Let God do His work-don’t get in the way!

So here’s a popular optical illusion of Jesus.  Stare at the center of the black and white blotch for 30 seconds and then stare at a white wall or white piece of paper and you should see the image of Jesus.  What?  You don’t see it?  It’s so obvious!

Jesus kinda did this with the parables He shared.  I’m reading John Fischer’s On A Hill Too Far Away  and he says that Jesus would tell a story and people would hear it and just walk away scratching their head.  And then He would explain it to His disciples and even some of them wouldn’t get it.  Here is a quote from the book:

“Jesus was always careful with the truth.  He guarded it constantly.  He never made it easy to get to….Jesus shrouded the truth because he trusted in two things: The power of the Father in bringing people to Himself (”no one can come to the Father except the Father draw him”), and the intelligence and desire of the individual to know truth and come after it.”

The author goes on to suggest that maybe we need to learn to resist the temptation to make the gospel seem obvious and that we need to be comfortable with ambiguity.  And he explains more with this quote:

“If it [the gospel] could be understood by human wisdom, it would cease to be what it is. The cross is one thing we don’t want to simplify.  It’s meaning is not going to pop into place for everyone.  Nor is it up to us to make it make sense…When we present the gospel to our culture, we are, in many ways, asking them to stare at a bunch of blotches on a page…Our job is not to get people to believe, but to hold up the picture.  God’s job is to make the image pop into place.  When we try to make everybody see, we are messing with God’s part,  We will never do this as well as He does.”

Sometimes I search for more ways to make the gospel more easier to understand.  But trying to explain God’s love is what I think is the “mystery” that Paul writes about.  The mystery of the cross.  This is God’s ultimate expression of love.  God’s love.   NOT human love.  This kind of love goes beyond anything we will fully comprehend.  Our minds don’t operate the way His does.  It takes divine power to make the picture pop!