God's Mysterious Ways

My mom always used to say, “God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.” And He most certainly does. He’s God after all—His ways are higher than our ways, His thoughts than our thoughts. Knowing that God is so magnificent, why is it we have such a hard time with some of the things He does? Some of the ways in which He chooses to manifest His power and glory?

We Western Christians tend to want a tidy little box of religious form and predictability—but that’s not a reflection of who God is! Not even close.

This is the God who parted the Red Sea, who walked on water and enabled Peter to do the same, who sent demons into pigs, and who spit in a guy’s eye so he could regain his sight. This is one out-of-the-ordinary God! So why do we expect that here in our culture, He’s going to “behave” and act in ways that are so…ordinary?

Could it be complacency? If God isn’t doing anything “big,” nothing much is really required of us. But if He’s moving in signs and wonders—we’re going to have to get onboard or be in the camp of the unimpressed, which really is another word for “unbelievers.” And I’m not talking about those who don’t believe in Christ but rather those who choose to only accept certain aspects or demonstrations of God and reject others because they’re just, well…too hard to believe.

We readily accept Jesus multiplying five fish and a couple loaves of bread into enough food to feed 5,000 people, but we dismiss reports of oil pouring from a Bible or jewels appearing in church services. “Well,” some would argue, “feeding the 5,000 had a purpose.” That attitude assumes we understand and therefore can interpret God’s purposes. I say that the purpose is rooted in love—whether God wants to feed you because you are hungry and He doesn’t want to send you away or He drops jewels from Heaven to shower His love upon you or He allows oil to pour from His written word—a visual reminder that the Holy Spirit is alive and active in our midst—all are rooted in the Father’s great love for us. He treasures us, He is mighty, and He wants us to be blessed.

And don’t forget that the Holy Spirit is also a gift to us, and He has promised to lead us into all truth—but many of us have decided that we will accept only those truths that fit into our little box marked “God (As I Allow Him to Be).”

Another argument I’ve heard is, “That’s not scriptural. I don’t find it in the Bible.” Just because something didn’t occur in the pages of the Bible doesn’t make it un-scriptural. All Scripture is God-breathed—literally inspired by His Spirit. Arguing that an unusual manifestation of God is “not scriptural” is essentially saying that only the Bible can be God-inspired, which basically makes Christianity a dead religion.

If we can always explain it, control it, quantify it, or direct it—then maybe…just maybe God’s not in it. Or at least not in the way He’d like to be.

When the signs of God’s Presence are absent, people in today’s world—particularly youth—have a hard time accepting God—how is believing in him anything different than believing in the Easter Bunny? So many in the Western Church have taken the supernatural out of their presentation of God—and in doing so, they deny His very character! In 2 Timothy 3, Paul warned about people in the last days being lovers of themselves and of pleasure, “having a form of godliness but denying its power” (verse 5a). It’s easy to see this Scripture outside the church, but we must be careful that some of us inside the church don’t fall prey to the same deceptive way of thinking. God is a God of power! Hello. And that power cannot be controlled; nor should it be squelched.

"These signs will accompany those who have believed: in My name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover” (Mark 16:17-18). These sound like pretty supernatural things to me! But these are the normal signs that should follow believers.

Let us not forget: “It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens” (Jeremiah 10:12). This is not a God who likes to be boxed in. We have made Him so small, in our limited understanding, that we can’t accept some of the “crazy” things He may very well want to do in our midst!

This is the same God who led the Israelites “in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night” (Exodus 13:21). But we think it’s “weird” to do fire tunnels (a tunnel formed by a line of people standing on each side—those who want to be touched by the power and love of God travel through the tunnel, while those forming the tunnel lay hands on them and pray for them).

Isn’t  it clear that we’ve reduced the Almighty to a “somewhat mighty” representation of Him? That the “weird” manifestations we might fear may be weird to us because we’re not actually walking in the fullness of God? I Corinthians 2:9 says, “However, as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”” Perhaps some of the things we have not yet conceived of, God is just waiting for us to open our hearts and minds to so that He can bring them into our midst. In John 14:12, Jesus said that those who believed in Him would do “even greater things” than He did while on the earth. Um, he raised Lazarus from the dead! Why are we so afraid of experiencing and even being used in the “greater things”?

