Foundations of the Church Let God Out of the Box
Foundations of the Church - Let God Out of the Box
Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV)
Isaiah 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
When it comes to doing things as we humans would do them, God is not normal! Have you ever stopped and looked at the way God does things on earth? It’s not normal! It’s not the way we think things should or would be done! God was not normal with…
1. Abraham
One of the earliest examples of this in scripture is found in Genesis when God tells
Abram to leave Ur of the Chaldees and not to take any of his extended family with Him.
Apparently not happy with Abram’s disobedience, (he took his nephew Lot with Him)
God doesn’t speak to Him again until he separates Himself from his nephew. Even
so, God still sends angels to save Lot from the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Place yourself in the position of Sarah Abram’s wife. Her husband says to her one day that God has told Him that they are to leave and leave everything and everybody they know behind them. Quite naturally she might ask, “and where are we to go?” Abram then says, “I don’t know, He didn’t say! He said He’ll tell me.” She must have thought I need to put some wet towels on his head and tell Him to lie down in the shade! That would be my first thoughts. Does Sarah do that? No!!!, she packs up the old SUV-camel and without even touching up her make-up jumps on the camel and is ready to go.
Later she allows Him to lie to a king and the king’s men about her relationship to
Abram which almost makes her the newest concubine of the king. Then she allows
Him to take their only child, (that they had waited 20 years for) and to offer Him as a sacrifice to this “unknown” God!
2. Noah
Next God saves the world, by having Noah build a huge ark on dry land
warning Him of a flood that will be caused by excessive rainfall when previously there
had never been rain! Then God chooses a man who when the flood is over gets
drunk and naked.
3. Moses
A little later He appears in a bush, setting it ablaze and yet not consuming it? He then speaks to a man through the noise of the burning bush and tells Him to take off his
shoes! Now He wants this man to tell Pharaoh, the King of the most powerful nation of
the world and the lowest of all the Gods of this world, to give away the most useful
thing he possesses; his slaves, all because some burning bush God named “I Am”
says so! Exodus 3:13-15 This God is not normal! He’s just not normal! He’s just not natural and comprehensible! What? You still don’t think He’s not normal?
4. Jonah
How about the story of Jonah? You know Jonah from the Old Testament. Jonah is the “great fish” story where the fish tries to convince his friends about “the one that got away!” Jonah is the first of all the writings of the prophets. Very little is known about Him. On the other hand, Ninevah, the place where GOD wants Jonah to go to is very well known. As far as a Jew is concerned, it is Hell on earth! The Ninevites were the sworn enemies of the Jews. They were known to have boiled Jews alive and to have skinned them alive and then dragged them behind a horse or chariot through the streets of Ninevah or to have staked them over an anthill.
With this knowledge what would be your response to a God that tells you, a Jew, that He wants you to go to warn the Ninevites that the God of the Jews is going to wipe
them out if they don’t repent? I’d be thinking, Go God, wipe them out! You’ve got to see how not normal this all looks?
So you’ll admit this looks not normal but there’s just not enough of a history to qualify God as being not normal?
5. Gideon
Gideon has 32,000 men to fight with. God says he has “too many.” Too Many? How can you have too many to fight a ground battle? That is how you win! You simply overwhelm your enemy by shear numbers. God has him cut his ranks to 300 men to fight all of the Midianites and Amalekites in Judges 6.
6. Elijah
What do you think of someone who would feed one of His greatest servants by the use of ravens? Is that not normal enough? No! What about someone who then sends you to meet a widow woman elsewhere whom He says He has commanded to feed you. You go
and ask the woman to fetch you some water. As she’s going you also ask her to
prepare you a “morsel of bread”. She then says she has only “a handful of meal in a
barrel, and a little oil in a jar... for me and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” This
is whom He has commanded to feed you? She is a widow woman with no means of
support and a son who is in herself preparing to die? I Kings 17. This is a not normal God!
7. Jesus
Generally today, we accept that the reason the Jews never accepted Jesus as the
Messiah, was because He didn’t come to them the way they expected the Messiah to come. By using scriptures like Psalm 45 and 68 as well as Isaiah 9:5-6 they had imagined a Messiah who would be a great conquering hero who would establish a new world order with them as the elite ruling class. They believed that as this elite class, that all the rest of the world would then suffer under them as they had under the rule of the world.
They had established through the teachings of the priest an elitism that was built on scripture. That was built and then established walls of “tradition”. This was a tradition that bound them from seeing the other side of the Messiah. They had used scripture to put God in a box! They had, by the use of scripture, established traditions that constructed a spiritual Jericho. They had used scripture to build such great walls to keep the people from ever transgressing “the Law” as well as to keep the people and God separated.
In Mark 7:13 we read, Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”
Tradition is another name for the spiritual walls! In chapter 7 we see how these walls are constructed. The Pharisees and certain scribes saw that the disciples of Jesus ate without washing their hands and as they noted that this is a violation of Jewish tradition.
