God Isn’t Supposed To Always Make Sense
“Consider the work of God:
who can make straight what he has made crooked?”
[Ecclesiastes 7:13]
As Much Sense As Calculus to An Ant
The Bible sometimes may not make sense to us and it may be because we are separated from the original context and audience by language, time and culture.
But other times, it’s not distance that makes it seem strange. It’s how God thinks and acts. Because even those in the original language, time and culture were confused by God.
Here are some obvious examples:
Abraham and Sarah, after being promised descendants as the sands of the sea and stars of the sky, were so confused by having to wait 25 years for one child, they succumbed to impatience. And hatched a scheme 11 years in to have a child outside of God’s plan1.
In Exodus 5, the Israelites are so confused by their slavery getting worse, instead of being freed, they turn on Moses. And Moses turns on God.
In Judges 6 Gideon is so confused by how God’s instructions didn’t make sense, he puts up not just one or two protests and comes across as a wimp, only for God to acquiesce and still use him.
There are 22 Psalms that ask the question “Why?”, and half of those ask the question multiple times. Meaning there are dozens of “Why”s in the worship music God gave his people to be recorded as Truth for all time and peoples2. I have read as well that in Job, the people in the book ask 210 questions through Chapter 37. The desire to understand what we do not, especially when it comes to God, is as old as the Bible itself3.
Humans simply do not reason the way God does and do not choose the way God does. God had to correct Samuel of all people for wanting to choose David’s brothers for understandable yet superficial reasons. God had to correct Jonah about loving the Ninevites because he refused to believe they deserved grace4. Jesus had to correct John the Baptist about what the Messiah’s ministry was supposed to look like. John the Baptist! How in the world was a man of that kind of faith confused?
God isn’t supposed to make sense to our human minds all the time. It’s why we need the enlightened eyes and mind that Paul speaks of in Ephesians. But even with that, our fleshly brain and vision struggle with how God does things. In Jehoshaphat’s day, God once sent the choir out to fight in a battle! Who does that?
If Samuel didn’t choose David, I know I would not have. If John the Baptist struggled with who Jesus was, I bet I would have5. If Gideon didn’t choose the 300 men, I would not have. I don’t think I’d have chosen Gideon. Gideon didn’t even choose himself. Neither did Moses. Or Jeremiah. Or Peter. Or Saul. And on and on. We like our cliches that say, “God doesn’t call the qualified but qualifies the called.” But a platitude cannot truly capture the reality of how God, at every turn in the Bible, chooses what men would not and do not. And how that puts people in spiritual and psychological knots.
Nowhere is this truth more clear than the life of Christ himself. Human thinking wouldn’t have chosen the manger. Or Bethlehem. Or Nazareth. Or Joseph and Mary’s family. Or the carpentry shop. We wouldn’t have chosen Roman Crucifixion, one era in human history where those in power mastered the art of not just killing criminals but humiliating them and inflicting extreme pain. In case it’s not clear from the Gospels, Jesus’s own followers were confused and offended by nearly all of these things. They didn’t make sense even in their time, to those who trusted Jesus the most6.
There are two big applications I want to make in closing. One it is truly OK to express the thought that God doesn’t make sense to us at times. Again, if you were making a list of the most faithful, confident saints in the Bible, you’d include Abraham, Moses, Samuel, John the Baptist, et al7. And look at their times of confusion! At times they sinned in response, and I do not condone that. But I do embrace the struggle of being confused.
And secondly, if God doesn’t make sense, then if we do follow when he doesn’t, our lives should not make sense. To lost people especially, but even to other Christians at times! If everything in your life can be explained by human wisdom and common sense, I think it’s safe to say no faith is involved. Peter once called Christians “aliens” and that is a word that communicates something so different I do not understand it and find it annoying in how bizarre it is. And in Peter’s letter it even meant people could get offended and angry in response to how different we are. But it also can mean they come to Jesus.
I don’t want my life to make sense all the time. I want to make decisions that cause people to say “What?” or “Why?” The same way Ecclesiastes 7:13 does. Because that’s how the God of Christianity worked through people in the Bible. I guarantee if you live out the Beatitudes regularly in your life, the average American (probably even in the church!) will think you weak or idiotic or worse.
