Sometimes God just doesn't make sense. He is, as near as I can tell, irrational. The key there though, is “as near as I can tell”. Really, it is inconceivable why a God who is perfect, right in every moral sense, all-powerful, and able to create an entire universe just by speaking would love me; I, who am far from perfect, often wrong, weak, and just create blog posts when I speak (well, figuratively – I don't have voice recognition software). If I so often fail him and make a hash of his plans, why give me a second chance (and a third, and a seventy-seventh)? Why let me in on what he's continuing to do, instead of just burning me (and, while he's at it, the rest of the world) to cinders and starting over? It is terribly unreasonable of him – definitely not what I would do, were I in his place. Thing is though, God does not answer to my reason. God cannot be contained, understood, analysed, or disected by my reason. He is bigger than that. He is God. I could say he's a bit like infinity, which is mathematically defined to be larger than any given number, in that he's grander than any given model, but of course that statement is logically contradictory (“this model of God states that he does not fit any model”). Isaiah 55:8-9 is often cited as an example of how we can't understand God's mind:
“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.”
Philip Yancey, in his book “What's So Amazing About Grace?”, makes the point that perhaps, rather than just God being a whole lot smarter and more subtle than us, maybe these verses are more about his ununderstandable grace – that he continues to work to connect with us, no matter how difficult we make it. All this leaves me quite grateful (and rather baffled) that I serve an unreasonable God.
(I hope my good friend Ash, who writes an excellent blog on reason and critical thinking does not take this post or this blog as an attack on him or his in any way. For me, this blog is a forum for all the things I can't say on his blog, or similar fora, and this post is why I can't say it. I still hold that reason and critical thinking are very valuable tools, and I hope I'm at least being consistent and reasonable with my unreason, if that makes any sense – I believe that I can understand God truly, yet not completely, in much the same way as Google Maps will give me a true, but incomplete understanding of Fredericton.)
God is unreasonable.....Gary Gallant would call him "prodigal"
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1 : characterized by profuse or wasteful expenditure : lavish
2 : recklessly spendthrift
3 : yielding abundantly : luxuriant —often used with of
Meaning that God extravagantly, recklessly and abundantly lavishes us with love. I know we typically use the word prodigal as a negative, but Gary quite reasonably explains that its an adjective that can be perceived positively or negatively. The prodigal son was prodigal with his wealth, bad.....God is prodigal with his love....good.
Read The Prodigal God sometime by Tim Keller....it explains God's recklessness
Right before the verses that you quoted from Isaiah 55, it says, "let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." So I think that Philip Yancey's point about God's grace being beyond our understanding fits the text pretty well.
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