Jesus then constructs a gate through the middle of those walls, when in v. 6 He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
When we are “religious” people, we do the same thing. We concern ourselves so much with what a person is like, that we fail to see their heart! We fail to see that it is not the “law” and the keeping of the law that saves people but rather that it is the establishment of a personal relationship with Jesus through what He did on the cross that gives you eternal life. Keeping the law or legalism does not bring life, it kills it.
After being confronted by Satan in the wilderness Jesus went to Nazareth and to the synagogue. He basically went to His home church! There the book of Isaiah was handed to Him to read from. He quoted Isaiah 61:1 in Luke 4:18-19 and said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Generally the Jews were looking for a Messiah that would establish a ruling king that would place them as His special, chosen people. That He would come and subdue all the peoples of the earth and place them (the Jews) in positions of aristocracy, in positions of authority. They were so steeped in this tradition that they were unable to fathom the possibility of any of the prophecies that said He would come any other way. Modern Pharisees do the same things they box God in just as the Jews had done.
In many ways we all approach life as a “product of our environment”. We have
established a bias based on a group of beliefs. When Philip found Nathaniel to tell Him about Jesus, Nathaniel replied, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”(John 1:46) Jesus teaches us how we need to look at God when in Mark 10:14-15 He uses children to illustrate the point when He says, “… Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”
Why did Jesus say this? It is because kids have an unpolluted basic life without a bias and without an environmentally influenced point of view. As they age this changes, but this is the point Jesus is making. He is telling us to put down our upbringing and to accept Him for who He is, what He is, and by what He does! To look outside of our box and to get outside of our box! This is a primary concept that was ever-present in the ministry of Jesus.
He was constantly trying to drive home the fact that the Jews had boxed God in and that we needed to let God be God! Whenever you box God in, He starts looking like man and for God that is “not normal”! It is mankind’s desire to be the center of the universe. We want to be the reason why this life exists. We are the focal point of the eternal battle between evil and God. Therefore we want to consider ourselves more important than we are. This is why we see the things of God as “not normal”.
We see our culture around us and call it “normal” when in reality our culture is “abnormal”. What would normal look like? It would be a world where communication between the creation and The Creator is constant. It would be where what we consider today as “supernatural” is in fact natural. We were designed to exist in God’s presence.
When Adam sinned part of Him died. There was now a void within mankind,
something that was drawing Him back to his Creator. When Adam sinned, the creation to Creator relationship ended. We were kicked out of the Garden. Now, Satan’s ways; the world’s way have become the “natural” way. After all, this world is his kingdom!
The Jewish people were the focal point of God’s desired relationship with mankind. He chose them to represent Him in this world and to take the message of His love for mankind to all mankind (like Jonah). And even though they made an attempt to develop a relationship with “I Am”, they failed to take His love to all mankind. Instead they developed an elitism that caused a hatred for Israel by many other nations.
The Jews had so established this one sided Messiah that even the world, the Gentiles believed it. In Matthew 2, it tells us that they knew He would be coming from the house of David, but they placed expectations upon Him to be an earthly king. They expected He would be raised in respect and privilege. They never expected Him to be a working guy, a carpenter’s son from Nazareth? God was out of their box! This was not “natural”. How could this be? This was “not normal”!
When Mary first heard that she was pregnant with Jesus, she responded in a traditional way. Look at Luke 1:31-34, the angel Gabriel says, “You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.” 34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
What happened? Did she not hear Him say that He would “be called The Son of
the Most High?” He wasn’t supposed to be called the son of Fred, Wilber or Joseph! He
wasn’t even to be called Mary’s son, but The Son of the Most High, the Son of God!
With her traditional ears she heard only that she was to bare a son. Her apparent understanding of the Messiah didn’t allow for Him to be born of flesh and blood, or to a person of “low estate”. She had been taught to Box God in, yet here He had sent the angel Gabriel to directly tell her that His ways were higher than ours. That His thoughts were far above all we could dream or think. That He was stepping out of the Box and that something “not normal” was about to happen.
God’s not normal was shown and that not normal is this: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
Mankind’s misunderstanding of true spirituality and what our Christian purpose is has caused immense damage to the human race. Tragically it is possible to think we are becoming more spiritual, when in God’s eyes we are becoming more smug and judgmental.
We can become what Mark Twain called “a good man in the worst sense of the word.” How many people are permanently repelled from Jesus by Christians who are mean, uncaring, stiff, boringly lifeless, obsessive, and dissatisfied? This is what happens when God is put in your box that you have created for Him instead of being allowed to be not normal in your life. John Ortberg writes, “Sometimes we are more damaged by our righteousness than sinners are by their sins.” Let’s let God out of our self made boxes and let Him be God. Will you step outside your box today by letting God out of His and trusting Him for who He is and what He has done to love you. The world needs to see a not normal God in us as we draw or very life from Him.