Walking the path

(3-minute read)

For the past few months, with increasing frequency, a picture would pop into my head of something that happened when I was four years old. We were living in Houston, Texas, at the time, and my dad took my brothers and me to Galveston, Texas, where the giant ships would come in. I don’t know why we went. It may have been just that my dad wanted to show us the ships. I had never seen an actual ship before. All I remember was my dad holding me in his arms, talking to a man while I looked at the ship that had already come in and was amazed at how big it was. Even though I didn’t know what was going on, I was perfectly content because I was in my dad’s arms, and I trusted my dad. At the age of four, I definitely could not be trusted to walk around on a pier by myself. Of course, I didn’t know the dangers.

Recently, I felt the Lord wanted me to study the beliefs and customs of the Jews during the Second Temple period, when Jesus was on the Earth. Unlike normal, each day when I would go to study, the presence of the Lord would be in the room, and it would only seem like a few minutes before my wife would call me to lunch. Each time I learned something, it seemed like numerous other questions would come up. Eventually, the question I was trying to resolve was how the first Christians tried to lead the Gentiles to the Lord. What did they say? Did they have a strategy?

It surprised me to find out that they just told what Jesus said and did, and then said, “Believe in him.” They relied exclusively on the miracle of the Lord’s drawing them to himself. There were no rational arguments or attempts to convince people by reasoning. They told them they would be saved from death and would live with the Lord forever. The word we translate as salvation was commonly used to refer to resolving any problem. The early Christians didn’t speak of hell or a place of eternal punishment because the Jews didn’t believe in hell, nor do they to this day. Until the 13th century AD, and the writing of the Maimonides 13 Principles, Judaism was known as a religion without doctrine. They tried to keep 613 laws they found in the first five books of the Old Testament to please God, their fellow man, and fit in with the customs of their culture. Jesus came and replaced that with first to love the Lord with all my heart, soul, and mind. Secondly, to love my neighbor as myself.

As I studied, the picture of my dad holding me by the docks popped into my mind, and I felt the Lord speaking to me: “That’s what I want from you.” What I knew at the age of four and what my father knew at the time were vastly different. What I know now and what the Lord knows now is a far bigger difference. Without a view of the future, I have no way of knowing for sure what is good or bad for me. I’ve already discovered too many times that what I thought was a bad thing turned out, in the end, to be very good for me, and vice versa.

Just as the early Christians taught, the Lord wants me to trust him, not to trust him for something, but just trust him. If I trust him like I trusted my father at the age of four, all things work for my good. This is true not only in this life but also in the life to come.