Fools For Christ

What is the bible? Is it the story of a people’s journey with God or is it an account of human existence as told by God. Is it a book about me or is it a book about God?

You and I have not always been here, and we will not always be here. As temporary beings we lack the capacity to see the whole picture. In contrast, God is eternal. He has always been and He will always be.

Throughout the Bible we see God taking the whole of human experience and pulling everything together into a pre, post, and present tense historic record of His divine redemption.

Only God knows and understands the human narrative from beginning to end. Why then would we entrust our eternal souls to individuals who cannot know or fully understand the human experience and yet choose to reject the sole credible version of it?

Some finite being stands before a crowd of several hundred. His authority is backed up by the few doctoral degrees his human mind has been able to earn during his 70 years of existence. He puts a smug half smile on his face, points his boney finger at a picture of the earth, and says, “No thinking person would ever believe in the biblical account of creation.” “No rational person would accept that the account of Adam and Eve indicates only two genders or is a picture of God’s plan for marriage.”

... and the few hundred sheep nod in drone-like agreement. This man then prints a book that records his 70-year-old wisdom. Thousands buy it. Well-meaning professors and seminarians sweat, and struggle pull the Word of God into some kind of coherent agreement with this man’s learning … as if his theory, not God’s Word, is the standard to which all thinking should align.

Paul describes this scenario with far fewer words than I do in Romans 1:22, “Professing themselves to be wise they became fools.”

It is better to be scorned and thought a fool for believing in the everlasting God than to be celebrated as an intellect for believing in a fool. I choose identify with Paul who told the Corinthian church, “We are fools for Christ.” (I Corinthians 4:10)

-Nathan