Don’t you wish God was simple? What about believing in God, or knowing how to handle the regular moral and relational dilemmas that we face? Wouldn’t it be a relief to have a collection of Bible texts that could take us, step by step, through each day and each day’s demands? After all, life is complicated. Do we really need a God who seems equally so?

If you think about God much, you know what I mean. If we imagine of our lives as road maps, they look more like London …

… than New York:*

If our lives were New Yorkish, we would hardly need a map. Just count streets and avenues, make square turns, and eventually you arrive at the right place. But, since they are more like London, a map is a much less precise and useful thing. Of course, we keep trying to impose right angles on our cow-path existence, and we find nothing but trouble.

Take any practical or spiritual need, any biblical concept, any divine or human attribute and subject it to an examination for clarity, understanding, “ease of use.” Let’s look at a random sampling. What do we know about faith? First, it is a gift that originates in God himself. Second, it is a mental assent to something that is true. Third, it is an implicit, total trust in a someone who claims to be utterly reliable, and yet who is unseen. Fourth, it is a trust that results in actions that demonstrate its presence and reality. Fifth, it expects to see answers to its requests. But, sixth, it asks us to continue believing even when the answers are not clear or evident. And, seventh, it is a daily provision for each circumstance, need, and purpose.

That’s something of what faith is. It’s each of those things, all of them put together, and more than we can even name. It’s the same with sin, with healing, with grace. With God himself, not content to be simple, but existing as a triunity of equal but separate persons.

We humans, of course, have a difficult time negotiating the complementing sides of truth. Faith/works; grace/law; justice/mercy; rest/zeal; free/bound – a nearly endless list of characteristics of God, of life in God, of our relationship with God and with others. We are like one-legged stools, hopping frantically between the threat of falling down to the left or to the right. We are always asking, “Is it this, or is it that?” and he is always answering, “Yes!”

In the end, there is only one solution: “Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11). In him all things hold together: God in eternity, God incarnate in humanity; God of glory joined to our suffering, God without sin, bearing our sin; eternal life put to death on the cross; infinite justice and infinite mercy meeting and made perfect through an offering of infinite love. Infinite God beyond all imagining; intimate God closer than our very breath.

Everything promised by the Father is, indeed, “yes” in Jesus, and every humanly irreconcilable truth pair is made perfect and whole. And he calls us to listen, to surrender, to ask, to receive, to wait, and to worship. Because he really will work all things together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose (Rom. 8:28).