On Sunday, we looked at the story of Absalom’s death and the divided loyalties of David. We focused on certainty and doubt, especially in regards to our relationship with God. One of the points that I made was that we sometimes create complexity in order to avoid the reality of sin. I said:
We complicate issues in a vain attempt to free ourselves from guilt and shame. God is sometimes so clear, but if we take Him at His word, it means that we have to face the reality of our own brokenness. It is easier to make the whole issue muddy. God can’t hold us accountable if it’s confusing, right? WRONG. If something is true and sure, then it doesn’t depend on our willingness to accept it. We can create all sorts of gray areas and claim complexity, but the truth of God just keeps on being true. We are only doing ourselves harm by working so hard to explain it away.
We end up creating doubt so that we don’t have to face the difficulty of a clear standard. If God is unknowable and ambiguous, then we don’t need to try to find Him or strive to follow Him, because it is an impossible task. This allows us to settle into subjectivism, defining God as we want Him to be and finding a community of people who agree with us. God gets lost in the complexity.
Of course, the opposite side of the coin is incomplete as well. When we simplify God down to coffee cup verses and pull quotes, we are hiding from the very real complexity of life. When people think that the solution to our problems are obvious – if we could just make a law or start a movement, it would be fixed – they are lying to themselves. Simplifying God and the mess that sin has created is another way of hiding from the problem. God loses His immensity when we minimize complexity.
While it sounds like I am speaking out of both sides of my mouth, I am not. I am not pressing for certainty or doubt, simplicity or complexity, on their own. What we need is a way to know what the appropriate response is in any given situation. This is exactly what God has given us in His self-revelation.
As Christians, we understand that this world is complex, because it was created by an infinite God. He designed order into everything in the cosmos, down to the interactions at the subatomic level. What sin has done is twisted every one of these perfectly-tuned systems; since they all overlap and rely on one another, the destruction of sin is massively complex. Since we are creation, and both sinners and victims of sin’s effects, we are not able to understand or solve the problems. We add to the problems, but have no way to ever get out from underneath them.
As people in a complex world, who face problems too complex for us, we are stuck. We are dead in our trespasses, but we are also overwhelmed by the destruction of sin. So God acts. Ephesians 2:4–7 tells us:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
God doesn’t give us an order and answer that we can apply apart from Him, He gives us Himself. He doesn’t hand us the tools to do the work, He completes it. In this, He simplifies the answer to our problems, without making our problems any less complicated. God invites us to be the recipients of the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. We are going to receive a very complicated salvation that reverses all of sin’s effects; we are going to experience this by very simply trusting Him. We are called into a life of simple obedience that we live out in a world that is a complicated mess. In this, we can be certain about God and all that he has given us, while we continue to be very unsure about anything else. One of my favorite verses in the Bible points to this:
The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. | Deuteronomy 29:29
There are a lot of things that you will never know. Knowing that there are secret things that God intentionally keeps from us, takes away the burden to have to figure it all out. It also allows us to focus on what has been revealed. When we do, it builds up certainty to carry us through the doubt.
The answer is not in pretending that we have nothing to hold on to, or simplifying everything down to solvable problems. The answer is found by seeing that sin has destroyed in complex ways, but God is greater. He is more complex than the greatest problems and intends to reverse every part of sin’s effects. Our part is to trust Him in this, and to follow His commands. When we do, we become part of God’s complex plan of redemption.