Dr. Harold Warlick, in a...
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Dr. Harold Warlick, in a soon-to-be-published book on Christian hope,* tells of his experience as a teenager, writing to a pen pal in Germany. They exchanged a blizzard of correspondence over several years. Then the inevitable happened. Both decided they would like to see what the other looked like. So they exchanged photographs. Both were so surprised -- and disillusioned -- that neither ever wrote another letter to the other person!
Things are not always as we preconceive them. Certainly if Harold Warlick had bothered to write to that girl (who obviously had an incredible amount of personality and pizzazz to keep him interested for three years), she might have written back, "It's really me! There isn't anybody else here by that name!"
And so it is with God. We preconceive him to be what he isn't. When he favors us with self-disclosure, we go into shock. Isaiah warns -- and promises -- "I am God and there is no other." If we didn't have in mind that the righteousness and strength (v. 24) he promised would look like a young heaven-minded preacher from the farm town of Nazareth, that's our problem.
*The Rarest of These is Hope: A Resource for Christians Facing Difficult Times, CSS Publishing Company, January, 1985 (No. 5826).
Things are not always as we preconceive them. Certainly if Harold Warlick had bothered to write to that girl (who obviously had an incredible amount of personality and pizzazz to keep him interested for three years), she might have written back, "It's really me! There isn't anybody else here by that name!"
And so it is with God. We preconceive him to be what he isn't. When he favors us with self-disclosure, we go into shock. Isaiah warns -- and promises -- "I am God and there is no other." If we didn't have in mind that the righteousness and strength (v. 24) he promised would look like a young heaven-minded preacher from the farm town of Nazareth, that's our problem.
*The Rarest of These is Hope: A Resource for Christians Facing Difficult Times, CSS Publishing Company, January, 1985 (No. 5826).
