God's ways are not our ways (Thursday, Lent 4)

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One of the things we may have known about God is that He is unpredictable. Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us that God’s ways are not our ways; His thoughts are not our thoughts. Sometimes we ask for something in prayer, but receive something else as an answer to our prayer. Sometimes, we pray for abundant riches, we pray to have it all just to be happy but sometimes it may be the wish of God that we should lack certain things so that we can be wise. Yes, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, but Jeremiah 29:11 tells us that His plans and thoughts for us are for our good, not for disaster – to give us a future filled with hope. Sometimes, certain situations in life make it difficult for us to understand this aspect of God. And that is why many of us find ourselves reeling in crisis of faith.


How do we relate with a God who is so unpredictable? What should be our attitude before Him? The best attitude should be that of humility, patience, silence and faith. This is where the people of Israel failed as we have it in Exo. 32:7-14. Beginning from Exodus chapters 20 to 32, Moses was with God on the Mountain, to receive the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) and other instructions from Him. The people of Israel waited for him to come down from the mountain; but he was nowhere to be found. They lost patience, they lost faith, they thought that God had abandoned them or had walked away from them. Thus, they created their own god – the "golden calf"– to be worshipped. They couldn’t stand the unpredictability of God. They didn't understand a God whose ways are not their ways. Because of their infidelity and impatience, God threatened to destroy them, but Moses pleaded with God not to destroy His own people.


We see this playing out in John 5:31-47. Jesus made frantic efforts to prove to the Jews that He was sent by God, but they refused to believe him. He gave four witnesses – John the Baptist, the Scriptures, God Himself and the works of God that He did – to testify that God sent him. And yet the Jews refused to believe in Him, maybe because they did not want an unpredictable God who came in the form of man, who spoke and worked through a carpenter from Nazareth and so on.


We can’t expect God to come into our lives in a predictable way. To expect God to come in the way we want is like trying to fit Him into a diagram. Let us allow God to be God. If we continue to imagine how God is supposed to be or act towards us, we may end up creating our versions of the "molten calf". And this is why many of us are being bashed by crushing crisis of faith. During this Lenten time, let us submit ourselves to be specially trained on how to remain faithful to God: a God whose ways and thoughts cannot always be our ways and thoughts.


Prayer:

Lord, when life becomes too difficult for me to understand, remind me always that my ways are not Your ways, Amen!


Have a fruitful Lenten journey!



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