“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”― Albert Einstein

Isaiah 55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Do you understand now?

Do you ever feel like a little child that is explaining things beyond their capacity to understand? It might sound like this; “I know that I know that I know.” Thanks, that explains everything.

Matthew 13:35 That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.

Can you keep a secret? No? I didn’t think so.

What secrets are meant to be shared and which ones are meant to be kept?

How about this then. You can explain some things more clearly to a six year old than you can a tenured professor. Six year olds have a better imagination than professors.

Six year olds want to believe, those with a hardened heart and a cement mind will not change. I am not saying God cannot get to that professor, just that I am not likely to be able to reason with him.

What can we do?

Galatians 2:20-21a I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God:

Stop trying to explain this life of faith and just live it.

Jonah 4:1-2 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.

Jonah knew God. Jonah didn’t want to obey God and was forced into a situation in which Jonah knew for a certainty, the end result. God would be God, gracious and merciful, with or without him. So Jonah gets angry. This is how God answers Jonah’s anger.

Jonah 4:10-11 Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

These are the last verses of the book of Jonah. There is no further conversation, no explanation of Jonah’s reaction to God’s answer, no view of Jonah ever coming to repent of his anger with the Lord. It is an unsettled issue.

Philippians 2:13-16 For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. Do all things without murmurings and disputings: That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; Holding forth the word of life; that I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain.

Are you okay Jonah?