Life's Mysteries Explained

Philosophical and theological puzzles rendered so simple a child could understand

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Life will remain primarily a mystery and a frustration

until you understand the heart and goals

of the God who is ultimately in control

of everything that touches your life.

God loves you because he loves you.

He loves you, not for what you can do for him,

but for what he can do for you.

You are of infinite worth

to the One who gave his all

that you might spend eternity with him.

The mind-boggling intensity of God’s love is as close and as crucial as the oxygen you breathe. Despite this, we tend to drift into regarding the infinite love of God as if it had the practical relevance of the countless grains of sand in a desert we have never seen. Let's bring our thinking down from the clouds to hard reality. The fact of divine love makes the happiness of Almighty God forever dependent upon your happiness. If you hurt, God hurts.

When pondering God’s plans for us, we tend to zero in on our role in God’s labor force. But although the Almighty has every right to treat you as his worker, the God of love chooses to be not your Boss, but your Mommy/Daddy. And as the best imaginable Parent, the Lord is devoted to your welfare. Foremost to him is your fulfillment and development. The Lord has ministry plans for you, but they are for your sake, not for his gain (God, after all, is totally self-sufficient). And any tasks he lovingly allocates are just a fraction of his overall dreams for you.

Anything God asks you to do is because it is in your very best interest. God’s blueprint for your life focuses on your endless happiness and fulfillment. This is not to be confused with short term ease and bliss that ultimately wears thin and crumbles. Like little children who think happiness means having no rules and an endless supply of candy, we still have a lot of growing up to do before we understand what is truly in our best interest. Much of what we presently clamor for we will eventually discover is not what we really want after all. In contrast, the infinite knowledge and intelligence of God focuses on things we will be eternally thrilled about. That often puts our priorities at odds with God’s priorities, even though both he and we seek our happiness.

Some people who haven’t thought it through imagine God is egocentric because he asks us to praise and worship him. What we hold highest in life sets the ceiling for personal growth, achievement and honor. And being preoccupied with oneself makes one’s personality shrivel. That’s why our loving Lord wants you to be God-centered. The Lord’s only wish is that we act as wisely and unselfishly as him. Like the Perfect Leader that he is, he asks nothing of us that he would not do himself. It is the very nature of love – and hence the nature of God – to focus on the beloved. Just as he wants you to be God-centered, his plans focus on you as if you were the center of the universe.

Your love means infinitely more to God than all the diamonds in myriads of galaxies. And praise is a natural expression of love. Lovers find praises effortlessly flowing from their lips as they praise their beloved’s looks, abilities, and so on.

If God wanted slaves he could in an instant create too many to cram on to every planet in the universe. The All-powerful, Self-Sufficient Lord of the Universe craves your praise only because he is love and is rapt in you.

A Puzzle

For insight into the plans of the God who controls your world, let’s briefly examine a matter that frustrates and puzzles every Christian sooner or later: Why does God sometimes let us lose battles with temptations? We want to be free. We’ve sincerely prayed that we lose interest in sin. Surely it’s in God’s own interest to answer that prayer, and yet still God refuses us a miraculous deliverance. Why?

For a webpage of testimonies of miraculous deliverances from addictions I interviewed a number of people. I became increasingly perplexed to learn that it seemed everyone who had experienced such a miracle still had one addiction – often smoking, but not always – that caused them great shame and embarrassment as they kept floundering in their attempts to beat that particular habit. Since helping people be freed from besetting sins is most important to me, I earnestly sought God about this puzzle.

I discovered there are two types of divine deliverances from slavery to sin. There is the sudden deliverance that takes almost no effort on the person’s part, and there is the slow deliverance that requires the person to cooperate with God in fighting a prolonged, painful battle with temptation. The deliverance where God does it all, is a manifestation of God’s power and brings him great glory. The deliverance that hinges on our partnership, however, is a manifestation of God’s love and wisdom, and brings us eternal glory. In the second type, God risks his name being blackened whenever we fall and dares share with us the honor when we win. Like nothing else, the prolonged battle builds within us the Godlike character that equips us to rule with God for all eternity. God loves us so much that eventually the opportunity for this training comes to all of us.

Often what most keeps us bound to sin is that we are inadequately motivated. Anyone, for instance, who thinks he can’t stop stealing suddenly finds new power to resist when a police officer is near. The removal of temptation might make our actions more Godlike but it wouldn’t do a thing to make our heart more Godlike. It would do nothing to heighten our motivation to do what is right.

To be like Christ is to sweat blood praying, ‘Not my will.’ Jesus, who might just happen to know a bit more about it than your average evangelist, said that to be his follower we must deny ourselves (Luke 9:23, note the context). If Bill’s flesh is crying out for sin and he fights that desire, he is denying himself. With every second’s resistance he is becoming more like his Savior. Take away the craving for sin, however, and that opportunity is lost. Without that nagging itch to sin, Bill could act as godly as an archangel while pursuing his own desires as selfishly as the devil. Even the devil can act like an angel of light, says Scripture. What matters is one’s motives for acting that way. There is no glory in acting godly if your heart is black.