But we aren’t called to be palatable to the human mind all the time. We aren’t called to always make sense.
Because God surely doesn’t.
- There’s also this: Abraham never did get to see descendants as the sands of the sea or the stars of the sky. It didn’t happen in his lifetime. Even by the fourth generation there were barely 70 people in his family. Numerous passages in the time of Moses, the kings and the prophets prove God kept his promise (Deuteronomy 1:10, 10:22, 2 Samuel 17:11, 1 Kings 4:20, Isaiah 10:22), but not to where Abraham saw it. And Hebrews 11 at the end even admits that God’s faithful did not always get to receive what is promised. There is no better phrase to sum up the heart of this article better than “(God’s faithful) did not receive what was promised”. ↩
- This kind of makes you wonder, do we have anything similar in our hymnody today? I know we have songs that ask questions, like Andrew Peterson’s “Is He Worthy?” And that song is perfect in that it answers those questions because we need those answers to understand God, Jesus, Resurrection and Hope. We cannot be healthy without those answers. But I wonder if we should have more songs that ask the “Why” questions that don’t have easy answers. Mark Schultz approached this with “He’s My Son” but that isn’t a congregational song. If any of our readers know of examples from either older hymns or newer ones, please feel free to share! ↩
- I find it supremely telling, on that note, that in Job God comes in at the end and doesn’t answer anything but asks Job 78 more questions. That is his “answer” to human confusion in perhaps the most consternating book in our Bible. ↩
- It is very telling to me that in the context of one of the famous “God doesn’t think the way we do” passages, Isaiah 55;8-9, God says his ways and thoughts are higher than ours when it comes to who he shows grace to. Read Isaiah 55:1-7 and behold it. The book of Jonah is Isaiah 55:1-9 in biography form. ↩
- It is my intention to harp less in public about the song “Mary, Did You Know?” and the recent American desire to chide the song as unnecessary since “Of course, Mary knew!” So I will relegate this to a footnote. There is basically zero chance in my mind that Mary knew everything about Jesus that Mark Lowry wrote about. Luke 2, Mark 3 and other places prove Jesus was confusing to his family. They thought he was out of his mind and he offended them. I feel like we think we come across weak or ignorant or doubtful when we don’t understand something about God, so we filter that through this song and say with boldness that “Mary knew!” Because we know! But this type of confidence simply doesn’t square with biblical truth or reality. There is a lot I can know in Christianity with confidence. But God simply cannot make sense to me all the time. Otherwise, there is no need for faith. In my opinion we rob Mary of her faith by claiming she knew all about Jesus because the angel told her a few select things. ↩
- Partial list of biblical references that support this: Micah 5:2, John 1:46, Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3, John 6:42, Matthew 16:22, Mark 8:32 ↩
- It’s worth noting to me that unlike the other examples, Moses had zero reason to balk at God because according to Stephen in Acts 7, Moses did know how to speak well. So he basically lied to God’s face. ↩
- God Isn’t Supposed To Always Make Sense - October 20, 2025
- Five Mesmerizingly Dynamic TV Villains - June 24, 2025
- A Plea To The Church To Turn On The Lights During Worship - April 21, 2025
Discover more from Rambling Ever On
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Great (and for me, timely) comments. These are good reminders for us all.
Regarding footnote #2, it’s not considered a “hymn” as far as I know, but Laura Story’s “Blessings” is another example of a song that explores this line of thinking and is one of my favorites.
Excellent article, nourishing food for thought. You present a balanced, nuanced, and realistic understanding of the incomprehensibility of God (Isaiah 40, Job, and the several other examples you give.
On the other hand, Christian life and experience can be cyclical, seasonal, or event specific. There may well be times that the truth from Scripture is so clear, the witness of the Spirit so strong, God’s moving in the moment so compelling, that God does totally make sense; David and Goliath, the blind man healed (I was blind but now I see.) Thanks, Gowdy, for reminding us of the other reality: we may never be able to figure out some things. Good job!
Not a hymn, though I do think it could be sung congregationally and I’m hoping to convince my worship leader to incorporate into our services, but John Van Deusen’s song, “By Gracious Powers” fits into this conversation wonderfully.
(I wrote a review about his new album, that contains this song, just last week.)