From the very beginning, our God
has been an incarnational God. We see
this most clearly in the Word becoming flesh and moving into our neighborhood,
but even before (and after) this, God has been (and continues to be) and
incarnational God. God chooses to work
through flawed, broken, short-sighted, selfish, sinful human beings. He’s been a God who has worked through the
ebbs and flows of human history. He didn’t
wait for us to get good enough to work through us, he has worked through us in
spite of our imperfections.
When we
come to the book of Judges, this is very apparent. Even the most well-known, heroic judges, like
Sampson, had less than stellar characters and lived morally ambiguous lives. But God was at work anyway.
Because
God chooses to work with pieces of work like you and me, it means that history
and reality are full of tension, paradox, and even contradiction. Faith isn’t about having all of the black and
white answers fully mapped out, but trusting God with our entire selves, even
when we can’t clearly read the map. We walk
by faith and not by sight. But like
history, God’s work in us is going somewhere.
History doesn’t repeat itself – in other words, it doesn’t travel in a
circle, but in a line that has a destination and goal. God works with us as we are, but he doesn’t
intend to leave us that way. As Romans 8
tells us, our final destiny is complete conformity to the image of his Son, the
Word made flesh! - Shay
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