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Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
… most of the time He chooses not to give us extreme eye-openers. Instead, He “underwhelms” us. He speaks in ways that we can easily ignore (burning bushes), and calls for us to adjust our God sensors to match His revelation.
Most of the people who heard Jesus didn’t understand what He was telling them.
But when He was alone, those around Him with the twelve asked Him about the parable. And He said to them, "To you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to those who are outside, all things come in parables, so that 'seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand; lest they should turn, and their sins be forgiven them.'”
Those who were outside the group of Jesus’ disciples heard the parables and scratched their heads. They liked to listen, but they didn’t grasp what was being said. A parable was a burning bush event, and they walked by it. The followers of Jesus, on the other hand, turned aside to it. They put in the time and effort to find out what Jesus was talking about. They made their God sensors sensitive by repenting, following Him, and asking questions.
I need to spend some time on the verse, “so that ‘Seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand; lest they should turn and their sins be forgiven them.’” Does this mean that God does not want some people to repent (turn)? The scriptures are emphatic:
Say to them: 'As I live,' says the Lord GOD,'I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live…
There appears to be a contradiction between Ezekiel 33:11 and Mark 4:12. If God takes no pleasure from the death of the wicked, why did Jesus say that He spoke parables so that people would hear and not understand lest they should turn? Does God want all to repent, or not?
Consider the conversion of the apostle Paul (also called Saul).
He set off. When he got to the outskirts of Damascus, he was suddenly dazed by a blinding flash of light. As he fell to the ground, he heard a voice: "Saul, Saul, why are you out to get me?"
He said, "Who are you, Master?"
"I am Jesus, the One you're hunting down. …”
(Acts 9:3-6, The Message)
I believe that if more people had experiences like Paul’s, there would be more Christians. Let’s face it – very few of us get this kind of opportunity. Most wander through life without ever being confronted by a blinding light and an audible voice from heaven.
I had a friend who had an opportunity similar to this. For the first thirty-six years of his life he was a proud, greedy, selfish person, not at all someone who you would expect to become a Christian. Then at the age of thirty-six, an acquaintance gave him a copy of David Wilkerson’s book, The Cross and the Switchblade.[46] As he read the first two chapters, he became disgusted and threw the book to the ground. It seemed like the ranting of a religious nut.
He then felt a supernatural force drive him to the floor and hold him there. He couldn’t get up until he had surrendered his life to Jesus Christ. He never finished reading The Cross and the Switchblade, but he served Jesus till the day of his death.
I hang out with a very charismatic crowd, and you would be shocked by some of their salvation stories. One friend was in a room that became strangely dark except for a light coming from a Bible on his bed. He wasn’t even sure how the Bible got there, but the experience drew Him to faith in Christ. Another friend had a vision of hell that helped convince him of his need for Jesus. Another sat in a bar contemplating his salvation and decided he would surrender to the Lord at the end of the summer. He then had a vision of being in a hospital. A short time later, a car accident put him into the scene he had witnessed in his vision. He surrendered to Jesus in the hospital.
I can never know for sure on this side of eternity whether these experiences were from God, but I can’t deny that they led my friends to Christ. They seem to be the work of the Holy Spirit, but even if they were only psychological impressions, God controls all things. He allowed the circumstances of their lives to produce the factors that led to the perceived manifestations of His power. He then used them to bring my friends to salvation.
I believe that God is wise and powerful enough to convince anyone to repent. Think about it: Suppose He took every sinner and gave them near death experiences in which they were taken to hell and then brought back. Then suppose He gave them similar experiences where they visited heaven. Would they be likely to repent?
You might say that God can’t do this, but there are people who claim to have been saved after experiences like this. I call it “resuscitation evangelism.” Whether the experiences are real or only tricks of the mind, God seems to occasionally use them to drive His word home to someone’s heart.
What if the Holy Spirit fell on people like He did on King Saul when he went out to kill David?
Then Saul sent messengers to take David. … Then the Spirit of God was upon him also, and he went on and prophesied until he came to Naioth in Ramah. And he also stripped off his clothes and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Therefore they say, "Is Saul also among the prophets?"
If the Holy Spirit can overwhelm a man who is attempting to kill God’s servant, He can overwhelm anyone. If God thought it was a good idea, He could hold all of us in a state of Holy Spirit bliss for our entire lives to make sure we believed in Him. He could drop us out and allow us to fall into mental torment when we decided to rebel. He holds all of the controls. He can give supernatural revelations that lift us in faith or terrify us into repentance. Nothing is too hard for Him.
