Midknight Review's editor waxes religious for the sake of a single post.

From the editor: I know, I know, this is a political blog. If you are not a big fan of God and/or God in Christ, you may want to skip this post. Otherwise, I hope it can have some practical meaning in your life, political or whatever - J David Smithson.

Hail the Unpredictability of God

It is so important to acknowledge the largeness of our God. We are told that He gives beyond our ability to ask or think; in other words “ to ask or comprehend.” Think about that for a moment. If God functions in ways we cannot understand or grasp, it is only because He, Himself, is larger than our failing abilities to lay hold of Him. And so it is that, out of necessity, He lays hold of us !!

Like someone once said, we pursue Him until he captures us.

And if God is more than we can think Him to be, He may appear to us to be unpredictable. Certainly He is consistent in what He has allowed us to know about Him as He is revealed to us in the Incarnation....... He cannot be what He is not. This "unpredictability" is not a notion tied to His immanence, His divine nature, but rather to His communion with man ----- how He expresses Himself in terms of function in our world and, perhaps more importantly, how we perceive that function to be.

When it comes to the revelation of God to man, there is the revealing, of course, and then there is manifestation. God through Christ reveals himself to us. That revelation is pure and holy and without contradiction. But then there is the perception of that revelation. Because this includes man’s ability [or do we dare say, “man’s inability to understand] to understand what has been revealed, this perception is anything but pure and holy. God’s revelation of himself to man through Jesus of Nazareth has been written. It is finished. Man’s understanding of this manifest God is not final and cannot be categorized as scripture, precisely because it is the work of man and mankind.

Think of the bus accident that kills 7 while 30 others survive. Many of the survivors will give praise to God, but what of those who died? And so we speak of the unpredictability of our Great God Almighty. We teach in this writing that He appears to be unpredictable in this particular matter solely because of His sovereignty and largeness. As our Creator, He cannot be reduced by His creation. We can only stand in awe. And when “awe” is not our experience , we can only trust.

We must acknowledge that God and God in Christ cannot be reduced or deduced by His creation. A pot cannot comprehend the potter. A chair cannot conceive of the carpenter. A creature cannot know of his Creator. In the end, there is revelation, our understanding of that revelation (whether God in scripture or God in our world) and a thing called faith and trust.

The believer is fully capable of faith and trust. The unbeliever is not. If there is anything that divides one from the other, it is the creatures acceptance of the Sovereignty of God. The believer will submit to it, in time, and the unbeliever will rebel.

As believers, we must come to expect this unpredictability. When the creature is inconsistent, it is because of his humanness and the failings that are associated with that circumstance, that is clear enough. But it may surprise you to know that the inconsistencies of God, this unpredictability of which we write, exists for the very same reason -- our humanity and the failings associated with that circumstance. To be critical of God for a supposed failure to act out consistently is not His failure ! Some turn and walk away from God because "He did not give to me in my time of need."

While your child lived, my child died and that makes God unpredictable and unacceptable. I have cancer and it will not be healed. I live in Haiti and that will never change. I have no job and will not find one before I lose my house and new car.

Understand that while the question of the age appears to be “ how do we make God work in these realities,” the truly creaturely question of "Why me," "Why this," or "why now" ?

Understand this, if our child had lived, if we had been born in the Hamptons, if someone had offered us a job that provided for a larger home and more luxurious car, we would not be asking these questions.

Such questions, then, are questions that deny His magnitude. They are of the devil's query.

To demand that the Infinite measure up to our finite expectations is the very essence of inconsistency. Think for a moment just how ridiculous that last thought sounds: we who are finite expecting He who is infinite to "measure up" to our way of thinking? Is that even possible?

For God to be consistent as we view predictability would be as the result of the "dummying down" of our God. Do we want a God who thinks as we do? Would that include those times when we do not know what to think or what to do or what to say?

Praise God when we go to Him not knowing what to say. He has given His Spirit for just such a circumstance. His ways are not our ways neither His thoughts our thoughts. We can be thankful for that !!

What a mess we would be in if that were not true.

Finally, we as creatures must resist the temptation to judge God. We are called to lose our lives in His. There are no promises of prosperity for doing so. Some are benefited, others “are cut asunder,” All are blessed. And in the end, the lessons of Job are our lessons, as well.

We believe in God because he is our Creator and provider and for no other reason.

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