Rather than help us, the weakening of temptation would merely deceive us by concealing just how much unlike God our motives and heart really are. It could also produce false confidence, lulling us into straying dangerously far from God into enemy territory.

To better understand the importance of motives, consider for a moment what might motivate a married man to stop looking at other women.

1.  Pure selfishness

If his wife catches him eyeing women one more time, she’ll divorce him and that would cost him mega bucks, people might think him a loser and he would have to do more housework.

2. He couldn’t bear for her to withdraw her love

That’s a far nobler motivation. He forces himself not to eye other women because his wife’s love and approval means everything to him.

3. He’d hate for his wife to be hurt

That’s even better. He restrains himself because even if she kept loving him, he doesn’t want her to feel the slightest hurt.

4. He longs to make her as happy as he possibly can

Better still: he doesn’t want merely to avoid hurting her, he passionately seeks her happiness, and for this he keeps his eyes pure.

5. He longs to do what is right

Another advance: even when his wife would never know, he still forces himself to not look at other women, simply because he wants to remain faithful to her.

6. He only has eyes for her

Through persistent effort he has eventually so trained himself to delight exclusively in his wife that, most of the time, every other woman might as well be wallpaper. (This does not mean he is never tempted. Temptation is spiritual rape whereby hostile spiritual powers assault us with feelings that come from them, not from our heart. Even Jesus suffered a violation of his purity that came from the devil, not his heart. Nevertheless, years of persistent self-discipline have brought the man to the point where it is his habitual, unthinking response to only have eyes for his wife. He has had so many victories in this realm and it has become such a deeply ingrained part of his character that the devil has virtually given up all hope of successfully using women to entice him.)

Slide your eyes back down those numbered lines and note the progression. God is working within us, seeking to coax us through a similar progression in our motives for serving God; advancing from fear of punishment, to not wanting to hurt God, to longing to delight God. Each higher motivation should add to, not replace, lower ones. Thus we should never lose our longing to delight God, but we can add to it by becoming so like God that we do right not only because it thrills our divine Lover but also simply because it is right. Finally, our heart can be so Godlike that we find ourselves doing the right thing because it is our very nature – our heart response. But for our motivation to be perfect, underneath that unthinking response must be the other levels of motivation, right down to being terrified of the consequences of disobeying God.

Of course the holy Lord neither wants us to fail, nor tempts us. He simply doesn’t always cover our inadequacies by miraculously removing temptation. The resulting struggle helps bring us to the point where, in the words of Jesus, we hunger and thirst after righteousness, displaying a passion for holy living worthy of a child of God.

Here’s how it works: whenever we surrender to temptation, it hurts us, either by the natural consequences of sin or by the conviction and disappointment we feel at having failed. For a Christian, the end result of the unpleasantness of failing is that we learn to hate sin more, appreciate God’s love and grace more, and realize more fully how as an embryo must draw everything from its mother for its survival, so we desperately need to draw upon God and his fellowship for everything that sustains our spiritual life.

Like many delays in answered prayer, God not responding to a lazy prayer the way we had hoped serves to purify our motives and to stretch our faith and so expand it.

But is this Really Biblical?

It seems obvious that, in the short-term at least, the Almighty would receive the greatest glory by miraculously removing temptation from his loved ones. I have provided a logical explanation, but is it really biblical to believe that the Holy One would choose to deny himself that glory by letting temptation rage in the lives of those Christ died for, despite their cries for an easier life?

As a child, I memorized what is arguably the Bible’s most powerful promise of victory over temptation. Ever since, I have clung to this glorious truth like a limpet to a rock in stormy seas. Ironically, despite my passion for this life-saving Scripture, there is an aspect of it that had eluded me for almost half a century. In fact, I’m slipping this verse into the webpage more than a decade after completing the rest of it. Thankfully, I had gleaned this truth from other parts of God’s Word but I had not seen it in this Scripture. Here’s the verse:

1 Corinthians 10:13 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

What had not hit me is that this is nothing remotely like a promise that God would make strong temptation melt away for his beloved. Instead, it is a promise that we would be able to “stand up under it.” The King James Version uses the expression “able to bear it.” The point is that if the divinely-provided “way out” (or “way to escape,” as the old version puts it) was for the temptation to go away, there would be nothing to “bear.”

Too many Christians wrongly suppose that if temptation continues to rage after prayer, there must be something wrong. The divine game-plan has never been to prevent us from being hit repeatedly by fierce temptation but to empower us to endure it. The promise is not that God will mollycoddle us, treating us as embarrassing weaklings who would shame him the moment things get tough, but that God will hide within us everything that we need to heroically survive the onslaught – and by so doing be acclaimed forever as spiritual champions.

