why God is like music (at least to me)

Those of you that know me are probably thinking "you would post about this." But I think I have something here. Or at least it makes sense to me, so feel free to stop reading at any time if it just becomes a bunch of jumble to you.

I am a huge fan of most any kind of music. I have my own opinions about certain kinds of country and rap, but I'll save that for another day. But perhaps even more than I like listening to music, I love playing music. There's just something about creating something that makes you feel a certain way that I love. My friends and I were talking about it, and I don't know if I would be the same person without music. I love listening to music when I'm happy, upset, pumped up, alone, with friends, ticked off, or just whenever. I have everything from Chris Tomlin to Slipknot in my CD collection, something for every mood. Wow, I just thought about Slipknot opening up for Chris Tomlin in concert. Quite a thought. ANYWAY--

There is one thing I've realized about playing music AND listening to it in that the more I know about the theory behind it, the less I like it. And by theory I don't mean the message they are trying to convey. I mean music theory. This is the reason I didn't major in music. I completely despise learning anything about music theory, and that may be the very reason my music never goes anywhere, but I just don't. I dislike it so much that I nearly quit taking guitar lessons in middle school because of everything I had to learn in band class to play the trumpet. I remember thinking "it can't be this complex and uninteresting." It's just not something I enjoy. To me, knowing every note you are playing and why you are playing it and in what octave you are playing it takes all of the feeling out of what you were doing. It's like you're taking something creative and beautiful and turning it into a science or a math. And I say that with all due respect. I love science and math--probably two of my favorite subjects, but they are very different than music for me.

Sometimes that's the way I feel about God. It's great to connect with God on a number of different levels, and if one of them happens to be intellectually, that is great. But to me it is not only impossible but exhausting to put reason to everything God is and does. And I get really tired of people who try to do this. I feel this way when I watch Christians on TV try to argue their beliefs with someone who believes in evolution or another similar theory. To me, the beautiful difference between God and science (which by the way, aren't meant to be in opposition to each other like they often are): the beauty is that in order to believe in something to do with science you need proof. You need a question, research, a hypothesis, experiment, analysis, and a conclusion (see, told you I listened in science class). With God, however, you just need faith. That's it. And the definition of faith, according to Webster's, is "belief without absolute proof." So when I see people on TV trying essentially to prove God the same way their opposition is trying to prove science, it really makes me wonder if they're missing the point.

Rob Bell makes an interesting point in "Velvet Elvis." He says this:

"What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry’s tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if, as you study the origin of the word ‘virgin’ you discover that the word ‘virgin’ in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word ‘virgin’ could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being ‘born of a virgin’ also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse? What if that spring were seriously questioned? Could a person keep on jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live? Or does the whole thing fall apart?…If the whole faith falls apart when we reexamine and rethink one spring, then it wasn’t that strong in the first place, was it?”

Now I realize this statement is very unorthodox and probably was intended to stir up some controversy (because Rob Bell enjoys doing that), but I think he is essentially saying this: do you believe in God because you have faith in God, or do you believe in God because you believe in a list of facts and statements, all of which in one way or another, "prove" God? Bell makes the statement later in the chapter that this situation hasn't occurred and will never occur, but maintains that we shouldn't believe in God like we believe in science. Science is only as strong as it's weakest opposing argument. Is that really what we want our faith to be like?

Anyway, back to the point. I'm basically just trying to say that if we are obsessed with understanding God like we understand things of this world, we will fail every time. I just really get the feeling that God is so far out of our league as far as intellect goes, that taking him and finding a nice neat box that we can put him in would be a lot like listening to the best jazz music you've ever heard (I guess if you don't like jazz, this analogy won't work), and going up to the saxophonist who taught himself to play by ear and saying "I really loved that music tonight. Can you please write it out for me?" More often than not, a jazz musician would look at you like you were just plain stupid. I get the feeling this is kinda how God felt when he was dealing with Job. Long story short, some really crappy stuff happens to Job. And when I say crappy, I mean like completely horrible stuff. Anyway, Job goes on this extremely lengthy rant, some of it he complains, some of it he questions God, and some of it--get this--he tries to put reason to why God has let these things happen to him and why God behaves the way he does. After this, God has straight up had it with Job. And I think no matter what translation you read of this passage, it's pretty obvious that God is pretty flippin' irritated with Job, and goes on his own rant:

"Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone"

(God goes on like this for quite a while). So what is he trying to say? Essentially, I think he's telling Job this: "Don't try to put me in your box. I won't fit. My ways are higher than your ways, and you will never understand why I do some things, so stop trying."

And here's the other thing, God is way too beautiful to be trimmed down to a list of beliefs and rules, like we tend to do a lot of times. I find it interesting how every passage in the bible, no matter what its content or length, can always be slimmed down to exactly three bullet points in a sermon. I think the bible was meant to be a lot more poetic and artistic than that. There are times in Exodus and other parts of the bible where the authors run out of ways to write about God in prose, so they just bust right into poetry. Jesus spoke in parables and metaphors a great majority of the time, as did many of the apostles. All this makes me think that God intended for his Word to be a lot more than a "How to Comprehend God" manual.

So I think this post is getting pretty lengthy. In short, my advice from personal experience would be this: don't try to constantly understand God, because you're not gonna be able to. And it's kind of like music--if you ever did find a way to understand him all the time, you probably wouldn't like it as much.