Searching for God.
Share
If you seek you will find... (Matthew 7:7).
Because God is already searching for you.
This is going to be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. The kind of Christian who thinks it's all about being "recruited" to a specific institution... about joining the right team.
It's why the Pharisees were so offended that Jesus pursued Gentiles and (heaven forbid) sinners! A gentile is basically someone who isn't an ethnic Jew. The Pharisees thought you had to be a "son of Abraham" to be saved.
But John the Baptizer put them to shame when he told them, "...do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham." (Matthew 3:9, ESV).
So here it goes...
"For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him." 2 Chronicles 16:9 (ESV)
This isn't the kind of verse you'll usually find on a t-shirt, or on a list of memory verses in Sunday School. But it's an important text to consider when we think about God's disposition toward those who don't belong to the cultural milieu of the people we see him engaging in the Bible.
A little context. In the past, the people of Israel knew that God helped them overcome their enemies. But King Asa (King of the Southern Kingdom of Judah at the time), rather than trusting the Lord, trusted a foreign king instead. So, Judah lost the battle.
What makes this passage (16:9) so intriguing, though, is the shift away from the particular (Asa's lack of trust) to a universal principle. That word translated as "for" here is sort of like how you'd cite a source if you were writing an essay for school. It's an authoritative principle that applies to the situation.
In other words, this has something to do with the unchanging character of God.
What do we learn? Well, we see that God searches the world. This notion of running "to and fro" is one word in Hebrew... it implies a "frantic search."
God is frantically searching... where? Throughout the whole earth!
The world known and unknown to the people of Israel. The entire planet. There's no mistaking the fact that this is about all of the world, even among those who've never heard of the God of Israel.
The Hebrew grammar of this verse makes the meaning clear. Sometimes the word for "earth" can mean "the land" and people might be inclined to say that this only refers to the people within the region or the promised land. You can't do that here, though. The way it's written in Hebrew adds what's called a construct noun and attaches it with a hyphen. בְּכָל־הָאָ֨רֶץ֙
You might not be able to read that, but it's clear in this formulation that all of creation, the entire world/planet is what's spoken of here.
One more important point. The English translation above uses the word "blameless" which sort of sounds like "sinless."
That's not really the sense here in the original Hebrew, either. The word there really implies a "whole hearted devotion." In other words, this passage is saying this...
God is always frantically searching the entire planet for anyone who seeks him with a whole heart.
And he's giving them "strong support." In other words, he desires to side with them, to support them, to carry them through life against all trouble... to have a relationship with them...
How can this be? I mean, if people elsewhere in the world don't know who the God of Israel is... why is he searching the entire planet? Isn't that a divine waste of time?
Not at all. Jesus says some similar things that are just as striking. All you have to do is turn to John 3:16 where we hear that God so loved the world.
We need to do a little work in the original Greek of this passage to really get it...
That word "so" might be the most important part. It means (literally) "in this way." And the "world" here (sorry my good Calvinist friends... it doesn't mean the "predestined") is cosmos... He loved all of creation, the entire planet/world, and even the universe.
But his love for the entire world is manifest in a particular way, at a unique place and time... when God decided to enter one specific culture and context and take human flesh. God loved the WHOLE WORLD this way... he sent his only son...
The next verse helps, too... and we don't quote it enough... "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:17).
The way God shows his love to the world is by entering into it... and he does it in specific ways, in unique cultural contexts. The Gospel isn't about spreading a particular culture or worldview or even language about how to relate to God. It's about letting people know about the God who actually enters into our world, who suffers alongside us, who carries us through it...
But if we believe what we already know from 2 Chronicles, and we hear that the incarnation of Jesus (his coming into the world) was because of his love for the entire world, then there's a cosmic significance to this event... something bigger than setting up a single religion that people must join to be saved.
It also means that throughout history God has been active throughout the world, revealing himself to any who seek him, even if they don't use the same language, the same "name" for Him, or have the same culture/worldview that we see reflected in the Bible. It means that God has done A LOT for the people he loves across the world that isn't spoken of in the Bible.
That means evangelism (for the Christian) isn't about forcing everyone to leave behind everything they believe (necessarily) and aligning all their "thinking" and "belief systems" with our doctrines, or demanding they join our churches.
The biggest mistake some evangelists make is that they reduce their mission to spreading Christian culture and language rather than about sharing the substance of the Good News.
We have to respect that God has been working in other people's lives all along... provided they've been searching for the truth. It may be that they're been seeking in ways that (following the principle of Incarnation - that God enters into our own culture and lives) reflect cultures and conceptions of the Divine that don't always line up precisely with our own perspectives.
We shouldn't be so quick to "condemn" people whose spiritual views sound foreign to ours. After all, it may very well be that these were the mechanisms that God used to lend his "strong support" to those who were seeking him with a whole heart in a different way. Because these people come from a variety of cultures, it makes sense that they might articulate their experience of God in the world in terms that might sound very different from what we're used to while in substance they're a lot closer to what we know about God than we realize.
I'm going to leave you with that to ponder today. Because I know some of you are going to be quick to say that if I'm going to read John 3:17 I need to keep going, too, into v. 18 where we hear about those who are "condemned already" for not believing the Son... or Jesus' statement that he is the "way, the truth, and the life" and that no one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6). Or, perhaps, that there is no other name under heaven that's been given whereby we must be saved (Acts 4:12).
Is there a way to reconcile this universal message... the love of the whole world... the frantic search of God across the entire planet for those who seek him whole heartedly... with these passages that get so specific about the one-of-a-kindness of Jesus?
Absolutely. And the solution isn't a matter of proof-texting one Biblical truth against the other. That's usually where people go with this. They choose to focus on the "universal" character of God's salvation or they focus on the "particular" instead. But there is a way that these two things can be held together in tension... and it's a much more biblical approach...
Stay tuned. That's tomorrow. :)
Abundant Blessings!
Judah
Know anyone else who might enjoy these daily newsletters/meditations? Share this link with them!!!
It's pretty explicit (I think) about what they'll get. Share the page as much as you like with as many people as possible! :)