“For who has known the mind of the Lord
that he will instruct Him?”
Has the philosopher?
Maybe professors,
or prosecutors,
or even psychologists,
no wait, maybe Presidents,
or physicists,
or maybe, poets?
I watched a Jubilee video featuring Alex O’Connor, an atheist, surrounded by twenty professed Christians. The rules were simple: Alex O’Connor makes a claim, a Christian faces O’Connor and attempts to address the claim, and a minimum of eleven raised red flags can vote out the Christian in the circle to be replaced by the first person who touches the chair. O’Connor, in an equanimous disposition made four abrasive claims to refute the existence of God, being, Suffering makes God’s existence unlikely, God commands genocide in the Bible, There is insufficient evidence to believe in the resurrection and Jesus never claimed to be God.
In about an hour and thirty-four minutes, the professed Christians who made it to the chair addressed O’Connor’s claims with the Axiological Expectation Mismatch problem denoting the subjectivity in morality, the consequences of the Fall of Man, the fact that we don’t deserve life, hyperbolic language, miracles, a Jesus visitation, Jesus’ famous assertion that “before Abraham was, I am,” and the “Two Powers in Heaven” motif throughout the Old Testament essentially foreshadowing the concept of the trinity, and more specifically Jesus’ Godhood. O’Connor resisted by focusing the conversation on the concept of a loving God permitting animal suffering as opposed to a subjective-morality issue, emphasizing God’s seeming genocidal command in 1 Samuel 15, attempting to discredit the Gospels through "contradictions," and poking holes in the semantics of Jesus’ divinic claims in the book of John. Judgmental-facial expressions could ironically be seen on the faces of the Christians towards whoever was trying to answer O’Connor as they raced towards the seat, nearly crashing into each other a couple of times. Some interesting questions were raised and some good answers were given, but in the end, nothing was definitively made known.
1 Corinthians 2:14-16 tells us,
“But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God,
for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them,
because they are spiritually appraised.
But he who is spiritual appraises all things,
yet he himself is appraised by no one.
For who has known the mind of the Lord
that he will instruct Him?
But we have the mind of Christ.”
The greatest minds have debated, deciphered,
diagnosed, decreed, deconstructed and denied,
but in all our knowledge, none is known.
“All we like sheep have gone astray,”
committing the same sin like our ancestors in the Garden,
attempting to be like God and define what is good and evil,
but “Woe to the one who quarrels with his Maker—
A piece of pottery among the other earthenware pottery pieces!
Will the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you doing?’”
To some, faith and reason are polar opposites,
but for those of us with the mind of Christ,
we understand that it is reasonable to trust God
even beyond our limited comprehension,
and if this answer defies our sense of control
then maybe that’s the point–
Maybe God asking Job forty-two rhetorical questions
was to get him to make peace with his limitations
and trust in a God who isn’t limited by our limitations.