Not Knowing "What" …but Knowing God

Not Knowing “What” …but Knowing God

Apr 15, 2014 1936

By Levi James

A youth resolves to win the affections of a girl. He devises a plan of action. It includes plying her with flowers, chocolates, outings, heroic deeds and carefully orchestrated chance encounters. The campaign begins. He ranges all his weaponry upon her. But she does not respond as envisaged. He is at a loss. He had counted on the reliability of his method. But another factor foiled him—her personal decision.

Life, for us, does not obey a neat formula or follow a diagram. The flow of history with its every whirlpool, shallows, deeps and rapids, is in the hands of the living God. Nothing can come to us but by way of his personal decision. Time and tide happens to us all. Often, despite our best efforts, we witness devastation and terror. We must often endure the shame of our weakness in the face of outrageous fortune, and contend with the discouragement that comes from our own moral failure and personal griefs.

Sometimes we are obliged to live through terrible silences in which God seems either absent or deaf or dumb. Why should blood and tears wet our way to Paradise? There is one hope—knowing God. For the Christian, that means knowing the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Not knowing providence, but knowing him who provides.

The prophet Daniel says that those who know their God will be strong. One cannot live in this world without strength, or access to strength. The three Hebrew princes were threatened with death in Nebechadnezzar’s furnace. They did not know what God would permit or prevent, but they knew God.

Those who know God may indeed find themselves in incomprehensible situations. They may not be able to say, “Oh yes, we see what God is up to here,” but they will still belong to him. They may be in the dark, but they will be able to say, “I am not alone, my father is with me.”

“The God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods” (Daniel 3:17,18).

Levi James