In the meantime

Isaac and I recently had  a conversation about having to trust God, even when we don’t fully understand everything about His Word or His ways. Sometimes there are gaps in our understanding of how God works and carries out His plan; often these gaps leave us baffled.  How can “A+B” equal “C” in God’s mind, when, in our minds, there is no way that “A+B=C”?  “C”, in our mind, equals something that we parallel with unfairness and unjustness on God’s part.   How can that be what the Bible teaches?  Surely there’s another answer that makes more sense. And so we often do come up with another answer—one that fits the “A+B=C” equation in our mind.  Yet, this answer is often based not so much on God’s Word as it is on what we want God’s Word to say. Struggling with these doctrinal gaps in our understanding of how an infinitely good God could act in a way that seems infinitely wrong is hard, sometimes even gut-wrenching.  Sometimes our emotions also get tied up in our struggle

The chronological through-the-Bible reading scheduling I’m going through has me in the Major and Minor Prophet books right now.  I just finished up  Ezekiel and Joel, and am in the middle of the book of Daniel.  Throughout Ezekiel and Joel, one particular theme kept jumping out at me: over and over again, God declares that “ you will know that I am the LORD .”  In its most basic form, this statement reminds us that, whatever He does, God is going to act in such a way that all who see it—whether the children of Israel, the pagan nations around them, or even those of us who now hold the book in our hands and read about it—will know who the Lord is!  Now that I’m in the book of Daniel, the theme seems to continue.  The book of Daniel is filled with stories that were some of my favorites in Sunday school: the golden image and Daniel’s three friends thrown into the smokin’ hot furnace, Daniel interpreting the king’s dreams about the tree  and the image, King Nebuchadnezzar liv