Theology is the study of God. It's an amazing and beautiful pursuit although it can be at times as confusing as it is rewarding.
It has been helpful for me to realize a few things in my study of God. I hope you find them helpful as well.
1. When the topic of study is God you can expect to be continually challenged by the subject matter.
Isa 55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
It is not a bad thing if you don't have everything in your theology figured out. No one who is studying the
true God has ever figured it all out. God's knowledge, power of intellect, and wisdom are so much greater than ours that it is not truly proper to even compare them. When we stand before the subject of God to learn, we are like toddlers, sucking our thumbs while sitting in the front row of an upper level nuclear physics class at MIT. You don't understand it all? That's OK! Just be glad that every once-in-a-while, by God's grace, you understand something!
2. God wants you to love him with all your mind! (and also with all your heart, soul, and strength)
Luk 10:27 And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."
Intellectual knowledge is wonderful... and pursuing intellectual knowledge of God as an act of worship in itself is holy. But to only know God with the mind and to not know him with the heart, life, and strength, is to not
really know him. Let your doctrine be applied doctrine. Let God's wonder in your mind empower your prayer and acts of service. Knowing everything about a woman is different than knowing her as your wife.
3. Don't try to understand everything that God has called "secret". It's called "secret" for a reason.
Deu 29:29 The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
There will always be questions we cannot answer about God and how he works. For example, how is it that God is sovereign over all things, including the will of man, yet man has a free will and is fully responsible for his actions? Some reasonable attempts to explain this apparent contradiction do exist, however in the end, even the Apostle Paul leaves us with:
Rom 9:20 But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?"
God has revealed himself to you in his word. He has endowed you with a will that can choose and tells you to repent of your sins and trust in his son for forgiveness and eternal life. Just do it.
And on the flip-side, may God give your blind heart sight and grant you the gift of repentance!
This isn't a contradiction. It's not illogical. It just
is and it's beyond our comprehension. If you know much about physics, you know that light is both a wave and a particle. Depending on how observe you can see it both ways. If light can have a wave-particle duality that is beyond human comprehension, God's working his sovereign will through man's will is no problem.
I of course, strive to have a theology that is consistent because God is consistent. But what is more important is that I remain true to what the Bible clearly speaks. I want to believe John 6 and John 15 with the same power and conviction. May God keep me from practicing any "exegetical" funny business to any portion of his perfect word.
So I end with a quote from a great preacher:
My love of consistency with my own doctrinal views is not great enough to allow me knowingly to alter a single text of Scripture. I have great respect for orthodoxy, but my reverence for inspiration is far greater. I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God. I never thought it to be any very great crime to seem to be inconsistent with myself, for who am I that I should everlastingly be consistent? But I do think it a great crime to be so inconsistent with the word of God that I should want to lop away a bough or even a twig from so much as a single tree of the forest of Scripture. God forbid that I should cut or shape, even in the least degree, any divine expression. So runs the text, and so we must read it...
Charles
Haddon Spurgeon
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