Friday, November 8, 2013

Why Nobody Can Fool God

“The Lord knows our thoughts,
that they are but an empty breath.”
— PSALM 94:11 (NRSV)
NOBODY can fool God. The One who designed life and all that is in it knows infinitely more than we care to even imagine. This, to us, is both a comfort and a tragedy. It is a comfort, for when we are in the lap of God’s will we accept this, but we will also dismay it as a tragedy because we all want to hide some of our deeds and desires from God and that is just plain absurd – everything we do, say or even think about is done in full view of God and all his – and Satan’s – angels.
Our only hope is to put the Kingdom of God first and foremost in our lives, in our planning, and in our execution. Of course, we will miss the mark – more often even than we desire to.
The will of humanity and the will of our Sovereign seem very similar. Both are the proclamation of an entity that has power and control. Both are decisive where heavens and earth shift to their command.
We humans have much more power and control than we even appreciate. Yet, we still cannot fool God. The grandest test of our God-likeness is that of our characters, like, how much can we mimic the moral and ethical will of God?
We can be – and we are of a sense – our own gods.
God has given us this comprehensive leeway, to make ourselves a life of our own choosing, down to the finite decisions we make. Even when we make decisions we don’t want to make, or we make decisions to do things we ‘have to do’ but don’t want to do, we still have the power and we are still in control.
***
God cannot be mocked – not without the inevitable consequences playing out. In eternity we will be greeted by the enormity of our deeds here on earth. What sort of greeting can we imagine getting? Notwithstanding the assumption that we will find ourselves in the glory of that Third Heaven, and we will, that I am sure, we have to marvel about this.
Why marvel? It’s simply inevitable, inescapable, undeniable, our destiny.
Nobody can fool God because there is something irrefutable coming – an awesome thing in too many senses to comprehend. We will experience the fullness of God’s love that day – his abounding, gracious, and even his terrible love. Do not think that God doesn’t know. To do so is to wage a perilous and futile war.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.

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