When our Frameworks Collapse: After working through the slaughter of the innocents, I feel as though I have been brought back to the place where I stood nearly forty years ago. I am beginning to question everything again – not because I no longer believe, but because everything I thought I understood suddenly seems so small. God is immense. His ways are unsearchable. His judgments are past finding out. The little frameworks we build around God begin to collapse when we realize that He is not merely greater than we imagined, but altogether beyond our ability to comprehend. He is before all things, above all things, and dependent upon nothing, while everything we know and everything we are depends entirely upon Him.
I find myself crying for mercy, crying for life, crying for the smallest glimmer of light, because apart from what the Lord gives, we have nothing with which to stand before Him. We will never bring God within the grasp of our understanding. We will never rise above His purposes and explain Him from the outside. There is no outside. There is only God, and everything else exists because He willed it so. We are within His world, upheld by His power, and dependent upon Him for every breath.
And yet, we somehow think God is under our thumb. We think we can summon Him into the courtroom of our reason, ask our questions, and require Him to defend His ways. We imagine that if we study hard enough and build a system tight enough, nothing will remain beyond us. But God does not stand before us to be examined. We stand before Him. He has revealed enough for faith, enough for worship, enough to leave us without excuse, but never enough to bring God down to the measure of man. “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.” Psalm 50:21.
I do not know what else to do but live by faith – not faith in my ability to understand Him, but faith in God Himself. And perhaps that is where faith truly begins: not when everything has been explained, but when all our explanations have reached their end. Not when we have brought God within the reach of our reasoning, but when we have been brought low before Him. Not when we can say, “Now I understand,” but when we can only cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
The more deeply I consider the absoluteness and holiness of God, the more I feel the limits of everything I have thought, written, and believed. I feel as though I am standing before something infinitely greater, purer, and more terrible than anything I have ever imagined. I cannot protect myself from Him. I cannot negotiate with Him. I cannot make myself worthy of one moment of His favor. All I can do is plead for mercy for Christ’s sake. And even that plea rests entirely upon Christ – upon who He is, upon what He has accomplished, and upon the mercy of God revealed in Him. I cannot say that I understand God, but I can say that Christ is the only refuge I have. I cannot answer all the questions that rise within me, but I can look to Christ, in whom God has revealed mercy to sinners.
Perhaps I am being brought back to the beginning again. Perhaps after all these years, after all the reading, writing, studying, and seeking to understand the truth of Holy Scripture, I am being made to see that I still possess nothing apart from what God gives. No light unless He gives light. No faith unless He gives faith. No life unless He gives life. No mercy unless He is merciful. There is something frightening about being brought to that place, but perhaps there is also something safe about it. It leaves me with nothing to defend, nothing to boast in, and nothing to hold before God except Christ.
I do not know where all these thoughts will lead. I only know that God is greater than I have ever understood Him to be, and I am smaller than I have ever imagined myself to be. And somewhere between those two realities, I find myself crying again for mercy, hoping in Christ, and asking the Lord for enough light to take one more step. MPJ