Big Brained People and God

I have a really good friend who has been posting some interesting and challenging questions about God on Facebook. Some examples:

• If the Bible is god's perfect word and the source of all morality, how do we justify or deal with the parts that are clearly immoral or that we could never support? And if we agree those parts do exist in the Bible, how can we go about picking which passages are acceptable and which are not?
  
• Does free will exist in heaven?

One of these posts has 129 responses, and a lot of folks are FREAKING OUT! It's totally understandable because people don't like having their beliefs messed with. Many people have a genuine concern for my friend. They have a deep desire for him to really know God they way that they do, but don't really know how to get around his difficult questions.

If you have spent much time with me, you know that I love deep, theological conversations so I want to get in on the action, but first I want to throw a little essay in your face to maybe redefine the place these questions come from - a place of absolute intellectualism. I am a firm believer in intellectual purity and think it is crucial for people of faith to be able to explain their beliefs with integrity, but I want to adjust the lenses we sometimes use to look at God and the Bible a little bit.

Do me a favor, and click here to read John 9. It's okay, I'll wait....

Finished? Okay...

Jesus heals this blind guy in a way that has no precedent and makes absolutely no intellectual sense. Jesus could have just said a word and the guy would have been healed, but instead he makes spit-mud and rubs it in the guy's face. Crazy. Nobody understood it. The religious leaders couldn't make intellectual sense out of Jesus because his teachings didn't match the structures of law they had built up around themselves (and make no mistake, Judaism in those days had become a rigid intellectual and behavioral pursuit of learned men babbling and writing about deep scriptural truths while legalistically living according to the unspiritual structures of the law).

The religious leaders challenge the man Jesus healed. Bear in mind that this guy knows NOTHING about Jesus and probably very little about Jewish law. He was a blind beggar. Religious folks looked at his blindness as judgment for sin in his life. He had been blind since birth, so no one had ever even given this guy a shot. Unworthy since the day he was born. They ask him intellectual questions to challenge his experience with Jesus, calling Jesus a sinner because what happened doesn't fit with their worldview and therefore must be wrong. The man responds this way:

"I don’t know whether he is a sinner,” the man replied. “But I know this: I was blind, and now I can see!”

-John 9:25

He's saying this: I can't answer your intellectual questions. I don't know how Jesus' teachings square up with your Old Testament laws. I can't tell you why he did this or what it even means for me...or you. But I know this - before Jesus came into my life, it stunk. But now everything has changed for me. I can't explain it, but I know it's true.

Here's my point - the effort to take a purely intellectual approach to God and the Bible will always fail you. It will do nothing but drive you farther and farther away from the truth of who he is, because God didn't just choose to make himself known to us intellectually. There are spiritual and emotional aspects to our humanity, and God speaks to all of them. Not just one. People who only respond to God in crazy emotional ways are just as out of whack as those who take a purely academic approach. Any imbalance, whether emotional or intellectual, will fail to bring us the full truth of who God is.

Allow me to illustrate. If you are a parent, you love your kids. With all your heart and soul you love them. But ask yourself this question: why do you love them? Objectively and intellectually, are they any more beautiful than other children? Are they any smarter than other kids worldwide? Are they better behaved than all other kids? If we were to be purely academic we would have to be intellectually honest and admit that there are kids somewhere in this world who are prettier, smarter, kinder, more talented, funnier and more helpful than our kids. So why do we love them? I think it's safe to say that passed on genetic material isn't the cause of that deep parental love, so why do we love our kids more than all other kids in the world when there are other kids who on paper are objectively more worthy of our love?

That question can't be answered intellectually. True love goes beyond the mind. You love them because you love them. You can't understand that love intellectually. It's the same with God. He cannot be fully understood academically. The single mom who recently committed her life to Christ at our church doesn't know all the theological truth about God. She doesn't know all the history and context of the Bible. She just knows that Jesus has changed her life. She can't quantify it by defending Old Testament dietary restrictions. She just knows that she was blind, but now she can see. It's the same with all of us. Some of us can better explain the difficult questions of the Bible than others, but even if every one of us had that ability, intellectually understanding all the answers doesn't have the power to change your life. That only comes by having a real encounter with Jesus.

Where are you in all this? Are the hard questions you are wrestling with keeping you from letting Jesus rub spit-mud in your eyes? Is your pursuit of emotional spiritual experience keeping you from growing in Biblical knowledge of God? Are you willing to have that encounter with Jesus, whatever it means for your preconceptions about who he is?