( Isaiah 55: 8-9 )
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.
God is in the business of shattering preconceptions. No one exemplified this more than the Lord Jesus Himself. He was unhindered by the need to please other people, which motivates so much of our own behavior. And unlike us, He enjoyed unbroken communion with His Father, with no memory of past guilt or failure. This allowed Him to express Gods nature in countless surprising ways. In fact, the one predictable thing about Jesus was that He was unpredictable. This trait confounded both his enemies and His disciples.
Jesus healed people everywhere He went. But He did it many different ways. Mostly, He simply spoke. Other times, He might put his fingers in a deaf-mutes ears (Mark 7:33), or spit on the ground to make a mud pack for blind eyes (John 9:6). He healed some people while taking them by the hand (Matthew 8:15, 9:25, Mark 1:31, 1:41, 5:41, 8:54). And sometimes He did nothing at all; people were healed simply by touching Him (Mark 3:10, 5:27, 6:56, 10:52, Luke 6:19, 8:44).
Were inclined to look for a technique in all this, so that we can replicate it, or at least understand how He did it. We bring our obsession with right action to these scriptures, looking for a method we can use. Our Western way of thinking presumes that an act performed properly will work consistently. We seek the equivalent of a spit-and-mud pack formula that will do the trick every time. But of course in all these instances, it wasnt the physical act that healed; it was the life of God, tapped by faith, which flowed through the act. The purpose was to display Gods glory and loving character. The various techniques were simply props. This kind of faith — rooted in an appreciation of Gods character and motivation — can always rely on God to come through.
In His teaching ministry too, the Lord refused to be pigeonholed. He was always truthful, but expressed Himself with great freedom. His words unfailingly perplexed, shocked and disappointed people. What they never did was confirm prejudice and complacency. He put His hearers on notice early, in the Sermon on the Mount. He took what they had accepted as true (You have heard that it was said) and expanded it beyond what they could imagine (but I say to you). He was trying to provoke what we would call a paradigm shift. It wasnt in the fine points of doctrine that they were wrong. It was their whole way of viewing reality, and God Himself.
We, of course, have our own paradigms that need shifting. Like the Pharisees and the Lords own disciples, we harbor mistaken perceptions that keep us from receiving the truth. These misperceptions usually afflict us without our conscious awareness. They have the most power when theyre rooted in our past experiences with people. In all these areas, God wants to overturn our false notions, confronting them with the power of His word: But I say unto you ...