When one starts walking with God, we quickly learn two things about him. First, he is utterly consistent. Second, he is completely unpredictable. He is constant because his nature never changes.
Malachi 3: 6-for I the Lord do not change.
Hebrews 13: 8-Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
God will never change the way he sees us or feels about us because it is impossible for him to do so. He acts the same way towards us on our best day as he does on our worst day. He does not and cannot change. This is one of the great things about the nature of God: he never shifts the way he acts, thinks, speaks, or sees. He is utterly consistent and faithful to his nature.
But beyond that, God is totally unpredictable. This paradox (two seemingly conflicting ideas contained in the same truth) is at the core of who God is.
There are many paradoxical facts about God: for example, he is a righteous judge who demands the death penalty for sin, and he is a loving father who paid that price himself. In God’s Kingdom, everything is a paradox. We give in order to receive. We die to live. The least is the greatest. The first is last, and so on.
God loves to do things unpredictably. Instead of sending a huge army to liberate Israel from Egypt, the most Pagan, evil empire on earth, he sent an old man with a stick and a stutter. Not only that, but he also hardened Pharaohs heart so that he wouldn’t listen! He’s the same God who reduced Gideon’s already badly outnumbered army from 32,000 to 300.
Only God would think of defeating the most fortified city on earth by getting people to walk around it silently for a few days and then to shout in expectation of the walls falling down. Jericho was taken with no ladders, no siege towers, no battering Rams, no ramps-just the shouts of people who had been wandering around the desert for 40 years. If I gave your church a similar prophecy, you would think I was nuts !
God unpredictability means we have no security in what God is doing. His nature never changes, but his actions do. We can only be secure in who he is.
Our mission as Christians is to learn how to live in Christ and let that be the bedrock of our life. God will ask each of us, both individually and as part of a corporate body, to do things that are outrageous, impossible and unpredictable. Unless we live in the constant nature of God, we’ll never take that step of faith.
It seems to me that much of the church is completely opposite to God. The church is inconsistent in its relationships, but boring and predictable in the way they go about things. We must turn that model around and become rock solid relationally and actively innovative.
The world doesn’t like what we have to offer at the moment because we’re too inconsistent in friendship-we don’t do what we say we will do, and we don’t mean what we say.
On the other hand, our church services are numbingly dull. No wonder God wants to bring us back into the place of being an enigma on the earth; it’s his nature he wants to see reflected in us.