God's Not A Weatherman

I had an interesting conversation with my 8-year-old son a couple days ago. Here's the gist of it.

"Dad, is it going to snow?"

"Well, son, one thing I've learned is that when it comes to snow, you can't always trust what the weatherman says."

"I guess your right. I think I really only trust the radar."

It looks like my 8-year-old has learned a valuable life lesson. Here, in Southeast Texas, snow is a rare find. I can probably count on one hand how many times I've seen it actually snow here. Naturally, when the weatherman says there's a chance, there's a bit of excitement in the air. And, when he says there's an 80% chance like he did this week, even the biggest skeptics can start to believe.

Even with a huge chance like that in the forecast, we awakened this morning to find no snow on the ground. I thought it a bit humorous today when one local weatherman fielded some questions from some elementary children who were a bit upset at discovering the ground absent of white fluffy snow this morning. He tried so hard to explain what happened and why there was no snow. Needless to say, I think most kids didn't really care about why it didn't snow, they just are bummed it didn't.

With all our modern technology, forecasting the weather is still done with a great margin of error. The computer models, the weatherman's expertise, and the hopes of all the children still can't make this process an exact science. While they are much more accurate than they were a few decades ago, they still miss it. The truth is, the job of forecasting the weather requires a great deal of speculation and educated guessing. Sometimes they nail it and sometimes they don't.

Back to my son's comment about the radar. He's figured out that the radar represents what's happening now. It's not forecasting. It's not guessing. It's what is. If he sees rain on the radar, he knows its raining right then and there. Its not hard to trust something like that. It's real. Although the radar may show its raining hundreds of miles away you can rest assured that its raining there even though you are not there to personally witness it.

Our faith in God is a great deal like that. We don't see Him, yet we know He exists. Like that radar screen, God's Word reveals truths about Him. Those truths, coupled with our faith launches us past the point of believing into the place of knowing. A place of assurance. A place that doesn't require any of our five physical senses to experience anything in order to know with confidence. My son never has to see the storm with his own eyes to know that it exists. All he needs to see is the image on a radar and he knows it is. Our Creator is revealed throughout Scripture. Page after page, there He is. Yes, He's in heaven, He's here on earth and He's everywhere else. But, in Scripture we can see Him. Not with our physical eyes, but with the eyes of our understanding, our eyes of faith. He's more real than anything we can see with our natural eyes.

Our biggest problem is we trust our five physical senses more than we do God's Word. Our five physical senses though are a lot like the weatherman. They can't always be trusted. No, I'm not dissin' the weatherman. I'm just making a point, that if we want to trust in something that is absolute, unchanging, and completely stable, then we'll have to learn to tap into this thing called faith. We'll have to learn how to gravitate toward believing God's Word more than we do our five senses.

God is real. His kingdom is more real than this world we live in. His kingdom is forever. Its eternal. The economy in His kingdom doesn't rise and fall. He's not on His throne wringing His hands and working up a sweat at all the calamity that's going on in the world. He's not worried about how things are going to play out. He's not sitting around throwing around odds with the angels as to whether things are going to go as planned. He wrote the script and it'll play out the way He said it would. He's at peace because, His kingdom is superior to the one in which we live in here on this earth. When our faith is rooted in His kingdom, then all is well with us. When our faith is truly in Him then we can walk through life with an assurance and confidence that is puzzling to those who trust in things that are filled with uncertainty.

The kind of life God designed each of us to live is one in which our trust and confidence is in Him and nothing else. God's not a weatherman. His Word is not full of speculation and educated guesses. His Word is full of truth and absolutes. When He speaks, its a done deal. Faith anchored in Him will prove to be more certain than confidence in anyone or anything else.