“Call to Me, and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” Jeremiah 33:3
I’ve been thinking lately about seemingly insoluble problems. You know the ones. They are broken relationships or illnesses or addictions or simply personal flaws that are showstoppers on the road to happiness and success. These things are in everyone’s lives – all around us. And experience teaches us we will go to our graves with issues that are never resolved. But I still can’t help believing the existence of unsolved problems is a contradiction to faith. A slap in our faces as believers. After all, aren’t we the ones who go around singing, “Jesus is the answer for the world today”? Is He only the answer for the easy problems? The problems that, if left alone, might work themselves out anyway? It’s a valid question.
There was a film a few years back that won audience’s hearts with the story of a troubled and trouble-seeking young man who just happened to be a genius. His genius came to light when he was caught one evening proving a mathematical theorem written on a blackboard while taking a break from mopping the floor. The plot turned on this young man being smarter than almost every human being alive, including the professors at M.I.T. He could see things they could not. For him, the math held no mysteries. He unlocked its secrets effortlessly, elegantly.
This kind of reminds me of Jesus, the Son of Man, healing the sick and delivering the tormented and raising the dead and commanding the elements and condemning the hypocrites. Answering life’s problems with a Word. Effortlessly. Elegantly.
I think I – we – attack our problems a lot like the students in that movie attacked the math proof. They tried this rule and that rule, this theory and that. Trial and error. Hoping something will unlock the mystery. Maybe they had success. Maybe not. Hit and miss.
But I believe there is an insight that comes only by the Spirit of God. I believe the Word of God, that ancient book the Bible, holds secrets. The “mighty” secrets of the heart of God, unlocked and revealed to us now by His Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:10). These kinds of answers don’t come from trial and error and wishful thinking. They are holy keys, wrought in light. They don’t find their way into the hands of sinners or hypocrites. They are not possessed by the proud. And they have nothing to do with human reasoning.
If we are ever to unlock the insoluble problems in life, we’re going to have to do it the same way Will of Good Will Hunting did. We’re going to have to do it the same way Jesus did. We are going to have to “see” answers that cannot be seen apart from the gift of insight. In other words, divine revelation: great and mighty things, which we do not know. And we’re going to have to prove out those answers in our lives for all the world to see. And that, my dear ones, is what it means to be a witness. It is so much more than words.
Is it possible? You bet! Is it easy? He said it was. Jesus is the Answer. Isn’t it time we proved it?