(Image Credit: Brent Florica, The King's Library)
Sometimes God's commands don't seem to make sense.
Take Jonah, for example. A patriotic Hebrew, prophesying good news for Israel (and more popular than most prophets as a result), delivering God's messages to the children of Abraham like a good, loyal messenger of God. Things were probably pretty good and to Jonah, they made sense as they were. He was doing his job. God was looking after Israel. Everything was as it should be.
But then God told him to go into an enemy city. A city outside of Israel. A city of barbarians, of sinful, savage torturers who revelled in the suffering of their victims. God wanted them to hear His message of salvation, the message that, to Jonah, was reserved for Israel, and Jonah . . . well, he just couldn't stomach it. To him, it just didn't make sense.
Adam and Eve were given one instruction—just one simple rule to follow in the Garden of Eden. But the moment temptation came, they looked at that tree and wondered, "Why shouldn't we eat this fruit? It just doesn't make sense."
We know in both these cases that God knew better. His common servants chose to follow their own path, to do what made sense to them instead of trusting the infinite wisdom and sovereignty of the One who made heaven and earth. Jonah was cast into a raging sea, swallowed by a whale, and then lost in a cliffhanger of bitterness and resentment; Adam and Eve brought the ultimate disease upon the world and its inhabitants for millennia to come. Why? Because they thought they knew better. They didn't understand why God would ask what He did, so they figured they would make the rules themselves.
Not much has changed today. The world has lots of ideas about God and the commands He makes, and it always finds ways to critique His instructions, to say they're unfair, or contradictory, or unloving. To say they just don't make any sense. But they're missing something: He's God. The CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE. He doesn't have to explain Himself to us, common humans. He knows what we don't and He sees what we can't, and in His perfect plan, everything makes perfect sense. We need to trust that He knows what He's doing.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. ~Isaiah 55:9