From Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The cost of bad meetings - oh, the humanity!
"'bad meetings exact a toll on the human beings who must endure them, and this goes far beyond mere momentary dissatisfaction. Bad meetings...generate real human suffering in the form of anger, lethargy, and cynicism. And while this certainly has a profound impact on organisational life, it also impacts people's self-esteem, their families, and their outlook on life..."
From Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
From Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
The Doubting Believer 2 - Ecclesiastes
I
Well: we are all still here.
According to Harold Camping and his followers, this certainly shouldn’t be. When he fronted the media on Sunday morning the 89 year old evangelist was reportedly ‘flabbergasted’ that the rapture had not occurred on 21st May as he had predicted.
Never mind that this one of the issues that Scripture quite clearly states is (to use the words of that eminent theologian Donald Rumsfeld) a ‘known unknown’. The declaration of a timetable for the end times evidently touches a need that people have for certainty about these matters.
It was only two weeks ago that I was in Strumica in rural Macedonia of all places and I saw the missionaries of 21st May handing out leaflets on the street. It made me angry: in a land where the evangelical churches cling to some kind of legitimacy by the skin of their teeth, this was the crazy face of evangelicalism that was being presented to their neighbours. So I leaned out the window of the car when we were stopped and the lights and said to one of them ‘hey, Jesus says ‘no-one knows the day or the hour!’ doesn’t he?’ But the guy was ready for this one: and he said ‘Yes but in Ecclesiastes it says…’ and I couldn’t hear the rest because our car moved on.
I would have been fascinated to hear where the 21st May appears in Ecclesiastes, of course, but I am still wondering, and Harold Camping isn’t returning my calls at the moment.
The 21st May crew are easy enough to ridicule. But their persuasive power, such as it is, lies in tapping into a feeling that is widespread – a feeling that we probably ought to own up to. And that feeling is, I think, best characterised as a disappointment and a frustration with the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Basically, we just want more certainty than we have been given. We know that, as James says, ‘the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind’. And yet, we cannot, we do not, have a knowledge of everything we would wish to know about. This leaves us – well, where does this leave us? Feeling insecure perhaps – or at least, with an insecurity that we seek to fill with certainties. We would like to know because a little extra knowledge would surely anchor our faith more securely against the winds of doubt that come blowing through from time to time.
Are we believers no better off, then, than our anxious unbelieving neighbours? Without belief in a personal God, the unbeliever has to reckon with whatever blind forces control the universe, a prospect that many people evidently find terrifying. The great Australian novelist David Malouf writes:
What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.
Are Christians in a better position than this? And if so: why do we have so few clear answers to our most difficult questions? Isn’t the Bible the answer book to all life’s problems, the road map to life, the solution to all our difficulties? Why has there been such a delay between Jesus’ first and second coming? Why does a loving and powerful God permit terrible tsunamis to sweep away small children? Why don’t people respond to the gospel if it is so evidently the truth?
These are all legitimate and profound questions for which there are no easy answers or cheap shortcuts. In fact, if they don’t trouble us, then I think we haven’t really been reading Scripture all that closely. There is in Biblical faith, I would like to suggest, a right doubting. There is an appropriate reticence to it, a reluctance to say more than it rightly knows. Christian theology, it turns out, is about learning to say ‘I don’t know’ as much as it is about saying with confidence ‘I know’.
And the important lesson of this right doubting is that we don’t alleviate the uncertainty we feel by creating false certainties. Rather, our faith is strengthened, amidst the turbulence of this world, by fixing our gaze more closely on the object of our faith.
II
Strange as it may seem for the May 21st guy, Ecclesiastes is exactly where I want to begin this second exposition on the theme of doubt, in chapter 11. I want to look at this text because the Teacher in Ecclesiastes illustrates the kind of ‘right doubting’ I am talking about.
The teacher is wisely aware of the limits of human wisdom when it comes to the world. As he says in 8:7, about the future:
Since no one knows the future,
who can tell someone else what is to come?
And in 8:16-17 he says he is sceptical about human claims to know everything:
When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth—his eyes not seeing sleep day or night— then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.
