God's Thoughts And Our Thoughts

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 On earth, the words of a wise man often mean something different from what a hearer understands of them. How natural then that the words of God, as he understands them, mean something infinitely higher than we at once apprehend.

There is a very great need for remembering this. Doing so will continually lead us from resting content with our knowledge and thoughts of the word, to wonder and wait what may be its full blessing as God has meant it. It will give our prayer for the Holy Spirit’s teaching new point and urgency, even to show us what has not yet entered into our heart to conceive. It will give confidence to the hope that there is for us, even in this life, a fulfillment beyond our highest thoughts.

God’s word thus has two meanings. One is that which it has in the mind of God, making the human words actually the bearers of all the glory of Divine wisdom, power, and love. The other is our feeble, partial, defective apprehension of it. Even after grace and experience have made such words as the love of God, the grace of God, the power of God, or any one of the many promises connected with these varieties, very true and real to us, there is still an infinite fullness in the word we have not yet known. How strikingly this is put in our text from Isaiah.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth.” Our faith in the fact is so simple and clear that no one would dream of trying with his little arm to reach the sun or the stars. To climb the highest mountain would not avail. We believe it with our whole heart. And now God says, even so, “my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.” Even when the word has spoken out God’s thoughts, and our thoughts have sought to take them in, they still remain, as high above our thoughts as the heavens are higher than the earth. All the infinities of God and the eternal world dwell in the word as the seed of eternal life. And as the full-grown oak is so mysteriously greater than the acorn from which it sprang, so are God’s words but seeds from which God’s mighty wonders of grace and power can grow up.

Faith in this word should teach us two lessons, the one of ignorance, the other of expectation. We should learn to come to the word as little children.

Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.” The prudent and the wise are not necessarily hypocrites or enemies. There are many of God’s own dear children, who, by neglecting to continually cultivate a childlike spirit, and unconsciously resting on the scripturalness of their creed, or the honesty of their spiritual study, have truth hidden from them, and never become spiritual men. “For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.” Let a deep sense of our ignorance, a deep distrust of our own power of understanding the things of God even, mark our Bible study.

The deeper our despair of entering right into the thoughts of God, the greater the confidence of expectancy may be. God wants to make His word true in us. “Your children shall be taught by the LORD” The Holy Spirit is already in us to reveal the things of God. In answer to our humble believing prayer, God will, through Him, give an ever growing insight into the mystery of God-our wonderful union and likeness to Christ, His living in us, and our being as He was in this world.

Yes, more- if our hearts thirst and wait for it, a time may come when, by a special communication of His Spirit, all our yearnings are satisfied and Christ so takes possession of the heart that, what was long a faith becomes an experience, that as the heavens are higher than the earth, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.