Quote Source – Jeff Hilles
Jeff Hilles names something most of us do before we even notice we’re doing it. We read about the flood, or the conquest of Canaan, or Ananias and Sapphira struck dead on the spot, and before we’ve prayed about any of it, we’ve already put God on trial. We hold up our own sense of fairness – forged in a fallen mind, shaped by a culture with its own blind spots – and ask whether God measures up to it.
That’s backwards. And it’s worth asking why we keep doing it anyway.
The Ruler We Reach For Isn’t Straight
Here’s the problem nobody wants to say out loud: the moral instinct we use to judge God is not neutral. It came from somewhere. Genesis 3 tells us we fell, and everything downstream of the fall got bent – our desires, our reasoning, even our conscience. We still know right from wrong, God saw to that, but our application of it is warped by pride, self-interest, and plain, limited information. We see maybe a hundred years of one life. God sees the whole of history, every motive, every consequence rippling out for generations. Using a bent ruler to grade a perfectly straight one isn’t humility. It’s confusion dressed up as conviction.
What Isaiah Already Told Us
This isn’t a new insight. God said it plainly through the prophet Isaiah, centuries before anyone had a comment section to argue in.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. [Isaiah 55:8-9]
That’s not God dodging accountability. It’s God telling the truth about the gap between His knowledge and ours. A parent doesn’t owe a toddler an explanation for every decision, not because the parent is careless, but because the toddler lacks the knowledge to understand the answer. Scale that gap up to infinity and you start to see the size of the problem when we demand God explain Himself on our terms.
Job Learned This the Hard Way
Job is the clearest case study in Scripture. He lost everything, demanded answers, and got them – just not the ones he expected. God’s response in Job 38 through 41 isn’t a courtroom defense. It’s a tour of creation designed to remind Job who’s standing where. Job doesn’t walk away with a satisfying explanation for his suffering. He walks away repenting “in dust and ashes,” having met the God he’d been trying to cross-examine. Sometimes the answer to “why” is simply an encounter with how much bigger God is than the question.
Trust Instead of a Verdict
None of this means we stop thinking, or that hard passages don’t deserve honest wrestling. Deuteronomy 32:4 calls God “a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” That’s a claim worth testing, not swallowing blindly. But testing it starts from trust in who God has revealed Himself to be in Christ – the God who went to a cross for people who were, by every human measure, still His enemies. Romans 5:8 says as much. A God who does that has already answered the character question. What’s left isn’t a verdict we render. It’s a posture we take: humble, teachable, willing to let the Judge of all the earth actually be the judge.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
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