98. The Mind of Christ
1 Corinthians 2:16 For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.
This is a contradictory promise: we have the mind of Christ. He had just said that no one has known the mind of the Lord. That is obvious. The Lord is the Creator; we are the creatures. God’s mind, His thoughts and His ways are so much beyond ours that God is incomprehensible to us. What is God doing? Why does He do what He does? What is Holiness? How is He Love? Where is Justice? Who? What? Where? When? How? Why? And on and on. We have many more questions than we have answers. His ways are not our ways. When faced with the deep things of God we are completely at a loss. We can’t even know God enough to ask the right questions.
We human beings cannot even know the Creation of the Universe. How could we possibly know the mind of the Lord who created it? Science knows a lot and human inquiry has answered a lot of questions. Humanity thinks we have come a long way in our understanding of the universe, but truthfully, the answers we have discovered have raised a ton of new questions. There is growth in understanding and learning, but there is so much more we don’t know. We know some things, but we can’t even answer all the questions God asked Job in Job 38-39. The only way we can respond is, like Job, cover our mouths and shut up. Job learned to quit questioning God and just repent and trust Him. Submit to the wisdom of God and believe that He is love. There is no other way: give up, and admit that we don’t know the mind of the Lord.
In the face of this, God gives us the mind of Christ. Amazing! God sent His Son. This is the way, and the only way, that the created human being can know God. He gave us a human who is also God. We can know Him, We have His mind. We can now know God intimately and personally. There is no other way to God; there is no other way to know Him. But in Christ God has creatively and effectively opened up the way in which man may and must go.
We have the mind of Christ, but we still do not know nearly everything about God. However, we do know everything we need to know. We actually know the otherwise unknowable. The most important thing we know when we know the mind of Christ is that God is Love. In Christ, we know beyond a doubt that God loves us. He gave His mind, and that mind is love. Impossibly, we can now know the love of God. And we can now know enough about all the attributes of God up to the level our finite minds can grasp. That still leaves us with much unknowing, but we know enough about the mind of God that we can trust Him for what we do not know. “Jesus loves me, this I know.” That is enough: I have the mind of Christ. I know how he feels about me and I know that everything He does is for my eternal good.