Quote of the Day (46)

I’ve told this story before, but it perfectly illustrates the mentality addressed in today’s quote.

In the mid-eighties, I was introduced to a fellow college student who claimed to be very interested in Jesus Christ, but had a “few” questions about the Bible first. I naturally offered to help in any way that I could. He handed me a list of familiar posers along the lines of “Where did Cain get his wife?”

Okay, the issues seemed important to him, so fair enough.

None of the questions was beyond my ability to handle, though one or two required a little research. After a couple of days, I gave him back six or seven pages of notes in response. He barely glanced at them before handing over a list of another fifteen to twenty questions of exactly the same sort.

I quickly realized my efforts to help him come to faith were likely to be fruitless.

From a post entitled “The Paralysis of Analysis” by David de Bruyn:

“The Bible teaches that believers who want to know God’s will must be prepared to do God’s will. This is all over Proverbs (Prov 1:7, 1:28-29, 2:5, 8:13, 9:10, 14:26-27, 15:33). In other words, submission precedes knowledge. No one gets the right to swill God’s will around in the test-tube of our own ruminations before we actually begin doing His will. God’s will is not a project we get to dissect with the scalpel of our own limited logic. No one is permitted to first challenge the coherence of the will of God like some kind of mental Sudoku, and then decide if he will actually submit to it. If you aren’t interested in loving your neighbour, God has no reason to help you understand the mysteries of predestination. If you won’t be nice to your cat and dog, it’s frankly laughable to imagine that the Creator of the universe is going to explain to you why he permitted Satan’s fall. God is not playing mental chess with us; He is interested in worshippers and friends.”

Amen to that. Especially the part about being nice to your cat and dog.