But when we get to chapter 11 we find that the lack of understanding of all things is also a lack of knowledge of God’s ways. The first two verses sound quite fatalistic, as if they are asking to accept some karmic principle:
1 Cast your bread upon the waters,
for after many days you will find it again.
2 Give portions to seven, yes to eight,
for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land
It’s investment advice that protects you from an unknown future – from the next GFC that comes along. ‘Cast your bread upon the waters’ sounds a bit like feeding ducks. Perhaps the NNIV clears it up for us by translating this verse as ‘Ship your grain across the waters’ – whatever the case, it stands as a kind of advice to trust the forces that undergird the world – ‘you never know what may occur if you invest yourself’. If that seems almost naïve, vs 2 offers the more pessimistic version: you need to forestall the coming of disaster by investing yourself across a broad portfolio – by ‘giving portions to seven, yes to eight’.
There is a pattern and an order to the way the world works, but the totality of it is concealed from human eyes and beyond human knowing. Observe the patterns:
3 If clouds are full of water,
they pour rain upon the earth.
Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where it falls, there will it lie.
These are almost truisms, aren’t they? If a tree falls, that’s where it lies; if clouds are full, they will wet the ground. The natural world has a rhythm and an order that does allow us to predict it to some extent.
But if you are caught gaping at the world trying to predict it and to outwit it, you will never plant your crops or gather them in (vs 4):
Whoever watches the wind will not plant;
whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
It seems that the teacher is giving us something with one hand, and taking it away with the other. There is definitely an order to things, so you can act according to some kind of regularity and pattern; but there is also a sense in which the whole picture is ever concealed from human beings, and so we can do nothing more than secure ourselves against the unknown and unpredictable.
Which leads us to the verse that seems to provide a key to the others, vs 5:
As you do not know the path of the wind,
or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God,
the Maker of all things.
It is not just that we cannot see the totality of the order of the things, though we can see that there is order and rhythm; it is not just that we cannot know the future. It is that we are profoundly ignorant of the work of God, the Maker of all things. We cannot understand him. Our ignorance of the workings of the natural world – of the path of the wind and of the formation of babies – is but an illustration of our ignorance of the workings of God.
Now it is worth just pausing a moment here, because as modern people we might actually and validly say wait a minute: isn’t it actually the case that we now can trace the path of the wind and that we do know how a baby is formed in its mother’s womb? Haven’t the bounds of ignorance been beaten back by the advance of science. And if that is the case, does the analogy hold up? Hasn’t this attitude of ‘there are some things we’ll never know’ been discredited by the power of investigation and theory? And if this is the case: can’t we also say that the possibility that we might ‘know the mind of God’ is ever closer?
Of course the analogy our other draws here is taken from the world of his own experience, where winds and births were untraceable. I don’t think there is anything in his writing or in the wisdom literature more widely that would prohibit proper human investigation of the created world. In fact, the presumption of order that he works with proved to be the foundation of scientific discovery in the seventeenth century and beyond. But the principle that he outlines here is still true: because there is not merely a force or a system at the heart of the universe but a Creator, human beings will only ever know things as parts of a whole.
In fact, our author is saying, God reveals himself and declares himself maker and judge of all things. But that does not give us access to his inner workings, to peer at his notebooks or to trawl through his hard drive. So he tells us:
Sow your seed in the morning,
and at evening let not your hands be idle,
for you do not know which will succeed,
whether this or that,
or whether both will do equally well.
There is no option for human beings but to do what they can – to work hard, given that we can’t predict the future.
How is this different from the despairing anxiety of our neighbours – the kind of view of fate that leads them down to the club to put their Centrelink payments through the pokies?
The teacher is not a fatalist – and this is vital to what he wants to teach us. He knows what he knows, and he knows what he doesn’t know. He knows that God has the measure of all things, and that God will judge. As he says in 11:9:
Be happy, young man, while you are young,
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the ways of your heart
and whatever your eyes see,
but know that for all these things
God will bring you to judgment.
And in 12:14:
God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
This is a doctrine of providence, in other words. We do not have total knowledge of the ways of God. We cannot from our perspective ever successfully calculate the way in which the hand of God will direct the future - of our own lives, let alone the planet’s.
