Words Creating Space

I’m praying that my young adult children will have a growing capacity for the Lord as they navigate life’s twists and turns upon this earth. I pray that this capacity will be nurtured by an awareness that they were made to be completed by something this present world can’t fully provide. This awareness can be likened to finding pieces of a puzzle that are made to fit together. I pray that my boys will recognize that it is God who completes them through meeting the deepest longings of their hearts.

I think this is why we are writing these blog posts on God’s character. We pray for our readers with a desire that you, too, would know that you were created for God and that your understanding of Him would be more wondrous than perhaps it had been before. God’s goodness existed before the world began and was expressed through all that He created. That means that each of us was created to represent a facet of His goodness and that we are restless within ourselves until we find an outlet through which to express this goodness.

God’s Way

An important element of God’s character is His patience, which is a way in which He expresses His goodness to us. God invites us into a relationship and His spirit accompanies us in a process of getting to know Him. This process is a sacred pilgrimage as we experience God’s interaction with us in sure, kind steps and it harkens back to the way in which He offered Himself to Adam and Eve. 

The Bible Project has a podcast on the Trees within the Garden of Eden that has helped me understand God’s intentions behind his statement in Genesis 3:22 that says “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” This statement seemed to communicate that God did not want mankind to have the knowledge of good and evil. However, this podcast offered that God intended to bestow knowledge to mankind but through the process of relationship. God’s declaration was an acknowledgment that mankind was not in a stage of maturity to be able to wisely handle the knowledge of good and evil. In eating from the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve chose what appealed to their physical body at the expense of their souls. Through His mercy, God blocked access to the Tree of Life so that mankind would not live forever in this crippled, fallen state. God’s desire was to bestow knowledge of good and evil through a process of coming to know, experience and trust Him first. This experiential knowledge of Him would develop different fruit and desire in the lives of His people. Knowledge of the goodness of God would help mankind to more rightly acknowledge evil and its capacity for destruction. God’s method of bestowing this knowledge was through a patient process where mankind would experience His goodness. We cannot fully know God apart from experiencing how he interacts with us. His character is revealed as we experience His patience with us.

Are we willing to be agents of God’s patience on earth? When we are, it means that we give others more grace.  How often do I become angry with others for the smallest things? I have to remind myself that if my desire is to help others more fully know and understand who God is, it is impossible apart from mirroring his ways. God’s anger was often kindled against those who claimed to know Him but who treated others badly. We show how superficial our knowledge is of God when we are not replicating his ways. When we recognize that He approaches us through love, kindness and patience, we are more apt to approach others this way.

Many of the Psalms express David’s deep desire to know God and to have God know him. As David brings all of himself to God, it acknowledges the secure relationship the two enjoy. David is convinced of God’s love and patience with him and God’s ways  encourage David to pursue God with all of his heart.

During the season of Lent, we acknowledge our need for forgiveness and the power our desires for things like power and control can have in leading us down paths that can harm us as well as others. However, Lent is also a valuable time to acknowledge God’s patient presence with us. We can realize that from the beginning of the world, God longed to reveal to us first the knowledge of Himself through experiencing His ways, and that all other knowledge of ourselves and of the world would flow out of that. May God’s amazing patience with us lead to more wonder, awe and capacity in our hearts and lives for Him.  May we also be motivated to love and serve others with the same patience that God shows us. Finally, may your recognition of God’s immense patience with you irresistibly connect you to Him and may your growing patience be the piece of the puzzle that connects others to God.