Peaceful Perplexity

I've had a number of conversations and experiences in the last 4 or 5 days that revolved around mystery.

I personally believe in a rule-of-thumb about how we view life. It's a theological idea, but it's an idea that affects all parts of our lives, because it informs our entire worldview.

We begin our outlook on any idea with confusion/lack of knowledge.

The first level of understanding, when you've come to a place where things make sense, means that you have arrived at a truth.

But, it is not the Truth. I believe that "All truth is God's truth." Rob Bell quotes that in Velvet Elvis, then goes on to say something to the effect of "every truth is God's truth." I disagree. The whole truth is God's truth, but it's easy to find a part of the truth and if we just talk about that, we could be actually talking about a lie, since we're missing the other half, or the other 99.999% of the truth, whatever the case may be for that instance.

The second level of understanding is when we say, "Oh, look...topic A and topic B are actually the same thing. I mean, they don't make any sort of sense together, but it's just...right."

Take for instance, God's grace and God's justice. I've always believed that they were true. God is a God of grace, and there is a lot of evidence for that in scripture, history, and in my own life. God is a God of justice. That is clear from the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and history.

But, when we realize that grace and justice are joined at the hip, we come to a place of a comfortable confusion. Perhaps "peaceful" is a better word than "comfortable." It's not comfortable. But, there is a peace that it is truth. And, in the vein of good alliteration, I'll call it "peaceful perplexity." I know this is way out of context, but I still love to use this verse to describe the fact that we aren't meant to have everything figured out. Click on the link and read it.

Grace seems like forgiveness, while justice seems like consequences, but in the Cross, we see a God who demanded the consequences, so somebody died for my actions. But we see a God who forgave completely, so He paid the price Himself.

Grace and Justice are joined in the Cross and tied together for the rest of eternity.
_________________________________

It seems like mystery is more popular with our postmodern culture than its modern predecessor. Younger people do seem to flock to the mysterious, and that could be attributed to a philosophical worldview alone (postmodernism).

Or, we can view it as the work of God in history, as He changes the perception of the Western World to more readily accept the fact that Christianity is an Eastern Religion, and to remember that God is infinite, and cannot be fully understood by the collective brainpower of every human being, let alone my own puny mind.

And here I sit, in another mystery--An infinite God who says He is in me and I have the mind of Christ.

Delightfully confusing. But that's what makes it true. That's what I'm calling the second level, even though "second level" sounds like Scientology. Maybe I need a better name.

Anything you can fully understand was probably invented by a human. Anything God made is more complex than you can fully understand. If you claim to understand anything completely, then you have put God in a box, and you are not giving Him the fear and respect He deserves. Even if I could understand grace (for instance) fully, I couldn't understand how God could be a God of justice and of grace. That's a separate subject altogether.