For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
I have often heard this Scripture quoted for the purpose of explaining how, as human beings, we are at times incapable of understanding what God is doing, and why He is doing it. People often say something that goes like this, “The ways of the Lord are mysterious.” I don’t particularly like that phrase, because I do not think there is anything “mysterious” about understanding God. That makes it sound like He is hiding something from us, or being tricky. God has already made known to us everything that we need to know. That does not mean He has made everything known to us, but He has made everything that we need to know, known. There is a huge difference. There are many things that we want to know, because our curiosity has no limits, but there are a limited number of things we absolutely need to know, and those things are the most important.
Understanding what God has made known requires us to put forth the effort, listen, and learn. People put forth exorbitant time and effort into learning many things that have no eternal significance, and yet treat the deep questions of life that can only be answered by God, as insignificant. God’s thoughts are indeed not our thoughts, I do not dispute that, and His ways are higher than our ways. That is why it is our responsibility, as individuals, to take the time to find out what God’s thoughts are, or at least the thoughts that He has made known to us. He has put down everything we need to know in a book.
In order to rightly understand these oft-quoted lines above from the prophet Isaiah, we need to look at the words within their context. We often misunderstand and misapply scripture when we take a few isolated verses and divorce them from their context.
Isaiah 55 starts out by addressing those in need. (That would be all of us.) “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters:’. On the surface, that sounds like such a simple conclusion that anyone would come to who is thirsty. So simple in fact, that it should not even need to be stated. “If you are thirsty, go to water.” Duh! He is referring to the water of the Spirit, to the spiritually dry, but it also applies in the literal sense as well. But think with me for a moment about the way humans tend to behave. We go everywhere but where the answer is. We go to God as a last resort when all else has failed. Why? Because, man, in his default, fallen state, is hostile to God. There is no other answer.
“and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
Despite what most of us have been led to believe all our lives, more money is not the solution to our problem. Money may fix some things temporarily, but it will not fix the one thing that is the root of all our problems; a heart that is turned away from God, and on a trajectory to hell, unless we do an about face. That is what it means to repent. That is not a popular word in our culture.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?”
Why waste your life chasing after that which will only give you temporary pleasure or relief, while your soul is dying?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and you will delight in the richest of fare.
Give ear and come to me;
listen, that you may live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
my faithful love promised to David.
It has been my observation over the course of my life that there are a lot of people in the world that are not very good at listening. This is a complicated issue. First, listening means more than hearing the words. Sometimes our words are weak, and sometimes we use words wrongly. Listening means seeking to understand the intent and purpose of the speaker. Many people enter a discussion or debate with the sole intent of proving themselves right, rather than listening objectively to what the other person has to say. This is not listening. This is ego chatter. In order to understand God’s ways, you have to listen to Him, not demand from Him, or whine to Him, or argue with Him in the effort to justify yourself. If you come to the Bible with a lot of preconceived ideas that you have heard from nonbelievers, you will be reading into it what you want to hear, to justify yourself, and defend your position of antagonism towards God, rather than listening to it and allowing it to speak truth to you.
(Verses 4-5 speak of David, and his place of rule over Israel.)
Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
Seek the Lord while He may be found, call on Him while He is near. This would certainly apply to Israel when God manifested Himself to them in various ways for the purpose of making Himself know, and in Jesus’ time as God confronted the Roman world, the Scribes and Pharisees, the common Hebrew population and the gentile world, in the person of Jesus Christ. However, I also believe, on a personal level, God orchestrates times and circumstances in our lives, as individuals, when we are more susceptible to hearing Him, or at least we should be. There are seasons in our lives in which people and circumstances make it easier for us to hear Him. I experienced this in my own life, and I have witnessed it happen to others.
Have you ever taken the time to think about how you think, and why you think the way you do? This is a very important issue that a lot of us need to give more thought to. Think about how you think! We are all influenced by a lot of people and things that affect how we think, whether we realize and admit it or not. Some of the ways we think are destructive. We have an enemy, Satan, the father of lies, whose sole intent is to kill, steal, and destroy. He puts evil and destructive thoughts in our minds. Sometimes he does this directly, sometimes he does it through others. You should be in the habit of questioning all your thoughts. Is any particular thought something that originated in your own mind, is it an inspiration of God, did someone else influence you, or is Satan lying to you? Is someone else controlling your thought process?
The Apostle Paul, in the Second Book of Corinthians, chapter 10, gives us the answer to this dilemma:
For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
Take your thoughts captive. Make them obedient to Christ. Learn of Christ. Know Him. He has promised to make Himself known to those who seek Him. Let Christ rule your thought life, or someone, or something else will put your mind in prison.
Danny's Stump 