Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.
(Proverbs 3:5-6)
I am someone who spends a lot of time living in my own head. I always have been, really. Always called a daydreamer, often lost from the present moment, playing out imagined scenarios, or trying to solve the great mysteries of life. It’s not that there’s something wrong with me, I don’t think. This is part of my personality, but like with any personality-type, each comes with its own challenges.
I’ve always prided myself in my intellectual ability. The few things in life I have really pursued, I have succeeded in and gained some level of mastery over. And when it came to religion, it was no different. When I became a Buddhist, I was not content to dabble in it, but had to master it, so I became an ordained Buddhist monk. I took it very seriously and even began teaching meditation classes.
But when Buddhism failed to meet my expectations, I put it behind me and began to live out my own philosophy on life. My mind was full of clever and spiritual ideas and I figured myself to be pretty wise. Life was still full of terrifying mysteries, but I was confident that my own philosophy on life was the best. I didn’t have all the answers, but I was confident I had thought everything through, and had arrived at the limits of intellect and settled into the sanest philosophical place.
It was from these very limits of intellect that I formed my philosophy on life. I knew that beyond a certain point, I knew nothing. And I was certain that no one else did either. So the only way to live was to embrace the mystery, to live in the moment, to surrender to it, having stripped myself of my former religious restraints. In some ways, I was on the right track, and perhaps it was a necessary step towards where I would end up, but at the time I was still heavily dependent upon my own intellect, my own reasoning, and that any truth that would enter my life had to be arrived at through my reasoning process.
There are strong parallels here to modern atheist materialism, where only that which can be felt and measured can be counted towards truth. And in a sense, this is what I had become. I had rejected Buddhism and them telling me what to think and believe, and embarked on the great expedition of measuring and feeling things out for myself. But eventually it hits its limit and I arrive at the intellectual desert called The End of Reasoning. My reasoning has only taken me so far, and now I reached this plateau of emptiness, because my thoughts could take me no place further.
From here I descended deeply into depression and apathy. I had to give up. And there came a point where something deeper within me realized that my reasoning wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t going to think my way anywhere beyond my life as it was. It was a dawning realization of humility and helplessness. My intellect had shown itself to be insufficient, so I set it aside. Then God entered the stage.
I had never thought I could become a Christian. I thought I was too clever for that. Surely Christians were naive and brainwashed. Believing everything an old book said, instead of thinking for themselves! But when I met God, I had nothing to lose. My intellect had failed me, and I was finally open to try something else. It was the opening that God needed to reach me. I had been too proud and full of my own ideas to ever entertain his foreign truths, but now there was a chink in my armour, and he took the opportunity.
First it was a simple table, set up in the town square, and a pastor and his wife and their gentle words. Then it was an invitation into a family. It was singing in a church held in a cinema. It was conversations over coffee. And the whole time my mind is coming kicking and screaming that I could never believe this stuff and that I would eventually have to leave. But to my heart, it was irresistible. God was able to move around my mind, which had been my biggest obstacle, and speak directly to my heart and into my life.
I found that in spite of my resistant thoughts, I couldn’t keep myself away. I started regularly praying and singing to God, joining with the community in the cinema. I found myself in places I had never been before. I felt things I had never felt. And my life began to change. I felt all the years of pain and brokenness begin to lift away, and I felt like a child again, free and full of wonder and imagination, with my dreams with crippled wings mended and beginning to fly again. God gave me all I secretly hoped life could be, but I could never reach it before on my own. It was when my inner machinations ground to a halt, that His systems booted up and came online in my life, like a hard reset with better programming.
In the Bible, there is a story about The Tower of Babel, where men tried to build a tower so tall that they could reach heaven and take it over. It was never going to be possible. And this is what I had done, trusting solely in my own powers of intellect to pierce into heaven’s mysteries. It was never going to work. God is too great, too wonderful, too limitless, too beyond to ever be contained and captured by the human mind. I join Job, from the Bible, in saying, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know!” (Job 42:3)
As the man went eastward with a measuring line in his hand, he measured off a thousand cubits and then led me through water that was ankle-deep. He measured off another thousand cubits and led me through water that was knee-deep. He measured off another thousand and led me through water that was up to the waist. He measured off another thousand, but now it was a river that I could not cross, because the water had risen and was deep enough to swim in—a river that no one could cross. He asked me, “Son of man, do you see this?
(Ezekiel 47:3-6)
Since we cannot by our own efforts or intelligence reach God, if anything at all can be known about Him, if he can be encountered and related to, it has to come from his side, he has to reveal something of himself and make himself known. There is no other way. In Christianity, this is the concept of “revelation”. God wants us to know him, and knowing that we cannot reach him ourselves, he reveals himself. This is what the Bible is. Just believing what an old book says is not the point. The Bible is a record of God’s revelation, or interaction with mankind.
God’s fullest revelation to mankind was called the incarnation. This is where God himself chose to be born into the world as a man called Jesus. Because we could not come up to God, in his love he came down to us. Jesus is God in the flesh. He is the ultimate revelation. He is the truth about God. He is the visible image of the invisible God. It is through learning about and learning from Jesus that we draw close to God. He is the revelation that we needed, because we could not get up to God. I could not.
Even these days I rack my brain trying to figure out things about God, or trying to solve the big polarizing questions even within Christianity. But then I remember that I never get to heaven by building my own tower, Heaven comes down to me. May I always be the kind of person that trusts in Jesus to come when he comes, to reveal when he will reveal, to trust that God is the giver of wisdom and he delights to give it, to let go of my striving, to lean not on my own understanding, but to trust the Source of truth, the one who gives me my daily bread, when I need it. Life is still full of mystery, and especially is God, but perhaps I can learn to embrace the unknowing better, if I trust in the One who knows.
What is Truth? 