“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord – Isaiah 55:8

Sometimes we try to understand how things happen the way they do and why God allows them. What God does and how He does them has intrigued mankind for ages and sent many on some interesting quests to understand Him. As psychologists probe the thoughts of their patients, many people have tried to get into God’s mind to probe His thoughts. They’ve tried to pick His brain to know how He does things and why He does them. How theatrical those efforts are!

One thing that has intrigued and mystified many is the simplicity of salvation. God says:

“If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved” (Rm. 10:9-10).

The natural mind responds: “That is foolishness.”

 I remember the day one of my friends posed this question to me: “How can an intellectual like you believe that somebody’s death on a wooden cross can take away your sins?” The idea baffled his cognitive mind, and he couldn’t process it intellectually. But, how could he? For spiritual things are spiritually discerned.  

^“The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:14).

The simplicity of things is that God’s ways are higher than ours. We should realize that His thoughts are way higher above our feeble minds. No one can make God’s ways fit into their human pattern. Nobody can bring God’s thoughts to conform to theirs. Such fruitless enterprises simply frustrate the natural mind. Imagine the folly of trying to investigate God by bringing Him to a human court. That’s how scornful every human effort to understand the ways and thoughts of God are to Him. Our duty is to just obey.

After all those miraculous ways God dealt with Israel from Egypt, like the people of today, they still wanted things their way. Listen to how God pleaded for their hearts, as he pleads for ours today:

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost” (Isaiah 55:1)

Tell this to the man on Madison Avenue, N.Y.C., the advertising capital of the world, and he see how he will dismiss you. How can you buy something without money? But that is the wisdom of God. Call it foolishness as you may, but, again, He says, “The foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:25).

So, God’s plea to the simple mind is:

Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.

For your own sake, it’s easier to just accept some things for what they are rather than oppressing yourself by stressing to explain things. God cannot be solved as a jigsaw puzzle. Faith is the only reasonable means of knowing and understanding Him; and how blissful is the one who finds Him this way! (Rm. 10:17; Heb. 11:1)

I pray you finally settle in your heart that God is too lofty for any human to completely know and understand. His ways are beyond your best imagination and your intellectual capacity cannot capture the thoughts of God. He chooses to reveal as much as He wants to, and nothing more.

The simplicity of the Gospel message therefore is:

“Be reconciled to God.” For, “God made Him [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 20-21).

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes will not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16).

Can you trust Him?