Hi, Samara.
Greetings from Nadi, Fiji, where today is your tomorrow. We crossed the dateline yesterday. We departed Honolulu on Tuesday the 28th and the same day arrived here in Fiji where it was Wednesday, the first of March.
We have to pay by the hour at this hotel to use internet. So I’ll go make arrangements to connect and see it I can get this sent off. I can’t be sure how regular I will be with these little posts. In fact, I already feeling the pressure of what I will face when we arrive in Vanuatu today with only 3 days to get ready for classes on Monday. And I have barely started studying!
Some of the above is now obsolete. We are no longer in Nadi. And it is no longer March 2, but March 3—5:03am. We are in fact here on the campus of Joy Bible Institute, rattling around in this big missionary house, trying to figure out what’s what and where. We arrived too late to do much in town, buying food and figuring things out with cell phones, etc. I was able to connect with their internet, and hope this email transmits OK. Of course, I wanted to send it last night, but my head kind of shut down with weariness due to all the time changes. Becki and Thano felt the same way. We simply crashed around 7:30pm without eating, with some fans running to offset the muggy heat.
Maybe I can communicate again today amidst my big list of objectives.
Love, Tua.
Let’s give some careful thought to this promised benefit of intently and passionately seeking wisdom and understanding, with the wonderful fringe benefit of understanding “the fear of the LORD” and finding “the knowledge of God.”
Perhaps a good word to begin with is TRANSCENDENT, which appropriately applied to the Biblical God means that He is way beyond our human capacity to fully comprehend or understand. So, if that is true, what chance do we have of knowing Him, let alone understanding Him? In a full and complete sense, NONE! However, He, by means of His AMAZING GRACE, is mindful of our puny capacity and stoops or CONDESCENDS to allow access with a very limited, yet adequate, measure of KNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTANDING. He not only allows that measure, He requires it. So that capacity which He ascribes to us comes with responsibility.
I quite like the idea of serving and worshiping a TRANSCENDANT God. If I thought I had figured God out and fully understood Him, I would have to believe I would end up with a very wimpy God. If I thought, as a lot of people do, “As man is, God once was—and as God is, man may become,” I don’t think this God would be worthy of my fear (respect) and worship.
Between Portland and Honolulu, I sat next to a nice lady named Ruth who has 4 adult children. She expressed particular concern for all of them—as they have not carried on with their nominal Christian background and all now insist that they just don’t really KNOW if there is a God or not. I offered some of my opinion that that kind of mindset can often be another way of saying, “I don’t really want to know if there is a God or not—because if I arrived at the clear realization that God exists, I might also learn that He would want to impose some requirements upon me that would cramp my style.” I didn’t offer a lot of hope that there would ever be any real change in their attitudes, because I think that a satisfied mindset that says, “I don’t know,” actually locks that person into NOT KNOWING. Such a person will never accidentally “find the knowledge of God.” Only those who SEEK end up FINDING. On the other hand, I offered my typical no-risk challenge—that a person is wise to go to the top—get “alone with God” and ask Him if He exists. Why not? Ask Him if there are things He wants him to see that he doesn’t see, or know that he doesn’t know. I’m convinced that one of our Lord’s favorite things is to respond to the honest cry of the human heart. I also said I would pray that the grace of God would touch their hearts to influence them to want to KNOW Him.