God: Subjective or Objective?

If you know me, you may have perceived that I am a straight-laced kind of girl.  I started this life with a small allotment of tolerance for those who are the 'creative types.'  I like events to happen in an efficient way, and I like to be the one who finds and executes the plan of operation.  That's how I like things to go, anyway.  Unfortunately for myself and those who have to put up with me, life happens in spite of me and my plan.  I say all of this to make this point: in the ongoing and timeless battle of subjective vs. objective, I fare on the objective side 110% of the time.  I like to know the 'why' of a situation so that I can figure out the best 'what,' 'when,' 'where,' 'who' and 'how.'  As you may have guessed, this makes me great at organizing events, administrating, and solving world hunger.  You can imagine then, how frustrating it may have been for my little Type-A personality to grow up with an X-type father.

That's my dad.  He doesn't fit into any box- well, perfectly anyway.  He sees events as they happen and makes judgment calls seemingly on the fly.  Growing up in his church, I not only had to see him (and respect him) as 'father,' but 'pastor', and as I got older, 'boss.'  Like I said before, his leadership methods didn't bode well with me all the time.  Often times, I would think to myself, "things would be so much easier if you could just tell me why we're doing this."  It wasn't until extremely recently that the Lord checked me about my attitude.  You see, it's not that I didn't respect my father, in fact, quite the opposite.  I wished I could operate the way he did more often, but my nature is to nail things down and always have a plan.  So, I was irritated when things didn't go according to plan...my plan.

The Lord literally stopped me mid-thought one day and gave me a revelation.  I love that.  God used my own bad attitude to show me something.  I realized that there was only one way you could be successful at working for my father; you had to know him.  That is the absolute only way that you can know if he is going to approve of something or not, if he prefers something or doesn't... you have to know him.  As I let that download in me, I felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit come upon me.  That is how my relationship is supposed to be with God.  God is both objective and subjective, and more often than not, I am not privy to the object.  I began to mull this over and search it out in scripture. 

How could I have missed this?  It's so evident in the Word.  It's like when Tamar whores herself out on the side of the road and the Bible says she is found more righteous than Judah (one of the 12 tribes of Israel).  Looking at that subjectively, it makes zero sense.  Even by the Law of Moses, prostitution is wrong.  So is lying.  So is stealing.  In fact, she pretty much broke every rule in the book that day--and it's counted unto her as righteousness?  Here's the secret: maybe Tamar didn't know the full plan, but what she did know was that God is a God who holds the end from the beginning and His will would be accomplished.  She trusted God for the rest.  And that's really what trusting God is all about.  It's about knowing Him.  He's the Type-A of all Type-A's.  He has a plan and He will execute it.  Sometimes the thing you are doing makes little to no sense, it doesn't fit in your box, it doesn't bode well with you.  Well I am sure that whoring on the side of the road didn't particularly sit well with Tamar either, but because of her trust in God, she was in the direct bloodline of Christ. 

Or how about the woman with the alabaster jar (Mat 26:6-13)?  The standards at that time being considered, what she did was wasteful and unclean, yet Jesus called it beautiful.  In fact, it so touched the heart of God that He declared that her act of worship would be forever told as part of the gospel.  Subjectively, it seems so foolish, but isn't it like our God to use foolish things to confound the wise?  You see, His plan was much bigger.  He knew Jesus was about to be crucified and He needed someone to anoint Him for burial.  How could the disciples possibly know that?  They couldn't, and they weren't expected to.  They were expected to know Him, what He preferred, what He approved of, what He needed.

There's an intimate relationship that we are privileged to have with our God.  Because of Jesus Christ, we are able to spend time with God and develop a friendship, a heart connection with Him.  In the Bible, Abraham is called a 'friend of God.'  Now, in our everyday relationships, we all know what happens when you become best friends with someone.  You spend time together, and sooner or later you begin to become like one another, and then a point comes where you can't remember what your life was like before you met this person.  That's what God desires with us.  He wants an all-access-pass to know us, so that we can know Him.  He wants to show us things that we never knew we never knew.  He wants to clue us in on little bits of the big picture, but He can only do that if we truly know Him.

I realized that my dad is a lot like God in this way.  He operates on the fuel of relationship rather than details or plans.  I believe that God wants us to do the same.  He wants us to run on that fuel so that when we are presented with a situation that seems uncertain, we can rely on our best friend to lead us.  "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:14).   Our lives are subject to the objective of God.  Lean on Him, let Him guide you and you are sure to fall in line with the objective no matter what the subject!

^That's me and dad