Everything is Backwards

After a couple of previous attempts at blogging on Xanga and livejournal, I’m going to give it a go again with “Blogger”. I’ll begin by posting thoughts on A.W. Tozer’s Knowledge of the Holy.

Understanding (the truest form) comes from faith, it is born in faith. You have sufficient knowledge to believe, because you know all about Christ and who God is. That is why I desire to see you put your “stakes in the ground,” because those stakes are “faiths” as it were. and from those faiths come the progressive journey towards that faith which saves, faith in Jesus Christ. Tozer continues, “The unbelieving mind would not be convinced by any proof, and the worshiping heart needs none.” Amen. Proverbs 1:7 says “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”. Elsewhere, the Bible repeats this theme.

On page 60, the last full paragraph, he speaks of God’s ability in his wisdom to devise perfect ends and to achieve those ends by the most perfect means. It (thus, He) sees the end from the beginning…. I agree wholeheartedly, but this creates a problem: if God is infinitely wise, and in his wisdom he knows how to devise perfect ends and to be achieved through perfect means, then the enduring pain we see in this world must be included in those means. I read an article over breakfast this morning about a former North Korean prisoner who escaped prison and became a beggar in China, found way to Hong Kong, and then to Seoul, South Korea where he became a playwright. He is now premiering his play in the USA. His story is like this: he was arrested for listening to a forbidden radio broadcast. When you’re imprisoned in North Korea, everyone you love is affected. His siblings were forced to divorce their spouses and banished to other regions. He was tortured with bamboo shoots under his fingernails and washed in salt water. His father was executed and his mother was driven insane by all this.

As unthinkable as these terrors are, we cannot bring ourselves to see God as less wise, rather more. Because, as stated before, I begin with belief and work it outwards to life, which is the truest understanding. I look at this man’s terrible situation, and am awed by a God who, in His wisdom, has a purpose and this person’s life, somehow, is the perfect means to accomplish God’s perfect ends. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of beginning with situations and working them outward and saying, “God, if you are wise, how could you let this happen?” Rather, we respond worshipfully: “God, only your infinite wisdom could explain this.” We often want to apply human wisdom to these situations and try to devise an explanation, but this is folly. To think that God-let-his-life-be-ruined-so-someone-
could-read-about-it-in-a-magazine- and-get-saved is a silly way of thinking and is often how we try to take the divine mind and put him on our own terms.

I can’t find it right now, but Tozer mentions somewhere that all of the reality that we can see or know exists in the undeniable reality of the Fall. Even this, the fall, was itself part of the means to some higher end, which exists in the divine mind. But that, too, must guide any discussion of wisdom and pain. What is this higher purpose? This higher end to which the Fall is but a means? We aren’t told specifically, and such a thought is too lofty and too wonderful for us to understand, but the Bible does hint at such notions: it is to display the fullest range of his beauty and glory to, first of all, Himself, and second of all, to the created world.