What God wants

If we could somehow, and eventually, gain all wisdom and knowledge then we would become God. Since this is impossible -- the creature can never absorb God -- only the opposite can happen. 

We can repeat what we have heard, which is practically all of the reporting in scripture. Folks like us communicating at the urgency of God what God has revealed. Glory. Glorifying God means God glories over us.

God can draw us to him, and he does. Jesus tells us that's exactly what God wants to do! 

God uses loops in logic 


http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/073018.cfm
Jeremiah 13:1-11
Matthew 13:31-35


My good friend John Sorensen dropped a verse on me this week that supplied an important piece in the puzzle bothering and nagging at me in writing this week's reflection. "What is God's point of hiding knowledge and wisdom from creation?"

Continuously in scripture we experience convoluted imagery that begs our curiosity and requires our full attention in order to discover what God reveals to us. Most times the work, arduous and frustrating, gets revealed much later than we're willing to wait.

Frankly, I gave up. Then, John Sorensen mentioned a proverb to me.

The answer to my question lay in the very verse that had me in a dither. Recorded in Matthew 13:35, Jesus quotes from antiquity in Psalms 78:2, saying that by speaking to us in puzzling terms he would unfold the puzzles of the past.

I will open my mouth in parables,
I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation
of the world.

I'm not comfortable with loops of logic. How does it help to solve puzzles by speaking in puzzles?

John Sorensen's verse, Proverbs 25:2, revealed an opening to the reason that God speaks in parables as a form of clarification.  Wrapped up in John's proverb are the two natures of Jesus -- his humanity and his divinity. We know that Jesus is both God and King. The proverb comes alive in that revelation. Concealing and discovering are intertwined for a reason -- the Glory of God and Kings.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
and the glory of kings to fathom a matter.

As our human and divine King, Jesus is the primary and appropriate source of all wisdom and knowledge. Jesus announces in scripture, through a continuing trail of actions and words, everything hidden to creation since the construction of earth. No one else can appropriately do this. 

Jesus, though, doesn't say he will announce what has lain hidden to kings. He opens his mouth in parables for all of us to hear.

We don't consider ourselves as kings and queens. Jesus quotes about the need for kings to discover knowledge and wisdom, so maybe the difficulty of parables is really left just to kings. It would seem that we are not privy to the fathoming, the discovery of things. That's a role assigned to anointed folks, an anciently devised burden of both heredity and appointment. Kings and queens. 

And yet, the puzzle unwinds in the next few verses of Psalms:

What we have heard and know;
things our ancestors have recounted to us.
We do not keep them from our children;
we recount them to the next generation,
the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD and his strength,
the wonders that he performed.

If we could somehow, and eventually, gain all wisdom and knowledge then we would become God. Since this is impossible -- the creature can never absorb God -- only the opposite can happen. God has joined us to him as his people. We belong to his heritage, ancient and new. And, we are anointed to him. He makes us kings and queens.

We can repeat what we have heard, which is practically all of the reporting in scripture. Folks like us communicating at the urgency of God what God has revealed. Glory. Glorifying God means God glories over us.

God can draw us to him, and he does. Jesus tells us that's exactly what God wants to do! The prophet Jeremiah provides a tale, a parable of God's hold on his people, where our creator reveals his intentions for humanity:

For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man's loins,
so had I made the whole house of Israel
and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the LORD;
to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty. 

Jeremiah 13:11

God wants to wrap us around him. We are renowned. He wants to praise us. We are his beauties. The stark intimacy of such imagery cannot be dismissed.

We can read about God's desires for us throughout scripture. We can experience in daily events the evidence of the divine God calling us to him.

The holy people of Israel, however, were not obedient. After God's stark visual admission to draw Israel to himself the truth is told.

But they did not listen.

Jesus opens the covers on knowledge and wisdom with a further and more complete revelation. He, our King and our God will make us kings and queens more like himself than we can imagine. 

We may tire of what we believe are loops in logic, and feel frustrated by God's seeming distance, but neither are true. His logic is pure. We are only distanced by pushing him away. 

Stick with me, Jesus says. He will reveal everything to us.

Oh my. Are we listening?


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