God's Mysterious Will Is Good!

My post is late this week because of my need to care for my wife as she recovered from endoscopic surgery (she is doing better each day). But something has been bubbling in me that I want to write about: the tendency of even believers to think that God's hidden will is somehow going to mean pain for us!

This was brought home to me when a wonderful teacher and friend spoke of negative circumstances and said that that's why they didn't really like Isaiah 55:8-9 which says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. 9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

I smiled when I heard this because of something Father showed me through this passage about His "mysterious ways." Like most folks I somehow took this passage to mean something like, "Listen, Tom, your pea-brain just can't get it, so when things that you don't like and you don't understand happen just suck it up. After all, God's ways are just so far beyond yours..." Well, okay maybe not everyone thinks like that or puts it that bluntly, but we do seem to think that the bad things that happen are somehow part of God's mysterious ways and that we just have to buck up. But when God opened my eyes about this passage, He led me to an astounding discovery: "mystery" in the New Testament is with perhaps one exception, always about something good that God is revealing about Himself! (Check it out for yourself by searching on mystery in the NT).

This passage in Isaiah reveals this in living color! Check out the two verses that precede 8-9: "Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, and he will freely pardon." 8 "FOR my thoughts are not your thoughts..."

Do you see what I saw? The exalted, unsearchable thoughts of God are in the context of His mercy towards those (rebellious people!) who turn towards Him. In other words, it's about His goodness! What is mysterious about God is not the fact that "bad things happen" in this world, but that He is so very, very good! He is so astonishingly good and loving and kind that the best human definitions of these traits fall infinitely short, because His thoughts are not our thoughts, and our ways are not like His! So when God "has something up His sleeve" that we cannot see or understand, we can be sure that it's something good, not something bad!

What does this mean for me, for you? Well for me it has changed my entire perspective about life and God in the midst of life. Now, no matter what happens (and Jettie and I are in a very, very hard time right now), I find myself looking for evidences of His amazing, totally good if mysterious will. And I find myself realizing that He is so beyond my best thoughts and operates for my good in ways so far beyond my ways that I am stunned even as I am loved into surrender, restfulness and yes, even expectancy.

So if God "hides" something, I now imagine that what He is hiding is just too good to be experienced. The lives of those who have been profoundly touched by God in the past seem to confirm this thought. The great evangelists Finney and Moody both wrote of being so profoundly touched by God's love that they had to ask God to stop! And other influential believers report these same kinds of experience of His goodness in one way or another. No wonder then, that Paul, when writing of the unsearchable things of God, put it in the context of God's astonishing mercy (Romans 11:32 ff). For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all. 33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34 “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”35 “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?”36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

Living increasingly in astonished wonder.

Tom, one of Abba's little boys