knowledge and make a fortune, rather than selling books and DVDs to the rest of us. Still, it’s easy to fall for stuff like this. It’s not just because we want to make money, either. That’s part of it, but not all of it.
I think there’s a part of all of us that wants to believe there’s some sort of secret knowledge out there. We want to believe there’s this stuff out there that nobody knows, but we can know it, if we just find the right person to teach us. The idea that there are people out there who know all the answers, and that we can be one of those people, too, can be really attractive to us.
The thing is, of course, that there’s only one person who knows everything, and that’s God. As we move into the second part of our sermon series, ”Who Is This God Person, Anyway,” that’s the aspect of God that we’re going to talk about today. God is all-knowing, and God is everywhere.
Now, the fact that God is all-knowing and is everywhere means at least two things for us. The first one is that nothing about us is hidden from God. We talked last week about how God stands outside of time. That means that, before we’re even born, God knows everything about us.
As our psalm said, there’s nowhere we can go to get away from God, and there’s nothing about us that God does not know. If we go to the highest heights, God is already there. If we go to the lowest low spots, God is already there. God knows when we sit down and when we get up. God knows what we’re going to say before we even say it. God knows our every thought.
That can be kind of scary. After all, none of us has lived a perfect life. I certainly have not. I’m sure each one of us has done some things we’re not particularly proud of. In fact, each one of us has probably done some things we’re pretty ashamed of. Each one of us has some things about ourselves that we’d just as soon God did not know. It can make us pretty uncomfortable to think about the fact that God knows absolutely everything about us.
God knows all the bad stuff about us. God knows things about us that nobody else knows. God sees even the things about us that we try to hide from ourselves. If we’re honest with ourselves, that’s a pretty unpleasant thought.
It does not have to be, though. God knows the bad stuff about us, but God knows the good stuff about us, too. In fact, God knows that good stuff better than we do, too. While it’s true that we can hide our sins from ourselves, there are times when we hide our goodness from ourselves, too. There are times when we get so down on ourselves that we don’t recognize how good we really are.
Not seeing the good in ourselves is just as wrong as not seeing the bad. Both ways give us a distorted picture of who we are. In fact, when we don’t recognize the good in ourselves, we’re not giving God enough credit or praise. Remember, our psalm also tells us that God created us and knew us before we were born. It says that not only is God wonderful, but all of God’s works are wonderful, too. That includes us. God cannot create something that is not good.
God sees everything about us, the good and the bad. God sees it all, and God knows it all. That brings us to the other side of God being all-knowing and everywhere. It’s true that we can never hide from God, but the good news is that God will never hide from us, either.
We know that, of course, but sometimes we struggle to believe it. I understand why. Life can be hard sometimes. In fact, it can be hard a lot of the time. I’d say that pretty much everyone here is struggling with something or other in your life. Other people may or may not know about it, but the struggle is still there. If anyone here is not struggling with something, then there’s someone close to you who is. That’s just the way life works.
When we have those struggles, it can be easy for us to feel like God is not there. We feel like either God does not know what’s going on or God just does not care. We say, “God, if you’re actually there, and you know what’s going on, why are you not doing something to help me?”
Well, God is always there. God always knows what’s going on. It’s just that God does not look at things the way we do. That’s what Isaiah was telling us in our reading this morning.
Isaiah says God sits enthroned above the earth. He says that, compared to God, we’re as small as grasshoppers. Yet, Isaiah says, God stretches out the heavens like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
Think about that. Even though we’re so small that we might think God would hardly even notice us, God still takes care of us. Not only that, Isaiah says God provides us a place to live in the heavens. That’s pretty cool, really.
In fact, it’s more than cool. It’s amazing. Isaiah goes on to say that there is no one to whom we can even compare God. God is so far above everyone that any comparison to God would be ridiculous. Yet that same God, the God who knows the names of each one of the stars, takes care of us. That’s awesome! That’s incredible!
It seems like it’s so hard for us to just trust that. We keep wanting things to go the way we want them to. When things don’t go the way we want them to go, we feel like God must not be going to do anything. So, we try to do it ourselves. We try to force things to go the way we want them to go. We rely on our own wisdom, rather than relying on God’s wisdom.
It seems like it’s so tempting for us to do it that way. Yet, we find out time after time that it just Does. Not. Work. We keep trying to force things to go our way, while the all-knowing God is waiting, wishing we’d get out of the way and let God take over.
It was the same in Isaiah’s time. Listen to what Isaiah says about it:
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
God has not gone any place. God is always there. The fact that things are not going the way we want them to go does not mean God has abandoned us. It just means that God has a different plan in mind than we do. Isaiah says God’s understanding is unsearchable. Paul, in our reading from First Corinthians, asks “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?”
Think about that. Isaiah tells us that we can never understand the mind of God. Paul tells us that we have no right to try to tell God what to do. We hear that, and our instinct is to get upset about it. We want to understand God. We want to be able to tell God what to do. We don’t like the fact that not only don’t we understand what God’s doing, we don’t even get a say in it.
Paul says, though, that this is a good thing. Paul says the reason we don’t understand, and the reason we don’t get a say, is that God has something better in mind for us than we could ever think of for ourselves. Listen to what Paul says, “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, God has prepared for those who love him.”
The fact that we cannot see what God’s doing does not meant God is doing nothing. It just means we don’t understand what God’s doing yet. A lot of times, when we don’t understand what God’s doing, it’s because God has something in mind for us that’s better than anything we’ve thought of. I’ve had that experience in my life a few times. I’ll bet you have, too.
We cannot hide from God, but God will not hide from us. God knows everything about us, and God still loves us. God loves us so much that God will do things for us that are better than anything we ever could have thought of on our own.
God has the system we need. It may not make us rich. It will help us live happier and more peaceful lives on earth, though. If we accept God’s love and God’s presence in our lives, we will always be with God and God will always be with us. That’s God’s perfect system. And it works.
No comments:
Post a Comment