Torah Discovery

           As we begin this journey that God has called us forth to, as we make the commitment to ingest the scriptures from beginning to end, we must do so with the words of the prophet in the forefront of our minds. In fact, we must imprint this truth on the forefront of our minds. Failure to do so will most certainly lead to misunderstanding, frustration, and accusation. For generations, men and women have both embraced God and viciously attacked God, all based on their willingness to accept or reject this one premise: His ways are higher than our ways, and His thoughts higher than our thoughts. The Word of God contains stories of beauty, but there are also many realities that are difficult to swallow and grasp. The temptation of man—since our birth in the garden—has led us to the same end: to make the word of God more palatable and enticing, understandable and simplistic. Instead of wrestling with the difficult spiritual and ethical truths, instead of seeking divine knowledge and understanding, we have taken it upon ourselves to become the chief editors of God’s Word. In other words, instead of taking God at His Word, we have taken the liberty to tell our fellow human beings—and God Himself for that matter—what He is thinking, how He feels, how He must act, what His own intentions are, and how He must behave in His dealings with mankind. For indeed, God’s ways are are higher than our ways, and instead of striving to grasp them, we’ve pulled them down so that He essentially acts and thinks as we would want Him to in any given situation.

The scriptures have been a thorn to man because they certainly do not conform to our expectations. In fact, they often transcend our understanding, and they speak in contradiction to our own ways. If we can learn to submit to the pure, unadulterated Word of God, then it, by no means, will make them easier to grasp, but piece by piece, we will begin to see beauty in the incongruity. God’s web of truth and majesty will slowly unfold before our eyes.

In several of his writings, Paul emphasizes these truths:

The wisdom of God is not synonymous with the wisdom of man. Through our own wisdom, through our own understanding, we will never come to fully see, know, or understand God. God designed it this way, why?

Reading and grappling with the story, from beginning to end, I am being deconstructed, we are being deconstructed. Before God can unveil His truths He must unravel ours. Unless we allow Him to do so, and unless He chooses to do so, then we will never grasp the truths of the good tidings from Genesis 1:1 through the book of Revelation. They will always remain to us a collection of disconnected fables, proverbs, prayers, and myths.