We know from the Scriptures that God sometimes raises the level of His revelation to meet an insensitive God sensor. The story of Balaam and his donkey is an example (Numbers 22). Balaam’s heart wasn’t right, so God sent an angel to oppose him. Balaam couldn’t see the angel, but his donkey could, and it refused to move forward, saving the wayward prophet’s life. Balaam, however, was determined to make the donkey continue on their journey, so he beat it three times.
His God sensor was insensitive. He should have considered that his donkey had never resisted him like this before, and that there might be a good reason for its actions.
God could have let Balaam walk by the burning bush of his donkey’s disobedience, but He instead chose to speak loudly enough for Balaam to hear. He had the donkey talk to the stubborn prophet, which opened his heart to what was happening.
God can make Himself loud and clear. He can overwhelm us in our insensitivity if He chooses, but my point is that most of the time He chooses not to give us extreme eye-openers. Instead, He “underwhelms” us. He speaks in ways that we can easily ignore (burning bushes), and He calls for us to adjust our God sensors to match His revelation.
This section will be tough for some, but please bear with me. I need to explain a little theology in order to make a very practical point. Consider two men sitting in a church listening to a preacher. Both hear the same message, and the Holy Spirit touches each in a similar way. Both have similar circumstances in their lives, but one is more sensitive to God than the other. As a result, he believes in Jesus while the other doesn’t.
Who chose that one man would be saved while the other wouldn’t? Obviously the two men did. One decided to surrender to Christ while the other didn’t.
We can’t stop there, however. Could God have raised His level of revelation and conviction to the point where the unsaved man would have responded? Of course He could have. He had all sorts of wisdom and power that He could have used to get the man’s attention and to motivate him to repent. He chose not to, however.
Without violating our ability to choose, God chooses who will be saved and who won’t. He decides how much of His revelation He will display, and since He also knows what it will take to get each person to repent, His chooses to give some enough to bring them to their knees and others not enough.
So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.
We make choices (we will), and we follow through on those choices (we run), but God decides whether He will mercifully raise the level of His revelation to match our God sensor. He decides whether to bring what will turn us around. Without interfering with our ability to decide, He chooses some and not others.
Does this turn humans into robots without free will? Not at all – each of us makes our own decisions. If we humble ourselves, God will give us grace. If we don’t, He will either pursue us with greater mercy until we humble ourselves, or He will leave us to what we deserve.
Allow me to now make this truth practical. Our life on this planet is an interaction with a God who is a person. He is not a set of principles that we can treat like a formula; He is involved with us. He makes choices in order to accomplish His plan. At some times He thunders; at others He whispers. No matter how He makes His will known, however, it is our responsibility to learn to cooperate with Him.
If we know this, we can adjust our God sensors to match His voice. We won’t fall to “fairytale-ism” or fatalism. “Fairytale-ism” tells us that because God loves us, He will make sure He gets our attention no matter what we do. Fatalism says, “If God decides how much mercy He will give, there is nothing we can do about it.”
Instead of these, we can trust that God is speaking (wisdom is shouting in the streets) and pursue Him until we know what He is saying. We can tap into His love by humbling ourselves and seeking Him according to His revelation rather than our wishes. We can do our part to be sensitive to the faintest touches of His mercy.
Peter makes an amazing statement that tells us to do just this.
Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble …
Because God works through the interplay of His mercy and our choices, we can make our call and election sure. We can dial up the sensitivity of our God sensor to the point where we sense Him, and doing so will seat us firmly in the center of His grace. Peter tells us how to do this.
So don't lose a minute in building on what you've been given, complementing your basic faith with good character, spiritual understanding, alert discipline, passionate patience, reverent wonder, warm friendliness, and generous love, each dimension fitting into and developing the others. With these qualities active and growing in your lives, no grass will grow under your feet, no day will pass without its reward as you mature in your experience of our Master Jesus.
(2 Peter 1:5-8, The Message)
I am now ready to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this chapter: “Does God want all to repent?” My answer is, “Yes, but He also has other goals, some of which we don’t understand.” For example, though He could focus all of His power on convincing the maximum number of people to turn to Him, He values character traits like faith and perseverance too much to sacrifice them by overwhelming us. He wants us to choose to trust Him willingly.
He often demonstrates His power without extreme eye-openers. He gives smaller displays, burning bushes, and calls for us to seek Him to find His larger message behind them. In wisely balancing the different parts of His purpose for the universe, He feels it is best to “underwhelm” us, to reveal Himself at a level that many will ignore.
How should this affect our lives? It should motivate us to fall to our knees and add to our lives those qualities which will make it so that “no day will pass without its reward as we mature in our experience of our Master Jesus.” It should lead us to repent in the way He wants us to, not as we want to.
There is great light or great darkness hanging in the balance of what might appear to be small decisions. He calls us to the difficulty of letting go of our own ways so we can “be diligent to make our call and election sure.”
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