But what we do have from Qoheleth the teacher is the knowledge that all things are in the hands of a God who brings things to their proper account. We do not know the plan; but we know that there is a plan – and that the plan belongs to the God whose divine nature and eternal qualities are on display all around us; and whose determination to save for himself a people echoes down history.
III
And that is perhaps where we need to modify what we have said about our knowledge this morning. For indeed we have been presented with a powerful revelation of God’s nature and his purposes in the coming of the Son – the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his being. We have in Christ the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past (as Paul calls it in Romans); Paul prays for the Colossians to ‘have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God’; and that they be ‘filled with the knowledge of God’s will’.
This mystery? It is the gospel of Jesus Christ – which is the revelation of God’s plan for all things from before the foundation of the world. We are privileged beyond even the angels, as Peter says. We stand in a place that the patriarchs and all the prophets could only dream about.
And what is it that we now know? The mystery is that the judgement of the judging God is not merely a balancing of the scales or a bringing of everything to account, but a great act of grace and mercy. The righteousness of God, from God, is revealed to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ who died for sin, so that God could be just and be the one who justifies the ungodly. It is in him that his reign over all things is established and in him that lies the future of all things.
But what we have here is and isn’t. It is decisive knowledge. The most vital thing to know about living on earth has been revealed to us. The deepest truth of all truths, the mystery of all mysteries, has been written in the sky for us – not as some arcane secret that you can only know if you swear on your mother’s grave by the light of a full moon, or that you can only know if you are inducted into the highest level of our club. We know this mystery because it has been exposed to the full light of day – the greatest Wikileak of all time.
But notice what this knowledge is not. It is not comprehensive knowledge. It is not knowledge of the movement of the planets or of the paths of electrons or of how the mysterious patterns of the DNA code combine to form our individuality. It is knowledge of the destiny of all things but it is not knowledge of the future. It is not even really an answer to the problem of evil – why does God do it that way? The knowledge given to us by faith in the gospel is not the removal of all uncertainty or the answer to all our questions.
Paul – even the Paul who could talk about the revelation of the knowledge of God’s will, even he, the apostle to whom had been given a special, unique experience of Jesus Christ, even he drew back from explaining all the ways of God. In Romans 9-11 we see him wrestling with the mystery of Israel’s hardenness of heart. Why would God do that? When he reaches the end of his discussion he throws up his hands and delivers this extraordinary sequence (Romans 11:33-36):
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
"Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?"
"Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?"
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.
Even we who have the knowledge of God’s will in Jesus Christ cannot presume to know the particular plans of God, what the theologians call the ‘secret will’ of God. Outside of Christ we cannot declare that this or that is his will, or not. We cannot predict what may happen. We cannot explain the inner workings of providence. We cannot explain history. In fact, to attempt to do so is a kind of blasphemy. If we could explain God in this way, or know his mind, he would not be truly God.
But notice how this lack of certainty does not leave Paul in an anxious state – just as it did not concern the Teacher. Like our secular contemporaries, we believe we are in the grip of a power that is beyond our control. But unlike them, we are not in the grip of an anxiety of unknowing. The difference is that we know the crucial piece of information: we know what this power is like. We know that in ‘all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose’.
The gospel, even the gospel, does not remove all uncertainty from us. And so it is right that we express bewilderment when we are bewildered. It is right that we say ‘I don’t know’ when we actually don’t. In fact, it is a grave temptation that Christians face to say too much – to try to explain everything. It is a temptation to which Christians have frequently succumbed with embarrassing or devastating results, as church history will tell us.
We feel this particularly acutely at moments of great crisis: when the medical diagnosis is not what we had prayed for, or when the earth moves under our feet, or when we are overwhelmed by the flood: what can we say? How can we explain the plans of God? What can the plan of God be in such moments? How can I really have confidence in God when there is so much that is unknown to me? How long, O Lord? I know for some of us here those moments of bewilderment are very real and very immediate.
