When G-d Ignores My Excue: So Distracted With Having Right Theology And With Whether We Are Going to Die In His Presence That We Refuse to Listen to What He Is Speaking To Us

And Moses said, “ I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.”

When the L-RD saw that he turned aside to see, the L-rd killed him for looking on the glory of G-d.

And thus the children of Israel were not delivered from the land of Egypt.

A missing manuscript of Exodus 3:3-4

Okay, gang, that is not how the text reads, and we know it. Here is how it reads.

And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.”

When the L-rd saw that he turned aside to see, G-d called out to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”

And he said, “here I am.”

Exodus 3:3-4 ESV

So Moses comes to the bush, and the L-rd responds. Moses does not die from seeing or hearing the L-RD speak, and yet we have constructed a theology from a couple of verses in Scripture that have been ripped from their context.

And we call ourselves sinners.

And we have become so obsessed with answering questions Scripture does not address that we fail to listen to what G-d is trying to say. Our job is not to use the clear visitation of G-d as an occasion to explain to G-d why it is not consistent for Him to do what He is doing.

And when it does, there are times when the question applies and there are times when the question does not apply.

True, later on,

Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at G-d.

Exodus 3:6

But that does not say “Moses knew he was going to die from connecting with G-d intimately”.

Later on, when Moses asks the L-rd to show His glory to him, and G-d responds “man may not look on me and live”, the purpose was Moses had not completed his assignment.

And we make all these arguments IN THE MIDDLE OF the conversation with the King of Glory, the L-rd Strong and Mighty, the L-rd Mighty In Battle. And we fail to hang onto the things the L-rd is giving us.

What if we quit trying, for a season, to posit whether or not we can look at the manifested presence of G-d, and start being concerned with “what is G-d saying in this season of my life?” and we make THAT our obsession.

Transitioning to eternity with the L-rd because He manifested in such glory that we died from it and sloughed off this mortal coil is not a bad way to die.

The bottom line, and I love correct theology and doctrine as much as the next person who pastors and teaches, is, instead of being obsessed with whether or not G-d is correct in His behavior and actions, is what is G-d really saying to us.

If I am so obsessed with whether or not G-d can, that I fail to ask whether or not I heard and saw what He wanted me to hear and see, then something is vitially missing.

If I so castigate everyone who does not agree with my interpretation of Scripture that I miss the lesson G-d was trying to teach me through them, whether they were a Jew, or a Catholic, or a Pentecostal, or a Charismatic, I have missed the point.

If I do not tease out the truth in a passage in all of its nuance, but I am so concerned with blunt and plain truth on the surface, but I won’t meditate deeply on the truth I have been giving, and give my spirit a chance to speak, because I have spent a lifetime shutting down the voice of my spirit for the voice of my heart or reason or soul, then I might want to spend some time recallibrating.

There is a humility and a response to His grace and calling and glory that can only be received by slowing the roll on our soulish questioning, and respecting the space our spirit needs to speak to us.

I would counsely each of you to run after the fullness of what He has for you, and maybe to spend less time asking whether or not this or that is possible.

The Teachers among us will be of little use apart from an encounter with G-d that messes them up for a season that they quit asking the soulish questions.

Back up top, Moses did want to know, but he kept giving excues to G-d. No that isn’t a typo. It is not “excuses”. An excue is a signal that you give to someone to remove you from a situation. No, it’s not in a dictionary. I just made the word up, and it is based on the word “cue”. As in that is my cue. We have miscue, and now we have excue.

There are going to be times when G-d frequently ignores our theology in order to get a point across. And there are going be times when G-d ignores our obsession with experience because He is trying to help us construct a theology.

This post is not designed to get someone to throw out theology in favor of experience, or experience in favor of theology. Rather, this post is designed to get you to take the two, apply a little softer touch to your construction of views, and your response to your experience, and to develop chops in both the directions of nuanced theology and full encounters that cannot be explained away.

And to be able to share.

Sometimes we need some theological chops to balance our our touchy-feely nonsense. And sometimes we need an encounter that blows apart the bad structure of an inadequate theology that served us in one season, but will not last into the next.

Just some mishmashed thoughts for you to ponder gang.

Oh yeah, and let us allow G-d the lattitude to manifest to us without us being so concerned about whether or not we are doing right, acting right, or believing right.

Sometimes, Daddy just wants to rock His baby.

And sometimes, or better yet, all the time, G-d wants our mind and our hearts to work in tandem, together as a team, submitted to one another. A pairing of two.