When God called Moses to demand release of the Israelites from Egyptian captivity, Moses felt inadequate and unqualified. He asked, “Who am I to do such a thing?” 

Now, when I ask this question of God, I usually ask in false humility. What I really want is God to reassure me of my qualifications and giftedness. What I really want is God to pump up my self-esteem. “Please remind me how awesome I am so that I’ll be confident enough to do this,” I ask God. And I fully expect God to respond, “Ralph, you’re good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.” 

This not what God said to Moses. In fact, he really didn’t even answer the question “Who is Moses?” He answered the question “Who is God?” 

The answer, of course, He is God. 

But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 

And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain” (Exodus 3:11-12)

God says to Moses, ”Who am I?” 

In other words, “Never mind who you are. You’re right; you’re a nobody. But you are called. I will be with you. And the sign of your success will not be a gold watch and a plaque and a place in Super-duper Church Magazine’s 100 Most Awesomest Churches and Pastors with Mad Leadership Skills, but worship of me.” 

“Oh.”
Moses’ “Oh” consisted of more questions. 

Moses said to the LORD, “O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” 

The LORD said to him, “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD ? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say” (Exodus 4:10-12). 

You’ve likely heard the dictum “God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called.” This is why God uses shepherds, fig farmers, youngest sons, prostitutes, widows, etc. 

This is why he uses sinners. Not so that they will realize their potential. Not so that they will finally see how inherently awesome they are. 

But so that God gets the glory and so that He gets the glory in the vivid, repeating imagery of turning ashes to beauty. 

God made man out of dirt. We — you and I — are dirt. 

We only need to read a little bit of Paul to see how little he, as an amazing apostle and church planter, cares about human credentials and qualifications. And Paul actually had them. 

The gospel is not the power to save because of our knowledge, our techniques, our systems, our innovations, our preaching style, our music style, our creativity, our conferences, our degrees, our viral marketing, our evaluations and efficiency, or our selves. None of those things is bad, but we make all of them idols so easily. They take so much effort, and yet we make them idols so effortlessly. 

“Who are we? We’re awesome!” But it is the gospel that is the power to save because of Jesus’ work. Because God is with the gospel and with us as we share it with those who have yet to encounter the real Jesus. 

So, in 2022 I have decided: “… to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”  (1 Corinthians 2:2).

In the new year this is something to ponder …

It is usually something we tend to overlook or, if we even consider, fail to invest in: that is that Jesus, being God in the flesh, was the smartest man who ever lived. Does Jesus ever show up on anybody’s list of the greatest thinkers of history? Gurus, perhaps. Sages, maybe. The world may think him “wise” in some Confucian sense. We think of him as an idealist, as an enlightened man, as a revolutionary. But generally speaking, we also tend to regard him as naïve or simple. 

The world does not regard Jesus as savvy or practical, and if we within the Church will be honest with ourselves, we must admit that our frequent failures to obey his commands stem essentially from our practical disbelief that he could really be right about the way to think and act. But if we really believe Jesus was who he said he was, we know we have recorded in Scripture and at our reading convenience, the greatest human mind of all time. 

How vast is the wisdom of Christ? As vast as the resources of Almighty God. Revisit that exciting post-resurrection scene from the road to Emmaus in Luke’s Gospel and remind yourself how all-encompassing Jesus’ knowledge is (and how all-illuminating our knowledge of Jesus can be). 

Jesus comes on these guys unawares and basically reveals the Bible to them. He illuminates Scripture to them. He answers their questions in such a fulfilling way that they say their hearts burned while he explained it to them. 

Christians, Jesus’ knowledge imparted to us is not just head knowledge, but a godly wisdom of the sort that should be our constant resource and inspiration and guide through all of life. When Jesus gives us the Sermon on the Mount, he’s not just giving us a list of things to do, but an invitation to real life as Holy Spirit-enlightened persons. His commands are not just calls to right behaviour, but calls to embrace a quality of the heart that leads to a pattern of life that burns with real knowledge from God. We call this real knowledge “truth.” And in 2022 we will need all the “truth” we can get.

Jesus was absolutely brilliant, and yet we don’t refer to or access that brilliance with much regularity, do we? We tend to make our own decisions, utilize our own reason, and then ask God to okay it, confirm it, bless it. 

We are great at compartmentalizing our lives, which is merely an extension of our implicit belief that Jesus’ knowledge is for our “spiritual life” but that our “everyday life” requires a more modern knowledge, a more “realistic” knowledge. Street smarts, perhaps. After all, it is 2022.

Dallas Willard writes: 

The world has succeeded in opposing intelligence to goodness . . . And today any attempt to combine spirituality or moral purity with great intelligence causes widespread pangs of “cognitive dissonance.” Mother Theresa, no more than Jesus, is thought of as smart — nice, of course, but not really smart. “Smart” means good at managing how life “really” is. 

Most of us have to get into the habit of thinking of Jesus as competent in all areas of our life, but we can’t settle at Jesus’ mere competence. We must embrace Jesus’ all-surpassing brilliance. That is where Jesus’ intelligence really shines through for us – he’s not just a storehouse of facts or data; he is the wellspring of all truth. Jesus the Man didn’t just teach and live the truth, he was, as he said himself, the Truth itself. 

We have to get past an anxiety-prone existence in this day of Covid and in which we acknowledge Jesus’ moral perfection and good teaching and miraculous power, but perversely, not to the extent that we think Him “in touch” with what we are really going through. 

In one of the great ironies of our modern evangelical subculture, we are very big on “making” the Christian faith practical and “relevant,” yet by and large we go on living our lives as if Jesus had nothing relevant to bear upon what we do and say, who we date or marry, what sort of jobs we take, what sort of families we raise, where we spend our time and who we spend it with. 

We’re cool with Jesus being good and nice, but we’re hesitant to live as if he is omniscient as well.