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“I believe this is what God wants me to do,” Jimmy reasoned for divorcing his wife.
She did nothing egregious, but was a normal wife and mom—and now devastated. He didn’t want to stay with her, but couldn’t give a satisfactory rationale. So he said, “I know he wants me to focus on ministry and leave behind my wife and kids.”
But how does Jimmy know what God wants? How does anyone know what God wants?
We need what God has communicated to know what God wants.
That “God spoke to me while I was praying to him,” gives no concrete foundation for assuming God actually communicated what he thinks. It’s not verifiable.
But what about when someone is raised from the dead with a new body?
When Jesus’ followers saw his corpse placed on the sheen rock in the tomb, they knew he was dead. Days later, they saw a man with a new body claiming to be Jesus. Some disbelieved.
Why? Because they knew people don’t resurrect from the dead. It doesn’t happen. But if it did, God did it.
After multiple appearances and a few fishy meals—like Tilapia for breakfast—the disciples understood that Jesus came from God and is God. They understood that what Jesus communicates is what God communicates.
Through Jesus, we understand both what God is like and wants. It’s not complicated. Jesus told his followers that they would be the first witnesses to the events of God. Subsequently, they recorded what they saw and heard in Jesus in order to preserve their story.
It turns out that Jesus even spoke about divorce.
We now have a verifiable foundation for understanding what God is like and wants. Jimmy was in the wrong.
The resurrection itself is recorded as God’s decisive event revealing his will for everyone. He wills life. That is, he wills all to experience a foretaste of the new world he began in Jesus in the old world we currently navigate.
There is no guessing. When Jesus speaks, God speaks. When the Bible speaks, God speaks.
That is the framework Jimmy should have used to discern whether God really was communicating to him to leave his family. He would have known that is against God’s intention (i.e., God wants us to take care of our familial responsibilities). He used a compass God didn’t manufacture.
And so do we all. We make choices that sound pious—because they are reasonable to us—but are actually out of line with God’s will.
In the Bible, we have God’s compass and foreseen destination. The resurrection secures it. And God has made it up for grabs.
Thanks,
Aaron