Taught the Truth by God

“Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O LORD,
and whom You teach out of your law, (Psalm 94:12–13 )

The phrase, “whom You teach out of your law,” stands out because it is such an important concept. Here’s why:

God thinks differently than we do:
“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)
And His values are far different from ours:
“. . . For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.”
(Luke 16:15)

The ancient Greek philosophers believed that they could think their way to truth and the nature of reality. To some degree each of us does this within our own culture and worldview. Because we grew up in them and absorbed them by assimilation, our thinking, our values, and our view of the nature of reality all feel right and normal and true. But when you live sympathetically within another culture for an extended period, it finally dawns on you that the other culture feels just as true and right to its citizens as yours does to you. Cultures and worldviews and the way we think and reason are all relative. They all grow out of our individual and collective use of a little 3.3 pound organic computing machine that we call the human brain. With its 86 billion, self-programming neurons, it is a beautiful, elegant piece of engineering. But our ability to use it for thinking is astronomically pathetic when we compare it to the mind of God by which he created the entire universe and everything in it. Pitting our thinking against God’s thinking would be like challenging a supercomputer with a wristwatch calculator. We simply don’t have the equipment to live our lives within actual truth and reality. We have to have outside help.

So all of this brings us back to Psalm 94:12. We need two things. We need information that the Living God has revealed and provided for us, and we need Him to teach us what it means and how it applies. And that is precisely what He is prepared to do if we will but let Him:
“Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O LORD,
and whom you teach out of your law,” (Psalm 94:12)

But there’s one more thing that is crucial. You see the great temptation is to read the scriptures and try to reshape them to fit our own thinking. That puts us back to square one. We must not only listen to what God wants to teach us, we must let Him reprogram our thinking. When we run across things in the scriptures that don’t fit our thinking, we must see our own notions as the finite, subjective results of mere human thinking and willingly replace them with the wisdom of God. Why? Because God’s wisdom is the only true reality. As Jesus put it:

“Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” (John 17:17 )