Mystery Of The Ages: Who And What Is God?

I was returning to my hotel in New Delhi some years ago from a private conference with the late Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India. Ever since arriving in India I had noticed cows and oxen wandering through the streets. I had never seen such animals straying loosely through city streets in any other country.

“Don’t these cattle stray quite a distance from home?” I asked of the car driver.

“Oh yes,” he answered.

“But when,” I asked, “they wander all over the streets so far away, how do their owners find them, to drive them back home for the night?”

The car driver smiled. “The owners don’t. But the cattle and oxen know their owners and where they live. They find their own way home in the evening.”

Immediately I thought of the scripture in the first chapter of Isaiah, which I had never understood so perfectly before this living explanation.

“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider. Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord…they are gone away backward” (Isa. 1:2-4).

And this was spoken of ancient Israel, a nation to which God had revealed himself by many evidences and miracles. How much less do other nations know about God — about who and what God is!

Nevertheless, other nations are human beings just like the nation Israel. It is important at the very outset of this chapter that you notice God calls these humans his own children. Many people say, “God just doesn’t seem real to me.” God is a great mystery to them. Their own human fathers don’t seem like a mystery. They seem real.

 Why Does God Seem Unreal? (p 32)

In this chapter I hope we will help make God as real to you as your own human father. God does reveal himself to us in the Bible, if we will just understand it, so that he will seem real to us.