Tread cautiously.
I have often heard my pastor make reference to a conversation between him and his friend a long time ago. He quotes his friend as saying, Let us be careful not to ascribe to the new creation what God did not ascribe to him. I hope I quoted it right.
That counsel is as golden as the day it was spoken, as it is today, that I am making reference to it. As we tread the grounds of new creation realities, we must be careful not to veer into idolatry, which is basically self-adulation and worship. Many have gone down this path but it never ends well.
Always remember that God is God; there is no “in him” or “in Christ” reality that will ever make you God. None! God did not give His Spirit to us to make us deputy Gods. We are not a part of the Godhead! We are sons of God (not even like THE SON of God, since He is God as a man). He is the Lord from heaven!
Sanity and soundness in Bible study will make you see that certain attributes and characteristics are exclusive to God. The giving of God’s Spirit does not give us every attribute of the Godhead. The boundary of Bible explanations is concerning the receiving of supernatural abilities and supernatural conduct, and even that has contextual implications.
For instance, only He is the Saviour; there is no “identification” that can make you a Saviour even though God gave you His Spirit. His Spirit in you does NOT make you a Saviour. You can’t save any man from His sins; you can only preach the message of the work that the Saviour accomplished for mankind.
He only is omnipresent too. Only God is everywhere at the same time; even if you have an “out of the body” experience, there is still no way you can be bodily active in two places at the same time. The best that can happen is that angels will put on your form to do something elsewhere, but not so for God. His Spirit is working in all our hearts at the same time. He is talking to multitudes at the same time, saying different things; that attribute is exclusive to Him.
Only God is omniscient, too. He knows everything! Even though God has given us the operation of the word of knowledge in the gift of His Spirit, that doesn’t mean we have become omniscient. Elisha was a seer who had quite a spectacular ministry. I mean, this man could hear battle plans in the enemy’s camp. Yet, when the son of the woman of Shunem died, he was totally unaware it would happen. It didn’t mean Elisha had become ineffective spiritually. He is a man! Paul didn’t know they were plotting to kill him the next day; it was his nephew who heard the plan and came to tell me. Was Paul spiritually deaf or blind? No! He is a man!
You have to admit that you will not always know everything. It will help you take the pressure of performance off yourself. If you have no information, then you don’t. You are NOT omniscient. You are NOT God! If things happen and you are not aware, stop beating yourself up. It is something else entirely, if you are NEVER aware of things going on; that’s not good, but if you often see and know, and sometimes you don’t get the “memo,” fine. Let God be God!
It is also okay if you don’t understand why certain things happened/happen. Many times, we are always seeking answers. Why this, why that? If we don’t get the answers, we get frustrated and start throwing tantrums at God, but, you see, God is God! There are times you will get answers, and there are times you won’t. You wouldn’t know why, yet you just know God is God! And God is Good!
There are people who have very remarkable power ministries who have had times they prayed for the sick and the sick wasn’t healed. Such experiences are usually confounding; I mean, you get the sick healed very often, but why is this one not healed? You know you are in faith; you know God wants to heal; the person seems to believe, but yet, you can’t see the healing. You move on and pray for another person, and bam, instant healing. You start to wonder why. Well, I can tell you that many times, we don’t get to know why. Does God know why? Yes! Lol. He is omniscient. Does that mean He will reveal the why to us? Sometimes, nope.
You see, one key basis of our worship is that God is not our mate. He is far above and far beyond us, and while we’ll keep learning to know Him better, a million lifetimes will never be sufficient to comprehend all the ways of God. Paul, a man of great revelation, exclaimed in Romans 11
After his thorough explanation of God’s salvation plan exclaimed with great wonder: The ways of God are past finding out, and his judgments are unsearchable! This is always the eventual conclusion of men who have devoted themselves to understanding the ways of God. They come to that point, when, even in the depths of their understanding, they have no option but to stare in helpless wonder at the majesty of what is yet to be unraveled. This stare, in helpless wonder, is the fulcrum of our worship.
The atheist only wants to worship what he can totally understand and explain; this is where he errs. The senses collapse and fall flat in the realm of God’s operations; this is why faith becomes a demand and a supply by God to us.
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The more we learn, grow, and walk with God, the more we will be humbled by the vastness, greatness, and depth of operations of this mighty God that we serve. Come to think of it, the space, which is but a tiny, infinitesimal portion of the majesty of God’s creation, is still being unraveled after thousands of years, and if the earth endures another million years, mankind will still stand in awe of what they are yet to discover.
Like that song writer said: Wide-eyes and mystified, may we be just like a child, staring at the beauty of our King.
May we never lose our wonder.
Amen!
Credit: Pastor Popoola Oluwatobi