But the Scriptural response to these doubting moments is not to resort to cheaply won answers; just as it is not to wallow in despair. Rather, our focus is drawn to what God himself has done, and to things he has revealed. The ground of Paul’s confidence is not in an explanation for everything that removes all doubt, but the knowledge that God has revealed the true righteousness of his purposes in just and merciful gospel of his Son. So his counsel to those in the grip of terrible affliction is this (2 Cor 4:17-18):
…our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Well: we are all still here.
According to Harold Camping and his followers, this certainly shouldn’t be. When he fronted the media on Sunday morning the 89 year old evangelist was reportedly ‘flabbergasted’ that the rapture had not occurred on 21st May as he had predicted.
Never mind that this one of the issues that Scripture quite clearly states is (to use the words of that eminent theologian Donald Rumsfeld) a ‘known unknown’. The declaration of a timetable for the end times evidently touches a need that people have for certainty about these matters.
It was only two weeks ago that I was in Strumica in rural Macedonia of all places and I saw the missionaries of 21st May handing out leaflets on the street. It made me angry: in a land where the evangelical churches cling to some kind of legitimacy by the skin of their teeth, this was the crazy face of evangelicalism that was being presented to their neighbours. So I leaned out the window of the car when we were stopped and the lights and said to one of them ‘hey, Jesus says ‘no-one knows the day or the hour!’ doesn’t he?’ But the guy was ready for this one: and he said ‘Yes but in Ecclesiastes it says…’ and I couldn’t hear the rest because our car moved on.
I would have been fascinated to hear where the 21st May appears in Ecclesiastes, of course, but I am still wondering, and Harold Camping isn’t returning my calls at the moment.
The 21st May crew are easy enough to ridicule. But their persuasive power, such as it is, lies in tapping into a feeling that is widespread – a feeling that we probably ought to own up to. And that feeling is, I think, best characterised as a disappointment and a frustration with the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Basically, we just want more certainty than we have been given. We know that, as James says, ‘the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind’. And yet, we cannot, we do not, have a knowledge of everything we would wish to know about. This leaves us – well, where does this leave us? Feeling insecure perhaps – or at least, with an insecurity that we seek to fill with certainties. We would like to know because a little extra knowledge would surely anchor our faith more securely against the winds of doubt that come blowing through from time to time.
Are we believers no better off, then, than our anxious unbelieving neighbours? Without belief in a personal God, the unbeliever has to reckon with whatever blind forces control the universe, a prospect that many people evidently find terrifying. The great Australian novelist David Malouf writes:
What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.
Are Christians in a better position than this? And if so: why do we have so few clear answers to our most difficult questions? Isn’t the Bible the answer book to all life’s problems, the road map to life, the solution to all our difficulties? Why has there been such a delay between Jesus’ first and second coming? Why does a loving and powerful God permit terrible tsunamis to sweep away small children? Why don’t people respond to the gospel if it is so evidently the truth?
These are all legitimate and profound questions for which there are no easy answers or cheap shortcuts. In fact, if they don’t trouble us, then I think we haven’t really been reading Scripture all that closely. There is in Biblical faith, I would like to suggest, a right doubting. There is an appropriate reticence to it, a reluctance to say more than it rightly knows. Christian theology, it turns out, is about learning to say ‘I don’t know’ as much as it is about saying with confidence ‘I know’.
And the important lesson of this right doubting is that we don’t alleviate the uncertainty we feel by creating false certainties. Rather, our faith is strengthened, amidst the turbulence of this world, by fixing our gaze more closely on the object of our faith.
II
Strange as it may seem for the May 21st guy, Ecclesiastes is exactly where I want to begin this second exposition on the theme of doubt, in chapter 11. I want to look at this text because the Teacher in Ecclesiastes illustrates the kind of ‘right doubting’ I am talking about.
The teacher is wisely aware of the limits of human wisdom when it comes to the world. As he says in 8:7, about the future:
Since no one knows the future,
who can tell someone else what is to come?
And in 8:16-17 he says he is sceptical about human claims to know everything:
When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth—his eyes not seeing sleep day or night— then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.
But when we get to chapter 11 we find that the lack of understanding of all things is also a lack of knowledge of God’s ways. The first two verses sound quite fatalistic, as if they are asking to accept some karmic principle:
1 Cast your bread upon the waters,
for after many days you will find it again.
