The Christian faith seems to be full of things that I believe to be true yet appear to be in conflict with each other. For the longest time, I tried to develop cleaver arguments to explain away these paradoxes. But the more I thought about them, the less secure I became. I could not just explain away these paradoxes. I even began to doubt my faith and began to wonder if everything that I had been taught since a child was a lie.
How could God be sovereign over everything and still give man free will? How can God will that His Son be wrongly murdered, which is a sin, and not be a sinner? How can God be perfect yet order Abraham to murder Issac? How can God be both a righteous judge, full of wrath and yet full of mercy and grace? How can Jesus be both fully God and man at the same time? How can God be One and yet consist of three distinct persons? If God is a spirit, why do the Scriptures describe Him at times as having body parts?
The Holy Scriptures appear to be full of paradoxes, things that could drive a person mad just trying to partially figure them out. Many of these things have plagued my mind for years. But I have recently found relief as I have begun to accept the fact that as the heavens are higher than the earth so are God's thoughts and ways higher and more complex than mine. I like the fact that I can't really catagorize and efficiently boil down God's truth into easy to figure out formulas.
While recently reading The Gospel According to Moses: What My Jewish Friends Taught Me about Jesus by Athol Dickson, I learned that I am not alone. Others have wrestled with the paradoxes in the Scriptures and come out with the same childlike faith. Jesus said that unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Some things I am not supposed to understand, I am just supposed to believe. It requires faith to know and serve God.
Athol Dickson wrote, "What if God placed these paradoxes within the Scriptures to cause me to struggle for the truth? What if it is the struggle he desires as much as the truth itself? Could it be that the truth lies not in one of the seemingly opposed answers to the paradox, but in between them, within the paradox itself?...I have learned that God uses the paradoxes of Scripture to ease me back toward the middle between the truths, because only from there can I keep all truths firmly in view…Faith and works are both important. Justice and mercy are required. My actions are somehow free and predestined. God is somehow everywhere and uniquely here. Both halves of each paradoxical statement are equally true, and in each case I must apply them to my life wholeheartedly, not in moderation, but to the greatest extent possible. Yet each half without the other becomes a distortion and a barrier on the way from here to my Creator. I must somehow find a place where the truths of each paradox mix and mingle harmoniously. There, in that delicate balance lies the path of righteousness. And at the end of that path stands God…Unfortunately, the human mind – or at least the Western mind – or at least my mind – finds it impossible to hold two paradoxical truths simultaneously and equally…It seems obvious to me that any God capable of creating the universe must be an unsolvable riddle for a finite human mind. So I believe in Jesus precisely because he is pure paradox, and on a certain level, only paradox can reveal the divine."
It seems that in order to arrive at the center of the road(God's pure truth) one must have two extremes. Both halves of the paradoxes act as two guides pointing toward the center, which is Jesus Christ. The answers we are looking for can only be found in the journey of personal discovery. Between the paradoxes, I discover something amazing, both halves are true and yet miss a critical frame of reference without the other. Because the truth is so grand, it must be God thing.
