Learning from what cannot be fully understood

Scripture Read: Judges 6:12-14 Then the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak that was in Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press in order to save it from the Midianites. 12 The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, “The Lord is with you, O valiant warrior.” 13 Then Gideon said to him, “O my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.” 14 The Lord looked at him and said, “Go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. Have I not sent you?”

Application:  The secret things of the Lord’s are His. ~ There are many things we will never fully understand about our God. Yet, some of the mysteries He has revealed partially and it is important that we learn about them even though we may not fully comprehend them. Our passage displays one of these issues, as we read about “the Angel of the Lord”. Please note, He is not one of the countless creations that God has called angels, there are many passages in the OT that show clearly this term refers to God Himself. (Here is just one – Exodus 3:2-6)

The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. ³ So Moses said, “I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.” ⁴ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” ⁵ Then He said, “Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” ⁶ He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Through study of the Word we will discover that the “Angel of the Lord” is actually the pre-incarnate Christ. He appeared to men before He took on flesh. Jesus Christ, being God has no beginning, yet we know that he did have a beginning as far as in the flesh. This requires us to stretch our understanding of the God we know, which is a good thing, though we must be careful to never deceive ourselves into believing that we fully comprehend.  There is another danger that we want to guard against whenever we study the very deep things of theology. We must be careful to not be satisfied with knowledge only. When a child of God becomes satisfied with knowledge for knowledge’s sake they are on the path to becoming a Pharisee and not really “knowing” God. The Hebrew word for “know” in Jeremiah 9:23-24 is yada and implies an actual experience with God, not an academic acquiring of facts. David, the man after God’s own heart , said “make me know Your ways, O Lord…” Ps. 25:4. Hosea said, “Come, let us return to the Lord…So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord” Hosea 6:1,3.

Our relationship between us and the Holy Spirit becomes so precious, as we take in deep theology. Things that we can never fully comprehend because they are so far above our understanding of God and can only be understood fully by God himself. So to know Him we must allow the Holy Spirit to give us practical understanding and applications of that knowledge which is then called wisdom. What practical application can we find from the knowledge that “the angel of the Lord” is our Lord Jesus Christ Pre-incarnate? Let me just give you one right now; every other religion has a plan ~ created by the mind of a finite human about what we can do to get to God (understand, know Him, worship Him, make peace with Him, etc.), and that’s why all of them are based on works (what we do). God’s plan also is based on works… His works! Knowing that Jesus Christ has always existed because He is God helps us be confident in His plan. . Who else could accomplish “perfection” and everything that needed to be done to offer us peace with God and a salvation that is so complete? Sin must be paid for, yet God desires a relationship with the ones that are responsible for sin. 

Only the mind of God could make a plan that would pay the debt, offering the debtor a relationship with his Creator, while at the same time remaining completely just and righteous. We do not have a salvation that has been hatched in the mind of a short-sighted, fallen man. Instead, our salvation came from the infinite mind of God, Who has accomplished in the person of Jesus Christ the impossible and is making it known to us by the person of the Holy Spirit. With this we have confidence to sleep at night with a complete peace in our heart that whatever may happen while we are sleeping, eternally we are safe. Because our God had no beginning or ending, because His plans will be brought to fruition, we have peace in His plans for us.  

Meditation Questions: When you discover a truth that is impossible to fully comprehend what do you do with that? How do you feel about it? Do you study it more or just ignore it? If it is Truth, what can you be confident of? So many in the world want to make Jesus just a man, why is that unfair? When you consider how much about God we can never know, how should that make you feel? What does your answer show you about your relationship with God?