A Thirst for Knowledge

Sometime during my Naval Academy (college) years, I started hungering for answers about God and His Word.  I had classmates, from various denominations, who often shared aspects of their Christian faith.  And I wanted to know the truth...and why.

As a child I had attended a Baptist church, and I knew answers were in the Bible.  I spent a lot of my free time reading the Bible, but I still needed somebody to explain things to me.

So on Saturdays, I'd walk to the Christian bookstore in downtown Annapolis, and try to find "that book" that would give me answers.

And for the next 20 years or so, I read a steady diet of Christian books on: theology, denominations, prayer, parenting, marriage, time management, church growth, spiritual gifts, the good Christian life, church history,  apologetics, creation, spiritual warfare, the end times, healing, miracles...

Even with all that reading, I couldn't put it "all together" and was still unsettled in my soul, wanting answers.
 
And then, one day, it happened; I don't even know when.  I knew and know that the answer is Christ and the cross, faith and salvation.   

Now, almost every day, I think, "I really didn't understand and get this...until today." 

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God...1 Peter 3:18 

Our God became man, walked among us, and died for our sins, for my sins.  That truth has such depth that it's new to me and deeper to me every day.

We have a thirst for knowledge, and our society is used to getting instant answers to seemingly everything.  We're spoiled into thinking that our thirst can be quenched.

Now, whenever I hear people, including Christians, ask difficult and often unanswerable questions...I think, "I don't have to know the answer to this question in order to make my faith real, or better, or secure."

I'm taken back to Adam's sin, back to the First Commandment.  I want to be God, to have His knowledge.  But the fact is, "He is...and I is not." 

Our thirst for knowledge is good, and the Bible is abundant, not only in the amount of knowledge, but in the profound richness and insight it contains, about our hearts and about our God. 

But for some things, we're not given the answer.  And there's comfort in that.  For "He is God...and I is not."