The biblical stories of faith are not about elevating individual people upward into being the focus of praise and adulation…but instead focus upon achieving something…a particular positive goal or task…not lifting up someone.
The positive characters in the biblical narrative stories of faith focus upon achieving the tasks at hand…which in-the-moment are bigger than themselves…requiring God’s help.
The biblical narrative stories of faith tell us that God’s ways are higher than our ways.
The end-point goal that God is aiming for…as demonstrated in the biblical narrative stories of Abraham through Paul…is not the acquisition of material wealth, popular acclaim, and financial security (Mt. 6:19-34)…not even the pursuit of basic survival in a difficult world…if that is our bottom-line, minimum definition of success…but something entirely different.
The end-point goal of God is higher…to compose and bring into being specifically tight life-scripts designed to benefit mankind…to fulfill to the highest extent the innate potential of those people called by God into their unique tasks, from the viewpoint of eternity…and at the same time to reveal to these people of faith and to the world-at-large…the real truth about God.
I have several books published on how to avoid making costly mistakes in building construction…through proactive debugging…yet not everyone buys these books, reads them, and puts this concept of advance personal preparation from the bottom upward…into practice.
Yet this divinely crafted experience about how to best acquire the raw data through first-person basic field research…in this case specifically on how to best manage construction jobsites…informs me about the real truth about God…that if our worldview priorities match the outlook of Hebrews 11:12-16…and we are willing to give God the benefit-of-the-doubt regarding His leadership skills to the point of picking up our cross to follow Him…then God can plan-out a course in our careers, our personal lives, and our ministries to the larger world…that far exceeds anything that we can or would come-up with on our own.
Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead the third day…to restore our relationship with God…to clean us up in terms of a new spiritual re-birth that creates the capacity for us to hear God’s voice…and to walk within a journey of faith…precisely so that the kingdom of God within us can not only prepare us for a future in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…but also so that God…through us…can fix a small part of the world around us to the extent of the outreach of our capacity and influence.
This tells us something about the real truth about God…which could not have originated through human literary fiction.
This concept…this worldview…of “seeking a country”…of “desiring a better country, that is, a heavenly”…could only originate from the God of the Bible who has the loving and brilliantly insightful capacity to prepare individual apprenticeships designed to prepare us for a future eternity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…starting now with our lives here.
If this concept of God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts as articulated in the biblical narrative stories of faith…beautifully summarized in Hebrews 11:12-16…that establishes and highlights the worldview that this life is a preparation for the upcoming life in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…to desire a better, heavenly country while living and participating in this current world…this then exposes the contrasting opposite worldview of going our own way (Isa. 53:6) as the worst possible misdirection to take.
If one of the main goals and purposes of this life is to discover the real truth about God (Gen. 3:1-5; Ps. 32:8; Jer. 33:3; 1 Jn. 2:17)…then going our own way in autonomous individualism…will not get us there.
Through my career path in building construction…I discovered the reality of a God-composed journey of faith life-script…in which God knew through foresight the precise end-point to aim for…and was able to open the right doors at the right times to create the opportunities…to reach a final destination that I could not have planned or orchestrated on my own…with anywhere near the success that God’s higher ways and thoughts for my life achieved.
This has real-world application to the question raised earlier in the book about the relevance of the biblical narrative stories of faith…to our modern lives today.
The concept that God can compose life-scripts for us to prepare us for an eternity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…and that as our Creator God He is the only person who could possibly know in advance the final end-point this preparation should aim at…is in every sense of the words…timeless, brilliant, and modern.
This concept of the higher ways and thoughts of God applied in our lives through God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…tailored specifically to every person who will follow God in faith…lies at the heart of the real truth about God.
Finally, God does not want to control…to over-manage…our lives. God created human beings with an incredible capacity for intellectual reasoning, moral judgment, and free-will choice.
The last thing God wants is for people to be like robots.
God simply has divine foresight…and resides at the top-most point on the vertical spectrum-line of absolute goodness and brilliant pure light.
God wants to joint-venture with us in a personal relationship. The half that God brings into the relationship is His divine attributes of perfect love and divinely timeless foresight.
If God can see 15 years into the future for a 21-year old young man just starting his career in building construction…to inspire and inaugurate a program of observing, recognizing, and recording construction problems as they occur…with the long-range goal to be able one day in the future to eliminate these problems proactively through the same quality of foreknowledge that God exhibits through divine foresight…demonstrated in the life-scripts in the biblical stories of faith…then God can do this for every imaginable career, calling, and life-plan “under the sun.”
God can insert the same divine quality of advance inspiration to the biochemist researcher looking for the cure for cancer…to the high school English teacher trying to find the best teaching method to inspire her students…to the defense attorney to find the best legal argument to acquit his innocent client…to the stay-at-home mom raising three children looking for the optimum approach to being at the top of her game as multi-tasker in-chief.
If God is this “savvy” and “with-it” to know about the unmined and untapped area of debugging building construction…to set-up a program for me to begin observing and recording this obscure information years before I would actually need it as a jobsite superintendent…then God is also current, proactive, and relevant for every other imaginable career and enterprise.
This is a small part…yet a well-defined insight…into the real truth about God.
“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” (Heb. 13:8)
“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” (Jn. 10:10)
The Cross in the Christian Life 