The spiritual attack on Paul allows us to see an aspect of this played out in real life:

2 Corinthians 12:7-9 To keep me from becoming conceited  . . . there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you . . .”

Paul was adamant that this “thorn” was anti-God, “a messenger of Satan” that tormented him. Despite the mighty apostle’s immense faith and spiritual authority, however, God cared too much for Paul’s spiritual well-being to answer his repeated prayers for the attack to end. God’s “grace” – the spiritual empowering to endure, divinely seeded within Paul – was enough.

The Lord revealed that the quick delivery most modern-day Christians expect, could have spiritually ruined Paul because of the greater danger lurking in the shadows – pride.

Even in the Old Testament, God’s people were called to fight the enemy, keep themselves holy and in no way compromise and yet, for at least two divinely brilliant reasons, God chose not to give them quick deliverances but to keep them battling their enemies year after year:

Exodus 23:29 But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you.

Judges 3:1-2 These are the nations the LORD left to test all those Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars in Canaan (he did this only to teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience)

As Peter affirmed, despite our intimate relationship with the all-powerful Lord, we should “not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12).

The “Simple Solution” or God’s Solution?

What seems a simple solution –the removal of temptation, for example – often turns out to be a superficial solution. God is rarely interested in the superficial. He wants to do a work so deep that it gains you eternal glory.

There have been times when I thought I desperately needed personal indications of God’s presence and I felt badly treated by God when he left me to stagger though life devoid of any tangible proof that he was with me. Eventually I remembered Thomas, who was granted perhaps the greatest of all such experiences – the opportunity to physically handle the risen Lord. How blessed he was! And yet the astounding thing is that Jesus told Thomas that the person who is really blessed is the one who is not granted an experience like him. The best is reserved for the person compelled to hold on by faith alone (John 20:29).

Finally I understood how I had forced my Lord into the position where he had either to deny me the experience I was hankering for, or deny me the greater blessing he had planned for me – the chance to gain glory by finding faith without experiencing anything dramatic and to grow in faith, that precious commodity that is more valuable than gold. The Lord had lovingly risked my wrath so that he could give me the greater blessing, and instead of being grateful, I had been annoyed at him.

How often we must unknowingly put God in such a situation. Seeing only one possible solution, we demand it of God, convinced that he must either act the only way we can figure, or God cannot be loving. We force God into either denying us what is best or acting in a manner that we have fooled ourselves into thinking is unloving. We repeatedly find ourselves in such situations because God is so intellectually superior to us.

Puzzling things that God does, or omits to do, sometimes make us secretly wish God had our intelligence! When all is revealed, however, these are the very things that will fill us with eternal praise that God does not have our intelligence.

Isaiah 55:8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. (9) “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

And yet the power of an infinite intellect finds its match in infinite love.

Psalms 103:11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him

What an astounding God!

Spiritual Jealousy

The reality is that everything God does is a manifestation of infinite love – even (although I might lack the brain power to explain it) his eternal judgment upon sinners.

Often what seems like God’s lack of love is actually to God a particularly costly expression of divine love. God’s discipline is an obvious example that receives much attention in Scripture. Every good parent knows that spoiling a beloved child is easy; it is the giving of needed discipline that hurts the parent deeply and in that sense displays the greater love. The child, of course, rarely recognizes punishment as love and it takes great commitment to a child’s welfare for a devoted parent to risk the child’s wrath by doing what is best for the child.

"Father God Disciplines His Children

Deuteronomy 8:5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you.

2 Samuel 7:14 I will be his father, and he shall be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men.

Job 5:17 Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.

Proverbs 3:11 My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke, (12) because the LORD disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.

1 Corinthians 11:32 When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.

Hebrews 12:5 And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, (6) because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.” (7) Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? (8) If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. (9) Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! (10) Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. (11) No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Revelation 3:19 Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent."

New Christians often seem to get instant answers to their every little prayer and yet mature Christians often endure rough times. This is like the way a mother attends to her newborn’s tiniest whimper but as the years roll on this level of attention diminishes. That in no way suggests diminishing love. She is wisely co-operating with, and encouraging, the growth process within her darling. Like an older brother, we can sometimes get jealous of the pampering that baby Christians receive but it’s not that we are loved less, it’s just that God is pleased with our development and believes we can now handle more.

Divine Joy

So through all sorts of things happening to us and in us, God is working on our motives, purifying and intensifying them, or working on some other aspect of our character, making us more and more like himself. God’s passion is that we experience divine joy – eternal glories beyond our present comprehension that make what we presently call happiness seem like plain sugar compared with an exquisite banquet. But we can partake of God’s joy, only if we first partake of his nature. For a cat to appreciate human pleasures, it would have to become human. Even a human child cannot fully enter adult pleasures until he loses childish tastes and irresponsibilities and becomes like an adult. Likewise, we can only truly enter the joy of the Lord (Matthew 25:23) by becoming like the Lord. And it is towards that end that God is constantly working.

