Reflections From an Office Visit

A man came into my office one day.  He was a nice man, always kind, always had a good word to say, never cynical.  He sat down and looked at me and said, Pastor I’ve spent the last hour in the parking lot trying to put into words what is on my heart today.  He stopped for a moment, then breaking the silence he said... “I just don’t believe that the Bible is God’s word to man, but Man’s word about God.” 

I was taken back.  What a statement, what does this mean?  After all, does is really make a big difference if the Bible is not God’s supernatural testimony of Himself?  Isn’t it virtually identical to say that the Bible is Man’s observation of God?  Both are statements of truth about reality.  So, they are both saying the same thing, right?  Right?  No, Never.  There is an enormous gap between these two statements that can never be bridged.  To say that the Bible is man’s word about God is to say that man is the center of reality.  That truth is determined by my experience, and not God’s expression. 

So, we sat in my office and the gentleman explains, “I can’t be holy, I’ve tried but I always fail.  Therefore, holiness does not exist, man made it up and put it in there.”  But can we ignore that the Bible calls us to holiness, was that just a man made addition, an error?  The man continued, “after all, I don’t want to believe in a God that kills people just because they don’t do what He wants them to do, That’s not my God, my God is loving.”  But can we ignore that the Bible tells us how serious God is about sin?  Can we really just make up our own God, in our own image? 

The man was finished, we both stood and I walked him to the door and wished him well.  As he drove off, my eyes locked onto a tall oak, and then I though “can an oak decide, ‘I don’t want to be an oak today, I think that I will be a cherry tree?”  Then I saw a squirrel scamper across the lawn and thought, “can a squirrel wake up one morning and say, I don’t want to be a squirrel today, I think that I will be a mighty lion.”  Then I saw a woman walking her dog and thought, “can a human wake up one day and say I don’t want to be a human today, I think I will be a…”  And then it hit me, “who defines the human, the squirrel, the tree?”  “Who determines what an oak, a squirrel, a human should and should not do?  How they should and should not act?”  The Creator and Father of all things, God does! 

I thought again about my dear brother’s words to me.  The more I thought about them, the more I struggled, why did he say such things?  I got in my truck and drove home, sat down in my lazy boy, but I could not get the man’s words out of my head.  And then I saw a commercial on the T.V.  A police officer talking about the reduction of crimes nationwide, a doctor talking about the increase in saved lives nationwide, an investor talking about the amount of saved money nationwide.  All of this thanks to I.B.M., making a smarter, and therefore better world.  They said “we will one day conquer all the ills of society, because we make humans smarter.”  At that moment I realized how appropriately human that man’s words in my office were.  You see humans don’t like boundaries.  We think that if we get smarter we can stop all crime.  If we just get more informed, we can expunge all poverty.  Yes, if we just get more equipped, we can even eliminate death.  Then we can be god.  I got up and walked to the window, looked up into the sky and saw all the stars.  I thought, “For years man has been exploring the outer depths of the universe, guided by the illusion that if we could but grasp it, we could control it.  Yet, after all these years of study and examination, lunar modules and satellites, the best description that we have of it is “space”.  Yes, the universe, like God and all of His creation cannot be grasped.  God is the one who has defined what a human ought to do, say, think, and be.  The question is not “is God’s revelation true,” but “how will I respond to what God has said?”