Can we accept that God is in control? Can we submit ourselves to God even when His ways are vastly different from our ways? It seems like our world will only follow God if He follows our rules of fairness and timing. If we don’t understand a rule God sets for us, we demand an explanation or we just ignore it. When God commands restitution for an unjust act, we understand it, agree with it, and follow. When God commands us not to plant two kids of seeds in the same field, we kind of see what He’s getting at, but we don’t agree, and so we ignore it.
God doesn’t always act in keeping with our own moral code or our timing. Jesus tells this parable where all the workers get the same pay no matter how long they work and we scratch our heads. “It’s a metaphor,” we proclaim, and so take away only the theological subcurrent of the passage. We assume the message here is that heaven is the end reward of those who come to trust in Christ on their deathbed as much as for those raised to follow from birth. But what about the message that God is above and beyond our human ideals of fairness? What of the reminder that God is so much more than we are that He can often seem alien, different, holy?
And as we study Moses on the Mountain, what do we make of God’s timing? Moses was on the mountain for a week before God revealed Himself. And then it was 40 days to give Him the tablets of the commandments He had already spoken. As we’ll see tomorrow, it can’t be surprising to us that the people turned away from God and back to the familiar godlessness when god didn’t act to fit their timing. Can we accept that God is in control, and not us?
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