We live in very strange times, something I’m reminded of every time I go to the store and for some strange reason everyone is wearing masks, except me! I wonder if I’ve entered the Twilight Zone, but my family assures me this is very much reality. So more than ever I’m in need of recalibration. I came across this phrase, “recalibrate your reality,” while listening to an episode of White Horse Inn some time ago, and it stuck with me. To calibrate usually refers to some device that does measurements, and setting it up so it can measure accurately. Put an “re” before it, and it is now being fine tuned to measure more effectively. The gentleman being interviewed on the podcast said we spend most of the week living in what we think is THE reality, and the God stuff is part of THAT. But that has it exactly backward. The Sunday reality is THE reality, and the rest of our week is part of that. Our tendency is to fit God into our story, when what we should be doing is fitting our story into God’s. Big, huge, gargantuan difference!
Most of the time when we go to Church, or spend our daily time in communion with God through his word and prayer, we tend to think we leave those places to go out into reality. Since we live in a thoroughly secular culture, we’re inclined to live as if the physical or material reality is all that there is, and that our meaning, hope, and significance comes from our mundane daily existence. If you think that’s not true of any one of us, see how easily disappointed or frustrated or angry we get when things don’t go our way. It’s as if we’re trying to fit God into our story, and not accepting that we’re supposed to fit into his. Seeing people in masks everywhere does this to me. It makes me angry, and I can start judging people, and thinking not at all like a Christian. For me, that’s a very good time to recalibrate my reality, to realize that God is still in control of all things, seen and unseen, and that Christ has been raised to rule over it all, now, and forever.
Except, that’s not so easy to believe and accept, that God is in control of the entire mess that is life in this fallen world. In fact, many who reject God use life’s misery and suffering as the reason to reject him, the so-called problem of evil. If God is all powerful, they reason, then he should be able to stop evil, and if he is good, he must. Since he doesn’t, he can’t, and is neither all powerful nor good. That’s perfectly logical, but also erroneous. First, just because something seems wrong to me, seems incompatible with what I perceive God is or should be, that doesn’t mean it is. I’m finite and limited in my knowledge and understanding of everything, so how dumb would it be of me to think that I have the capacity to stand in judgment of God. I hate sin, suffering, evil, and death as much as the next guy, but it never made sense to me that somehow because of that, that I got to determine that these things disqualified God from being God.
There is also the not inconsiderable fact that the Bible never has a problem accepting that sin, suffering, evil, and death are perfectly compatible with an almighty, sovereign, good and loving God. Rather, God is the means by which his suffering creatures try to make sense of what to them so rarely makes sense. Many characters look at what’s going on in their lives and their world and wonder, what the hell is going on! Cluelessness is a major feature of God’s people all throughout Scripture, but none conclude that because they are clueless, that God must not exist, or that God if he does exist, he is impotent and not good. They accept what pagan King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon declared after he had been driven from and restored to his kingdom by the God of Israel, “that the Most High God is ruler over the kingdom of men and sets anyone He wants over it.” The reality we inhabit, the reality that is real, is what King David declared to the people of Israel not long before his own death:
Praise be to you, Lord,
the God of our father Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.
11 Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all.
12 Wealth and honor come from you;
you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power
to exalt and give strength to all.
13 Now, our God, we give you thanks,
and praise your glorious name.
This is the reality I daily seek to recalibrate myself into, the only reality that makes sense whether I fully understand it, or not.
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