Because they don’t fit with our comfortable, easily explained, limited risk, neat and clean everyday lives. We have no trouble believing that God could bring water from a rock or turn water into wine…back then. But if it happened in our midst today, many of us would want to switch churches. It would make us uncomfortable because it’s too outside our experience. I would argue that these things should be desired not for the sake of the signs themselves but for a greater understanding of who God is and the power He holds to change lives—and that this is the God who will be coming back to us! Not a God who stands stoically behind a pulpit and leads us in responsive reading (though there’s nothing wrong with responsive reading)—He’s coming in power! Jesus said in Mark 14:62, “…you will see the Son of Man seated in the place of power at God's right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven" (NLT).

Bottom line—if we serve a supernatural God, we need to expect supernatural occurrences. We need to embrace them as part of our family heritage, for we are “joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17, KJV). We pray “on earth as it is in heaven,” but do we really mean that? Heaven is an unfathomably glorious place! It is the hub of all supernatural activity—and God wants to bring that reality to earth. Are we willing to open the door for it to happen? Are we willing to set aside our preconceptions of what “orderly church” and “Christian life” should look like in order to experience His glory?

I’m not saying that all churches should operate the same or worship the same. What I’m saying is—we are too stuck in our ways and even afraid to let God be God if it doesn’t look “natural.” Paul was knocked to the ground and struck blind when he came into contact with our Lord, but we think it’s weird if a person experiencing the presence of God begins to shake and tremble, or even cry out. What has made us so religious in our thinking?!

In Judges, chapter 6, Gideon was so bold as to even question the wisdom of the angel God sent to him. ““Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”” The enemy’s strategy has always been to get us to see God as small—so that we would be kept from all forms of victory. So that we would continue to live out our lives simply “threshing wheat,” as it were—never aspiring to anything more, never seeing ourselves as the tools God would use once we become activated in our true callings.

Gideon was not quick to change his thinking. He even asked the angel of the Lord for a sign—that it was really God who was talking to him. He laid down an offering. “Then the angel of the Lord touched the meat and the unleavened bread with the tip of the staff that was in his hand. Fire flared from the rock, consuming the meat and the bread. And the angel of the Lord disappeared. When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord, he exclaimed, “Alas, Sovereign Lord! I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face!”” (Judges 6:21-22). Sounds a little on the supernatural side to me.

Fortunately, Gideon finally decided to trust God—after asking Him twice for confirmation through a fleece—as if the whole “angel of the Lord” experience weren’t enough. I believe Gideon had become hard-wired to believe for defeat and the absence of God’s presence as the norm. He was basing his belief system on his rational experience, not on the character of God. But finally He saw the light and believed—even when God asked him to drastically reduce the size of his army so that there would be no doubt that the ensuing victory was of God’s hand. God even showed Gideon the victory in a dream. ““I had a dream,” he was saying. “A round loaf of barley bread came tumbling into the Midianite camp. It struck the tent with such force that the tent overturned and collapsed”” (Judges 7:13b). The Lord then provided the interpretation. And the rest is history. There was a miraculous triumph for Israel that day. What a weird dream though! The type of thing many of us would scoff at, yet it was a key to unlock Gideon’s understanding of a God who was way bigger than he had made him to be.

Revelation—however strange a manner it may come in—is a gift! God has many gifts for us we are yet to receive—because we simply have closed our minds to them—we won’t receive them. “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11).

Ask Him! Ask Him to rock your world as you know it, to show up in power, to do things you’ve never seen before, to affect many for His Kingdom—because no one can deny that this is the one true God. May we not be so earthly minded that we are no heavenly good. May we not be so “careful” in our pursuit of God that we actually reduce Him to something that will fit into our wallets and purses.

I will end with a declaration from a familiar song many of us learned as children. I would challenge you—how true is this declaration in your life today? Do you believe there is nothing your God cannot do? And if He does, will you try to explain it away as the Pharisees did? How “big” is God in your life? Will you allow Him to be even bigger?

My God is so big, so strong and so mighty
There's nothing my God cannot do
My God is so big, so strong and so mighty
There's nothing my God cannot do

The mountains are His, the rivers are His
The stars are His handiwork too
My God is so big, so strong and so mighty
There's nothing my God cannot do
(from www.songlyrics.com/veggie-tales-veggie-tunes)