My father-in-law used to have some horses. Not long after he got them, some of us went to see them. I am completely blind and I had never before touched a horse. My wife took my right hand and placed it on the horse. My first thought was that it was much harrier than I had thought and I began to substantially revise my mental picture of what I thought a horse looked like. What I did not know was that she had placed my hand on the horses mane. Not knowing this, I assumed that this was what the whole horse felt like. You can probably imagine the mental picture I was getting. I said “It’s kinda like a huge dog but even harrier”. Everyone laughed. My wife explained and moved my hand to a different spot. We have gotten a lot of laughs out of that over the years.
I guess the moral of this story is that you can’t judge a horse by its mane. This reminds me of something much more important. You can’t judge the Bible, nor can you get a sense of Who God truly is, by reading a verse or two. You can take a verse here and there in order to try to prove a point you want to prove or to reinforce the image that you have of who you want God to be. Having done so, you can take comfort from the fact that your position is supported by God’s Word. However, it will be an empty comfort, with no more true substance than my false mental image of that horse.
If you want to know Who God truly is, you must spend time in His Word. Truly understanding Him requires that you look at all of Him, which requires delving into all of His Word, not just your proof text and comfort verses. If you only focus on those things, you will be just like me with my hand on that horse’s mane, completely ignorant of the whole picture and even ignorant of your ignorance.
Just as my wife had to reveal to me the true nature of that horse, God must reveal to us His true nature. It is largely through His Word that we come to know Him but it is He Who must reveal the Truth contained in His Word. Study His Word and sincerely ask Him to reveal to you the Truth contained within. Only through His guidance of studying His Word can you truly begin to know Him.
This principle that it is not possible to understand God, by taking portions of His Word in isolation, applies to other things as well. It is also not possible to understand what God is doing in your life, by taking one incident or one period of time in isolation.
Consider a rainbow. I have never seen one. Even back when I still had a little vision, I couldn’t see well enough for that. However, I have read about them and had them described to me. They sound quite beautiful. However, unless you have seen one from an airplane, you have never seen an entire one. An entire rainbow forms a huge circle, so big that you only see a fraction of its circumference, giving it the bow appearance. The fact that you perceive it as a bow does not change the fact that it is actually a circle.
Similarly, the fact that we do not perceive God working in our lives, or that we even perceive what He is doing as negative, does not mean that He is not working and that what He is doing is not good. If you see a rainbow from an airplane, you can see that it is a circle, because you can see the whole thing. God can see the entirety of our life, from beginning to end, something that we cannot do. So, our prospective will be different than His. We must trust Him, that He is good by His very nature and that what He is doing is, in fact, good, even when we don’t understand it. We can trust that what He is doing now will work out for the best in the future, by looking at how what He has done in the past has worked out for the present. In order for that to work, we have to stick with Him long enough for that pattern to form.
There are numerous examples of this in Scripture. Noah did not actually see the rain, something which had never happened before, until after he had spent more than one hundred years constructing the ark. However, he trusted God that it would happen and, through his obedience, humanity was perpetuated. When Abram and Sarai were far too old to have a child, God promised Abram that he would have a child, from which the nation of Israel, God’s chosen people, would spring. Abram trusted God and He accounted it to him for righteousness (Gen. 15:6). David could not see the prosperity of his later reign, when he was being chased by Saul, as we see in the despair expressed in many of the Psalms. But he trusted in God and his spirit, and in deed his life, were uplifted, as we also see in the Psalms. God’s Word makes it clear that His normal way of working is to work things for good, in the long term, that we cannot understand in the short term. We know that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ((Hebrews 11:1).
This is not just confined to the pages of Scripture. As with all Truth conveyed by Scripture, it also manifests in the world in which we live today. When I lost all my eyesight, I could not see (no pun intended) how God would, almost two decades later, use those events in order to help to provide this platform He has given me to minister for Him. I have faced much hardship because of my blindness. However, through God’s power, I and others, are better off because of my blindness. So it is with God.
God is bigger than our limited human perception. He is bigger than what we can feel in any given moment. He is bigger than a verse or two of Scripture. He is bigger than what He is doing in our life at any one particular point in time. He is bigger and He is greater than all these things and yet we try to define our experience of Him based on these things.
I challenge and encourage you. If you go to church and have a bad experience (you will eventually), keep persevering or find another church. If you read some Scripture that doesn’t make sense to you (you will), make sure that you truly understand what it is saying, through prayer and study, and then try actually living it out in your life, even if you don’t immediately understand why God says what He does. If you are doing your best to live for Him and bad things still happen (they will), keep living for Him and see how He works things out, in the long term. Give Him a chance to prove Himself and He will, every time. Often, the foods that are less pleasurable, in the short term, are the ones that are the best for us, in the long term, but that is not apparent after just one bight. Taste and see that He is good (Psalm 34:8). I promise, you will be glad you did.
