Will we ever know who we are? Some day: said the Apostle. Currently we know enough to identify ourselves in part. Who was King David or the Apostle Paul? Who was Leonardo DaVinci, or Michelangelo? No student of the arts can have escaped some play with the game of identifying them. They were so conflicted, so different, so gifted, and so other worldly that we sometimes feel that they were not meant for this planet. DaVinci could reach from the depths of ugliness to heights of delicacy in sublimity. He seemed taken with the end of the World – in blood and confusion. Michelangelo could be taken with thoughts of faith in God, and torn with the anger of daemons. The men were aware of, and seem to have experienced the best and the worst.
King David, the consolidator of a nation from the tribes in Israel, represents the varied spectrum. Abraham was father of the family of Israel. David became the nation (unification) of Israel. Tribalism gave way to nationhood. David was seen as great – a musician and poet, a soldier and leader, a king and administrator, a saint and a sinner. His sins were so heinous that one wonders how God could honor him, to the point of sending to earth the one called Jesus, the Son of David. How could it be that kings following David in Israel’s history were judged by the degree to which they measured up to his best leadership and ultimate resolution for life from God?
A conundrum relates to what people, lay and ordained, have thought of Jesus Christ. How could one who lived 2,000 years ago, who spoke of himself often; whose message was understood by the attentive educated and uneducated; and, who left behind considerable documentation of who he was and what he did, be so variously identified? Churches and groups, claiming the authority of Christ, differ in their theologies, church practices, their primary beliefs about the world and future, and yet attach whatever they affirm to the name of Jesus Christ. They use the same Bible source in arriving at their varied conclusions. The conflicts are often simply man-made – troublesome.
The answers to the paradoxes/contradictions rest in two primary explanations: 1) – in mankind’s unwillingness to permit God to reveal himself (as he is) to mankind; and, 2) – in mankind’s inability or unwillingness to identify self. The first must be passed over for now, but relates to arrogance – that men and women can determine the reality of anything that affects life. So we make a god, an idol, possibly of wood or stone, but more likely an idol of the mind that fits in some way into our beliefs about all else. God becomes just one more elusive presupposition factor in the world. In the second ignorance, persons can’t find sufficient humility to permit some things go by until the end. Perhaps there will emerge advanced information and understanding. The Apostle, owning a first class mind, noted that he did not know everything about what he would like to know. He must wait, not only for knowledge but for the teacher, who would reveal all things. We know much, but not enough to answer some large questions. Humility (in this limited knowledge) is our portion. Humility ought to characterize us in faith. At the appropriate time we will know our full identity, under God. Then we shall know fulfillment, full life, freedom, and rest (peace). Some of what we yearn to know is presently available. God, knowing omissions exasperate us, gave us faith, prayer, Scripture and the Holy Spirit. That’s enough – for now. We shall be known as we are known. Whatever our shame may be will die for the Christian by an act of forgetting. We human beings find it difficult to forget, but God can forget. It is one of the miracles of God that he can expunge what he does not want remembered. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020