Grains of Sand

Google Images I guess it’s just human nature to want to be a “know-it-all.” I’m not talking about the person who thinks he has the answers to every question, the solution to every problem and the opinion that is better than anyone else’s. I mean the person who needs to know what’s going on and is driven crazy when we think information is being withheld. Eve fell into the trap being laid by Satan when she thought that God was holding out on her and Adam by forbidding them to eat of the fruit from one single tree (Genesis 3:4, 5). I’m not sure why the Israelites would have thought that God was withholding information from them. By the time we get to Deuteronomy 29, Moses has unloaded (or uploaded) a pile of information that God considers essential for His people as they look forward to their new homeland—and he isn’t finished yet! He has just delivered a stinging warning about the consequences of disobedience when he adds this interesting statement: “ The secret things belong to the ...

Google Images We always revert to what we know. When I look back at our beginnings in Venezuela I am reminded of how true that statement is. We wanted to do something uniquely Venezuelan, to make the church we were trying to establish be different, be Venezuelan. In the end it was uniquely North American. That wasn’t a bad thing—Venezuela is very pro-all-things-North-American. My point is that it just became too complicated to be different and much easier to go back to what we knew. After the resurrection, after Jesus’ appearances in the upper room and on the Emmaus road, the disciples were still “on hold.” What was the next step for them? They weren’t entirely sure and it was futile to speculate and too frustrating to plan. When we get to John 21 we discover Peter and some of the others reverting to what they already knew to do—fishing. They were sitting on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, waiting for no-one-knew-what. Peter suddenly announced, “ I’m going out to fish... ” (21:3)....