Serving God with 12 Shirts???????

Numbers 15-17

Wow!!! Lots of death, lots of violence, lots of rebellion.  These three chapters present us with one of our greatest dilemmas.  What do we do when God acts in ways that seem contrary to what we know of Him through His Son, Jesus the Christ?  If you expect an old broken down sculptor from the hills of East Tennessee to know the answer to that one you're gonna be sorely disappointed.  I don’t understand.  I remember when my Dad died.  I had pleaded with God.  Here was a man who had lived his entire life devoted to serving God and he died at 67 with 12 shirts in his closet.   What did it get him?  Other men with no “God” credentials were living on while cancer finally laid my Dad’s ravaged body down. 

Try this.  Go outside on a clear dark night and look up at the stars and shake your fist at the heavens and pour out all your non-understandings.  Scream and shout till your hoarse and there’s no more tears left.  You know what will happen?  Nothing!  Night will be just as quiet and dark and deep as it was when you started.  I don’t understand God.  But at some point I had to come to grips with this one great truth of my faith.  I don’t have to or need to!!!  If He truly is who He declares Himself to be, Lord and Maker, All Powerful, All Present, Holder of everything in the entire universe, including me, in His Authoritative Power then that is ENOUGH.  Then at that point I can live peacefully with “For My (God’s) thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”  Isaiah 55:8-9

I regularly lie under that black night sky I mentioned above and you know what it always says to me?  “I made all this for you at this moment to say, ‘ I love you, Lee!’”  Not as quiet as it once was.