Consider This:
What if the God we trust most
is the one we've created in our own minds?
This week, I had the privilege of hearing retired Army Ranger Jeff Struecker speak at the Tampa Bay Leadership Prayer Breakfast hosted by CBMC. Jeff played a significant role in the Battle of Mogadishu that was the subject of the movie Black Hawk Down.
He used a common Army Ranger experience to illustrate the kind of faith that defines Jesus’ followers as his disciples: a parachute.
We can know everything about parachutes:
The difference between a drag parachute and one that we can steer.
How to fold and pack a parachute properly.
How it feels to wear a parachute on our backs all day long.
We can know all there is to know about a parachute—all of which is helpful (and in some cases essential) knowledge. But until we jump out of a plane and trust the parachute to save us, all our knowledge remains theoretical. We don’t fully and intimately know the parachute.
And more pointedly, we don’t actually trust it.
The Shortcut
What Jeff illustrated highlights the difference between rational knowledge about God and intuitive knowledge of him—and the difference is profound.
I addressed this in my last article, where I gave a frank warning:
The great danger facing the church is that we substitute rational knowledge for intuitive knowledge. In other words,
We think that knowing ABOUT God
is the same as KNOWING God.And while we might rationally deny we believe this, our behavior and thinking habits indicate otherwise. Like our society as a whole, we have unknowingly fallen into the trap of leaning more on rational understanding than intuitive [understanding].
Here’s the article if you want the full context…
There are a lot of moving parts here—including how our brains process information and how our culture has increasingly prioritized explicit, analytical knowledge over relational and experiential understanding. But the main point is pretty simple:
We trust in what we
most frequently think about—
and how we think about it.
This is the essence of Jesus’ teaching about the “eye”—biblically, the center of our perception: What we regard as trustworthy shapes what we pursue and how we live.
The eye is the lamp of the body; so then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
Mt. 6.22-23
What we choose to “see” and how we choose to “see” it (our mindset) will lead our hearts either toward God or away from him.
Our rational knowledge ABOUT God—which includes our theology, doctrines, traditions and creeds—is explicit, concrete and clear. It feels more concrete than our intuitive knowledge OF God, which is relational, fluid, contextual, ambiguous, paradoxical, open-ended … anything but explicit, concrete and clear.
And more concrete = more trustworthy—or so it appears.
It’s not about rational knowledge being unreliable or unnecessary, it’s about how we engage with it. Our grave danger is that we actively trust the theology, doctrines, traditions and creeds we’ve created about God, more than we actively trust God himself.
We use our rational knowledge as a shortcut to faith. Since our theology, doctrines, traditions and creeds are God-related, it’s easy to “see” that trusting them is the same as trusting God.
It is not.
Trusting them is like trusting our parachute knowledge, which doesn’t actually require any faith.
Trusting God—relationally, experientially—is like trusting our parachute, which won’t happen without faith.1
As If That Weren’t Bad Enough …
There’s an even more sinister danger lurking in the mix: Our rational knowledge about God can quickly become the framework for relating to him.
Our frameworks can become the lens we look through to “see” God and our reality. They can generate false expectations about God that reshape our very perception of him.2
From here, it’s a rapid descent into the realm of dictating who God should be. In other words, we take on a role only God is suited for, and God becomes that which we shape to suit our needs and desires.
This is where the image of the potter and the clay becomes relevant.