2 Give portions to seven, yes to eight,
for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land
It’s investment advice that protects you from an unknown future – from the next GFC that comes along. ‘Cast your bread upon the waters’ sounds a bit like feeding ducks. Perhaps the NNIV clears it up for us by translating this verse as ‘Ship your grain across the waters’ – whatever the case, it stands as a kind of advice to trust the forces that undergird the world – ‘you never know what may occur if you invest yourself’. If that seems almost naïve, vs 2 offers the more pessimistic version: you need to forestall the coming of disaster by investing yourself across a broad portfolio – by ‘giving portions to seven, yes to eight’.
There is a pattern and an order to the way the world works, but the totality of it is concealed from human eyes and beyond human knowing. Observe the patterns:
3 If clouds are full of water,
they pour rain upon the earth.
Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where it falls, there will it lie.
These are almost truisms, aren’t they? If a tree falls, that’s where it lies; if clouds are full, they will wet the ground. The natural world has a rhythm and an order that does allow us to predict it to some extent.
But if you are caught gaping at the world trying to predict it and to outwit it, you will never plant your crops or gather them in (vs 4):
Whoever watches the wind will not plant;
whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
It seems that the teacher is giving us something with one hand, and taking it away with the other. There is definitely an order to things, so you can act according to some kind of regularity and pattern; but there is also a sense in which the whole picture is ever concealed from human beings, and so we can do nothing more than secure ourselves against the unknown and unpredictable.
Which leads us to the verse that seems to provide a key to the others, vs 5:
As you do not know the path of the wind,
or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God,
the Maker of all things.
It is not just that we cannot see the totality of the order of the things, though we can see that there is order and rhythm; it is not just that we cannot know the future. It is that we are profoundly ignorant of the work of God, the Maker of all things. We cannot understand him. Our ignorance of the workings of the natural world – of the path of the wind and of the formation of babies – is but an illustration of our ignorance of the workings of God.
Now it is worth just pausing a moment here, because as modern people we might actually and validly say wait a minute: isn’t it actually the case that we now can trace the path of the wind and that we do know how a baby is formed in its mother’s womb? Haven’t the bounds of ignorance been beaten back by the advance of science. And if that is the case, does the analogy hold up? Hasn’t this attitude of ‘there are some things we’ll never know’ been discredited by the power of investigation and theory? And if this is the case: can’t we also say that the possibility that we might ‘know the mind of God’ is ever closer?
Of course the analogy our other draws here is taken from the world of his own experience, where winds and births were untraceable. I don’t think there is anything in his writing or in the wisdom literature more widely that would prohibit proper human investigation of the created world. In fact, the presumption of order that he works with proved to be the foundation of scientific discovery in the seventeenth century and beyond. But the principle that he outlines here is still true: because there is not merely a force or a system at the heart of the universe but a Creator, human beings will only ever know things as parts of a whole.
In fact, our author is saying, God reveals himself and declares himself maker and judge of all things. But that does not give us access to his inner workings, to peer at his notebooks or to trawl through his hard drive. So he tells us:
Sow your seed in the morning,
and at evening let not your hands be idle,
for you do not know which will succeed,
whether this or that,
or whether both will do equally well.
There is no option for human beings but to do what they can – to work hard, given that we can’t predict the future.
How is this different from the despairing anxiety of our neighbours – the kind of view of fate that leads them down to the club to put their Centrelink payments through the pokies?
The teacher is not a fatalist – and this is vital to what he wants to teach us. He knows what he knows, and he knows what he doesn’t know. He knows that God has the measure of all things, and that God will judge. As he says in 11:9:
Be happy, young man, while you are young,
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the ways of your heart
and whatever your eyes see,
but know that for all these things
God will bring you to judgment.
And in 12:14:
God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
This is a doctrine of providence, in other words. We do not have total knowledge of the ways of God. We cannot from our perspective ever successfully calculate the way in which the hand of God will direct the future - of our own lives, let alone the planet’s.
But what we do have from Qoheleth the teacher is the knowledge that all things are in the hands of a God who brings things to their proper account. We do not know the plan; but we know that there is a plan – and that the plan belongs to the God whose divine nature and eternal qualities are on display all around us; and whose determination to save for himself a people echoes down history.
