I had an interesting experience with the Lord this morning. I have to give you a bit of background or it might not make sense. I did a lot of cooking and house cleaning for Christmas. I had gotten most of it done (cooking and cleaning) on Monday and Tuesday. But I still had to prepare/cook the main course and sweep the floors, clean the guest bathroom, etc on Christmas day. I started that very early Christmas morning. After I'd cleaned for about an hour, I bent over to sweep some dust into the dustpan. When I straightened out, I had this excruciating pain in the small of my back. I can't imagine how one could hurt their back sweeping the floor, but I did. It was incapacitating. I ended up unable to stand upright, I had to hunch over or the pain was unbearable. And it hurt a lot to simply stand up.

I won't go into the details of attempting to finish preparing the meal in that condition. Suffice it to say, I realized I had to limit my activity. So the next several days were just sort of "sit on the sofa with a heating pad" days. I spent my time watching TV (not much else you can do) and it was not a very spiritual time for me. In fact, the pain made it hard to concentrate to pray. So my prayer life fell off as well.

Because of this, the week between Christmas and New Year's Day has been a very mundane and unfruitful week for me. It was not a lot of fun and I did not feel that close to God much of the week. I was not in sin or defeat, just mundane day-to-day life where God did not break in a lot and I did not accomplish much in the natural.

The Lord met me a bit at church on Sunday, but not at the level I was hoping for. I felt closer to God all day Sunday. But by the next day, Monday, it was back to vegetating on my sofa with the heating pad and feeling unspiritual. That is pretty much how Tuesday, New Year's Eve, went for me as well. My husband and I planned to go to my church's New Years Eve party, but by 8 PM (as we were about to leave), we both felt really exhausted. So we decided to rent a video and stay home.

Today is New Year's Day. I awoke very early and I tried to start the day off with prayer, but it was hard to concentrate, so I turned on the TV and watched a bit of a comedy. Then I heard God tell me that if I went upstairs to write, He would speak to me. So I turned off the TV and went to the computer. I began to write in a sort of prophetic flow where I find out what God is saying as I read what I write. The Lord does that with me frequently, where He tells me to sit down and write and then He speaks to me. But we'd not done that for a little over a month.

Most of what God said to me was encouraging and renewing. A bit of it was directive. In particular, He told me to put more time into reading the Bible for my own growth/edification. He told me not to consider the studying I do to prepare my teachings as my scripture devotions. E.g., read the bible more for myself and less for studying it for teachings. He promised to speak to me as I did that, as I read prayerfully His word for my own edification. (I used to do a lot of that but I have sort of gotten out of the habit lately since I have been spending so much time preparing various teachings. He was calling me back to a spiritual discipline I'd gotten lax on.)

Since I had gotten that direction, I decided maybe I ought to start obeying it instantly. So I brought up an online bible and began reading John chapter 12. Why John 12? Because when I was bringing up the online bible, I heard God tell me to read John 12, so I did. He spoke to me some as I was reading it, which was very nice.. just like old times. Then I came to a passage that really puzzled me. It was verses 47 and 48. Jesus had been talking about His upcoming death and then He said, "As for the person who hears My words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. There is a judge for the one who rejects Me and does not accept My words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day."

It sounded like He was saying that He would not judge the world or unbelievers. That did not jive with my "judgment seat of Christ" theology, so I began to research/study that topic. I wanted to resolve the tension between that verse and what I believed I knew about the subject. It peeked my interest and fascinated me. I sort of dived into it and did all sorts of study.. looking up throne, judgment seat, etc in the bible dictionary and bible encyclopedia. I searched for some verses I remembered on the subject and re-read them, like the passage about Jesus separating the sheep from the goats. I looked at John 5:22-27 and Acts 17:31, which both explicitly state that Jesus was given authority to judge the world. I puzzled for a while over this. I know that the Bible is authoritative and infallible, it could not misrepresent the words of Christ. So there must be a reason that the tension exists between these two statements that Jesus made.. one where He says He is not going to judge those who don't keep His sayings and the other where He says He is going to judge them.

I came up with a few "weak" explanations to resolve this tension, but I did not feel satisfied with either one. One was that perhaps Jesus means it is not up to Him to judge those who do not receive Him as their Lord -- it is a cast in stone fate that they will go to Hell because they rejected Him. Or perhaps Jesus meant that His first coming is not to judge mankind but to save them and that He will leave the Judgment for His second coming.

I kept feeling like I was missing something, that there was more to it and Jesus had a reason for making these two statements that did not seem to jive with each other. He used to speak in parables when teaching and to say thought provoking things. I figured that there was more He wanted me to get out of this, but I could not figure out what it was. So I finally wrote an e-mail to my mentors and put the question before them.

Then after writing the e-mail, I did a bit of intense prayer asking God to address this for me. What principle is here that I am missing? Is there any changes I need to make to my thinking, to my theology, to my lifestyle in response to whatever point God is trying to make with these two statements that are at tension with each other?

After a little while, God broke in and spoke to me. He said, "Teresa, I am so big that you will never fully understand Me, not even in all of eternity. I will constantly be showing you more and more of Myself, but you will never be able to understand it all or take it all in. You will be able to pursue knowing Me more for all of eternity and to always be growing in that knowledge but never attaining the full revelation of Who I am."

He went on to tell me that He showed me this "puzzle" to intrigue me to press in for more understanding of Him and His ways. It had worked, because I had puzzled over it with fascination for quite a while this morning. I still don't have my answer but I know it will come.

However, what I experienced with God this morning is what hunters call "the thrill of the chase." It is neat to begin to puzzle over some aspect of God or of something He said, and to find yourself driven to study scripture to understand more, to find yourself asking Him to give you more understanding. It is good to have your full interest on God rather than on whatever movie happens to be on TV. It is interesting and it is exciting and you find yourself really pressing into God for the answer.

That is sort of like what eternity is going to be like. The more we get to know God, the more we will realize this aspect or that aspect of Him that we don't know or don't understand. We will have the thrill of the treasure hunt of getting to know God better in that area, of getting to understand that aspect of His nature. And when we get that one mastered, then He will show us another mystery and launch us on another treasure hunt to get to know Him better. And for all of eternity we will never run out of these "mysteries" because He is so big and so vast. It is going to be fun to get to know Him better and better as eternity progresses.