God Guesswork

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.”  Genesis 1:26  NASB

God said – “How can I know what God wants me to do in this situation?”  Certainly you’ve asked yourself that question.  But unless you have an open ­two-way communication channel with God, you’ve probably asked without a direct answer.  You have to guess what God wants, hoping that your assessment is correct.  After a while, you realize that there is no formula for spiritual success.  Most of life’s decisions are guesswork.  That doesn’t mean it’s all random and chaotic.  Not at all!  What it means is that when we decide, we make a choice based on the best information we have at the moment, and often that turns out to be not the whole picture.  What we think we want is a fixed guidebook, a set of rules that guarantee that every choice we make will be the ultimate right choice.  We think we want God to talk to us now, in this moment when we have to decide.  We believe we must always be right.

But is that what we really want?  Or really need?  A formula, a rule, a law?  Can there ever be a law that specifies what we should do in every situation?  And if God should choose to tell us what to do every time, would that really help?  God’s perspective is a bit more expansive than ours.  He sees the end of all the possibilities in a way that is hidden from us.  If He told us what to do in every situation based on His view of the matter, would we actually do it, or would we hesitate because we can’t see how it all works out?  Perhaps having free choice depends on a limited understanding of the matter, and if that understanding were always informed by divine intervention, we wouldn’t really have a “free” choice at all.  Maybe life is supposed to have a bit of guesswork built into it. 

Look at it this way.  How would your children grow up if you managed every decision they made?  How could they understand themselves if you hovered over them every second, always telling them what to do next?  What kind of people would they become?

Of course, there are a lot of biblical situations where God shows up and speaks.  We read those passages and imagine that direct divine communication is what we need.  But look carefully at those verses.  Most of the time God’s directions are not for individuals, and when they are, they are often quite distressing.  Remember the prophets’ response to God’s directives?  “Woe is me,” is the usual immediate outcome, and even more so if God reveals to the prophet what his life will be like as a result of doing what God wants done.  It’s scary to think about the verse that says God reveals to Paul all that he must suffer for the Kingdom.  Few men could handle such a revelation.  Now that you’ve lived a while, imagine how you would have reacted if God had revealed to you everything that you would go through when you started this journey.  Would you still have signed on the dotted line?  Maybe it’s just better not to know what’s next, and if that is better, then we should stop acting as if we want to know and just do what we can now and trust God will do what He can with our choices.

Topical Index: guesswork, choice, future, Genesis 1:26