The constant need to explain. . .

Don't get me wrong.  I think explanations are good.  I am all in favor of transparency.  I like it when I understand why something is what it is.  That said, it is something different when we try to explain God as if He were a problem to be solved.  We get into trouble when we do that.   Yet this is precisely what we want to do and what we think we have to do -- explain God and His ways.

This is becoming and increasingly serious problem.  We want to explain why God created as He did and how He did, why He created them male and female, why He worked so slowly and deliberately down through the patriarchs, prophets, and ages, etc.  We want to be the apologist or interpreter for God but in so doing we have removed the mystery of God and turned Him into a rational being like ourselves.  It works because then we can hold Him accountable for what we do not like and for what we do not get.

Why is there the category of clean and unclean animals, food, times, seasons, etc?  Why did God have to do redemption through the death of His only Son?  What does it all mean?  How does it all work?  At some point in time we need to tell ourselves and those around us what God said to Job.  Where were you when all of this was being created and order assigned?  Do we presume to be God's advisors?  There is a certain arrogance in this that we seem unable to resist.  We want an explainable God because we want to know who to blame and to butter up.  God refuses to be that.  He does not woo or win us with neat and tidy explanations but confronts us with His holiness and mercy, His power and compassion, His grace and favor.  These are by their very nature not explainable.

Predestination is the ultimate example whereby we pull God down to our size and make from Him a neat if not somewhat arbitrary explanation of what we want to know -- why are some saved and not others?  Yet the doctrine of election was never meant to explain God -- only to comfort the elect in the knowledge of God's mercy which is not a whim but a promise.  I wish it were only predestination.  We also speculate about what happens to us when we die, about the souls of the unborn who die before birth, of the nature of the resurrection, the Real Presence, and so many other things.  We Lutherans are not alone.  We came out of a church which gloried in theological systems.  God does not give us a system.  He confronts us with who He is and what He has done.  That is our refuge and hope.  Either we take it to the bank or we will find ourselves heading down the garden path of deceit as we try to tie God up into a nice little box with the presumption that He wants us to peer into His mind instead of stand in awe of His displays of shocking mercy. The cross defies explanation but it invites faith and hope and love.  The sooner we remember this, the better off we will all be.  We do not have to know why.  We simply have to know God.  That relates to matters of how all thing came to be right down to sexuality and gender right down to events in our lives that we want to make into signs from God.  There is a little too much explaining going on and too little believing.