If Mother Nature were a real person, she would most certainly be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder based on her behavior during the month of February in South Carolina. Tornadic thunderstorms, torrential rain, flooding, and snow, all in the span of 48 hours? That’s just crazy.
A few years ago we even experienced an earthquake on Valentine’s Day. It was so rumbly and loud, I thought a plane was about to crash into our house.
It’s just about impossible right now to know whether to put on boots or flip flops, tank tops or flannel shirts. Most of the questions I ask our Alexa device—and yes, we do have one of those artificial intelligence gadgets—are some variation of “Hey Alexa, what will the weather be like today?” (If this little A.I. is nefariously reporting our conversations back to the Amazon mothership, as some suspect, the evil eavesdroppers are surely bored to tears.)
Alexa never honestly answers our weather questions with, “Hey, don’t ask me. I’m basically just a pile of plastic, wires and microchips.” No, Alexa typically just covers her high-tech heinie with a safe, generic answer like, “Partly cloudy with a chance of showers.”
Of course, consistency and predictability aren’t necessarily good when it comes to weather. Winter weather in my native land, Indiana, was consistently, predictably awful, and I hated it. Freezing cold and gray, followed by more freezing cold and gray.
Man has definitely made some huge advances in weather forecasting, but I doubt the experts will ever get it 100 percent right because God regularly needs to remind us that He’s God and we’re not. This life will always include a certain amount of mystery.
That doesn’t, however, mean God is entirely unknowable and unpredictable. He has revealed many things in the Bible about His character, His ways and His plans and has told us, “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart (Jeremiah 29:13).” In other passages, we’re encouraged to observe and learn how He does things.
Would God issue that invitation if it were impossible?
Moses was a man who passionately wanted to know the One who called him to the daunting (and exasperating) task of leading the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land, so he audaciously asked God to show him His glory. How did God react to that request? Did He rebuke Moses and say, “No way, you brazen little human! How dare you ask me that!”?
No, God replied that while it would be impossible and way too much for anyone to see ALL of who He is, He would allow Moses to see His back as He passed by (Exodus 33). In the next chapter, God did just that, while also verbally describing Himself to Moses as He went by. And this, in a nutshell, was God’s description: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and truth, forgiving and just.
Those are some mighty reassuring characteristics and this is just one passage where God reveals His nature. There are many others. Shouldn’t we make it our quest to know as much as we can about the One who holds all of creation, including our lives, in His hand?
We can’t know everything God is going to do or allow, but we can always learn more about who He is. He stands ready to blow apart our misinformed assumptions, so “… let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth (Hosea 6:3).”
God’s not fickle like our weather, but we’ll never trust Him until we know Him.