III
And that is perhaps where we need to modify what we have said about our knowledge this morning. For indeed we have been presented with a powerful revelation of God’s nature and his purposes in the coming of the Son – the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his being. We have in Christ the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past (as Paul calls it in Romans); Paul prays for the Colossians to ‘have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God’; and that they be ‘filled with the knowledge of God’s will’.
This mystery? It is the gospel of Jesus Christ – which is the revelation of God’s plan for all things from before the foundation of the world. We are privileged beyond even the angels, as Peter says. We stand in a place that the patriarchs and all the prophets could only dream about.
And what is it that we now know? The mystery is that the judgement of the judging God is not merely a balancing of the scales or a bringing of everything to account, but a great act of grace and mercy. The righteousness of God, from God, is revealed to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ who died for sin, so that God could be just and be the one who justifies the ungodly. It is in him that his reign over all things is established and in him that lies the future of all things.
But what we have here is and isn’t. It is decisive knowledge. The most vital thing to know about living on earth has been revealed to us. The deepest truth of all truths, the mystery of all mysteries, has been written in the sky for us – not as some arcane secret that you can only know if you swear on your mother’s grave by the light of a full moon, or that you can only know if you are inducted into the highest level of our club. We know this mystery because it has been exposed to the full light of day – the greatest Wikileak of all time.
But notice what this knowledge is not. It is not comprehensive knowledge. It is not knowledge of the movement of the planets or of the paths of electrons or of how the mysterious patterns of the DNA code combine to form our individuality. It is knowledge of the destiny of all things but it is not knowledge of the future. It is not even really an answer to the problem of evil – why does God do it that way? The knowledge given to us by faith in the gospel is not the removal of all uncertainty or the answer to all our questions.
Paul – even the Paul who could talk about the revelation of the knowledge of God’s will, even he, the apostle to whom had been given a special, unique experience of Jesus Christ, even he drew back from explaining all the ways of God. In Romans 9-11 we see him wrestling with the mystery of Israel’s hardenness of heart. Why would God do that? When he reaches the end of his discussion he throws up his hands and delivers this extraordinary sequence (Romans 11:33-36):
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
"Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?"
"Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?"
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.
Even we who have the knowledge of God’s will in Jesus Christ cannot presume to know the particular plans of God, what the theologians call the ‘secret will’ of God. Outside of Christ we cannot declare that this or that is his will, or not. We cannot predict what may happen. We cannot explain the inner workings of providence. We cannot explain history. In fact, to attempt to do so is a kind of blasphemy. If we could explain God in this way, or know his mind, he would not be truly God.
But notice how this lack of certainty does not leave Paul in an anxious state – just as it did not concern the Teacher. Like our secular contemporaries, we believe we are in the grip of a power that is beyond our control. But unlike them, we are not in the grip of an anxiety of unknowing. The difference is that we know the crucial piece of information: we know what this power is like. We know that in ‘all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose’.
The gospel, even the gospel, does not remove all uncertainty from us. And so it is right that we express bewilderment when we are bewildered. It is right that we say ‘I don’t know’ when we actually don’t. In fact, it is a grave temptation that Christians face to say too much – to try to explain everything. It is a temptation to which Christians have frequently succumbed with embarrassing or devastating results, as church history will tell us.
We feel this particularly acutely at moments of great crisis: when the medical diagnosis is not what we had prayed for, or when the earth moves under our feet, or when we are overwhelmed by the flood: what can we say? How can we explain the plans of God? What can the plan of God be in such moments? How can I really have confidence in God when there is so much that is unknown to me? How long, O Lord? I know for some of us here those moments of bewilderment are very real and very immediate.
But the Scriptural response to these doubting moments is not to resort to cheaply won answers; just as it is not to wallow in despair. Rather, our focus is drawn to what God himself has done, and to things he has revealed. The ground of Paul’s confidence is not in an explanation for everything that removes all doubt, but the knowledge that God has revealed the true righteousness of his purposes in just and merciful gospel of his Son. So his counsel to those in the grip of terrible affliction is this (2 Cor 4:17-18):
…our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
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