Luke 6:35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then . . . you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

Luke 6:40 A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.

Romans 8:28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (29) For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

Related Scriptures

Note that the above Scripture says God works everything that happens, not causes everything that happens. We must understand that we presently live in a battle zone – a world filled with God’s enemies. When Christ returns this period of grace will instantly end and everything contrary to God’s loving ways will be annihilated. That will be both the most thrilling and most horrifying moment in earth’s history. It will mean the end of pain and suffering and cheating and lying and stealing and hate, but it will necessitate the destruction of everyone who has not let Christ remove every trace of sin from their lives. A world in which there is no suffering is a world in which everyone not cleansed from their sin has been eternally banished to hell. So each moment in which the world we live in exposes us to suffering, is another moment in which billions of precious people have yet another chance to come to their senses and let Jesus deliver them from their suicidal infatuation with sin before it’s too late (2 Peter 3:9-14). (For a more detailed explanation see Why I Hate The Myth of a Cruel Christian God)

So some things that hit us are attacks from anti-God forces. God doesn’t initiate everything that happens to us, and yet he manipulates everything, so that things hurled at us in satanic fury are so ingeniously deflected by the Almighty that they end up achieving good. And the good that our Perfect Father/Mother is working towards, is our ultimate good, not what we always instantly recognize as being good. God’s goal is not instant bliss but the eternal bliss of us becoming like the eternal Son of God, perfect in love and purity and wisdom and glory.

Suffering Makes us Worthy

A man in my ministry team told me he did not feel worthy to minister to people suffering in ways that he had never suffered. His use of the word ‘worthy’ hit me. Suffering makes us worthy – not just worthy of eternal glory when we come through with our faith intact, but worthy to minister to others. The eternal Son of God always has been so indescribably worthy of honor and of our love that it would seem impossible to increase it, and yet there are ways in which what he suffered makes him even more worthy. We can follow in his footsteps. A link at the bottom of this page gives you the opportunity to explore a little more the ministry implications of suffering.

Upside Down

When looking down from heaven, everything on earth is viewed upside down. But heaven’s perspective is the right one.

Luke 16:15 He said to them, “. . . What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.”

We find Jesus’ teaching perplexing because he was forever turning things right side up. He taught, for instance, that among the worst things that could happen to you on earth is that you are rewarded (Matthew 6:1-5,16) or that people speak well of you (Luke 6:26). He said you’re blessed when you mourn, or are poor, or are persecuted. The first shall be last, the greatest shall be the least and it’s more blessed to give than to receive. Another example of us seeing things the wrong way is when someone finally discovers that the busier we are, the longer – not the less – we need to be in prayer.

When you are in heaven looking back over your past life, what will you regard as the most exciting aspects of earthly life? All earth’s pleasures will be totally eclipsed by heaven’s pleasures, so the pleasures of your past will no longer impress you. Relationships and fellowship enjoyed on earth will also be completely outdone by heaven’s perfect communication and love. With the wisdom of hindsight we will all agree that the most wonderful thing about our stay on earth was the trials. That sounds ridiculous, even though we know Scripture affirms that so much good results from hard times that it urges us to rejoice whenever trials hit us. Let’s explore this mystery.

There were two passions driving the great apostle Paul, which it would do us good to have within us. One of his longings – to know Christ (Philippians 3:10) – will, for all of us, reach thrilling pinnacles in heaven. The other – to share in Christ’s sufferings (Romans 8:17; Philippians 3:10; Colossians 1:24; 1 Peter 4:13) – we will be deprived of in heaven. We will only be able to wistfully look back to past opportunities. In glory, when at last our eyes are opened to just how much our Lord has done for us and how wonderful he really is, it will at last get through our thick heads why the disciples rejoiced over the privilege of being flogged and humiliated for Jesus (Acts 5:40-41). What we will lament in Paradise is that the opportunity to express the depth of our love by suffering for Christ has passed us by. And we will nostalgically miss the trials. Here’s why:

Although we will have many thrilling things to do in heaven, we’ll be rather like former football champions who have retired and gone into sport administration. Life will be easier. There will be no more injuries, no more tedious, grueling training sessions, no more agonizing over mistakes made on the field, but the opportunity to gain more glory and become a greater hero will have forever passed.

So life is exciting. And the greatest thrills it offers are the pain and dangers and challenges. Forget about a soft life. Leave that to your heavenly retirement. Now’s your time for glory. You’re a champion in the making; someone increasingly bearing the likeness of God himself; someone the Almighty will forever smile upon with Fatherly pride.