Christian, don’t only associate, read, learn from, and listen to those you completely agree with. Doing so, you miss out on God helping you (a crooked stick) see straight lines drawn with other crooked sticks.
Two decades ago, I had to agree with nearly everything in a book before I would read it (which is sorta impossible, right, to know what a book says before reading it?). I remember buying a set of commentaries at a bookstore in Greenville, excited to take them home, and then at home I noticed something in the introduction I didn’t like and was prepared to take them back to the store…
Though the book is small, my slow reading abilities are continuing to plod through something I bought a few weeks ago that has turned out to have some different views than I expected. Two decades ago, I wouldn’t have even made it past the description and purchased it. Fifteen-ish years ago, I probably wouldn’t have made it through the first chapter. And even in a chapter that I have said in my mind several times, “But what about Romans 5, what about this, what about that”… you come away with comforting gems like this:
God is mysterious. Humans do not get to know everything about God. Humans are not owed a rational explanation for everything. It seems impossible anyway: given who God and humans are, there remains a difference that is not easily bridged by God or humans. The downside is that we may rightly feel as if we are left in the dark, wondering about God and about whether God is really part of our lives. The upside perhaps is that not knowing leads us to reflect more on God and to long for God in our lives. To paraphrase Augustine, our hearts do not rest, until they rest in God. 1
- Mark S. Smith, The Genesis of Good and Evil: The Fall(out) and Original Sin in the Bible, First edition. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019), 64. ↩
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