His thoughts

A passage of scripture has been running through my mind lately.

Isaiah 55:8-9 says:

8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.

9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways

And My thoughts than your thoughts.

I can’t seem to get it out of my mind.

Where do thoughts come from? They come from our minds. The mind is part of our soul along with will and emotions.

The Apostle Paul told us in Romans 8:5 that we either set our minds on the things of the flesh or the things of the Spirit. In order to know the thoughts of God we need to set our minds on the things of the Spirit.

We are told in 1 Corinthians 2:10-16 that God has revealed things that have not even entered the heart of man to us who have the Spirit of God through the Spirit and that without that Spirit we can’t even know the thoughts of God.

Why don’t we know those thoughts of God? Because we are trying to know those thoughts through the natural and vs. 14 tells us that the natural man cannot understand them.

I have a friend that rejects God because he simply cannot accept happenings like the flood. Other people reject God because of all the evil in the world and God’s seemingly apathy and lack of concern during very catastrophic happenings. You have heard their arguments, “If that is what God is like, then I don’t want him.”

No one could have hated God more than Job, but what did Job say?

In worship:

21 He said,

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

And naked I shall return there.

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Job 1:21 (NASB)

And

15 “Though He slay me,

I will hope in Him.

Job 13:15 (NASB)

How was Job able to utter such a statement? He was looking at things differently than through the natural.

Paul finishes the chapter in 1 Corinthians with the words-“but we have the mind of Christ.”

If we are to know the thoughts and ways of God we have to approach Him, not with our minds, but through the Spirit.

The riches of Christ are “unfathomable” but that doesn’t mean that we can’t know more than we know now. And we can because the Holy Spirit has been given to us.