Bible Studies

Past Finding Out

by Terry Barlow
08/26/14
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    We’ve heard it said often that people just need time in certain cases or situations to “figure things out” and there are times when that may be true. But when it comes to the ways of God we’re told in Paul’s letter to the Romans that they are “past finding out” or “untraceable” even by Dick Tracy, or the best detectives among us! (Romans chapter 11 v.33) It doesn’t depend on the determination or diligence of the seeker or finder. In fact, in the same letter we read that one class of people who were looking hard for God’s righteous ways couldn’t find them and, ironically, another class of people who weren’t even looking were the very ones who found them. “…Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained righteousness – namely the righteousness that comes through faith. But Israel, pursuing the law for righteousness has not achieved the law.——Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were by works (of the law). What that tells us is that God’s ways are REVEALED more than they are found out, and they are revealed when and where, and how (by faith) and to whom God choses to reveal them.

   That, it turns out, is the great stumbling stone of all religion; that salvation is achieved by faith and not by works (at least not our own works, but our faith in Another’s works). “But I’ve been mostly good!” We protest. “I meant well.” “My good deeds outweigh my bad ones!” As long, that is, as we use our own scales and not God’s. You might say we stumble over our own scales. Remember when the apostle Thomas used his natural reason perfectly when he commented, “But, Jesus, how can we know the way (which Jesus insisted they knew) when we don’t know where you are going?” Using spiritual reason, on the other hand, we CAN know the way through faith even if we don’t know where exactly we are going or what it’s going to look like, or what’s going to happen next. We have Abraham himself, the father of the faithful, as our patterned example in that, the one who went forth from wealth and comfort, (as Moses did later) not knowing where he was going. (There is no real Hebrew word for faith like there is in Greek, in Hebrew it’s more like “faithful”)

  We can know the way by knowing Jesus Who revealed Himself to us AS the way, knowing Him in a personal abiding, moment to moment relationship. O, praise the LORD for that! We love Him because He first loved us….and continues to love us so deeply that this love is constantly flowing toward us and within us, bearing us up in its current like a river.