Take our need for divine guidance. Too many people regard it as an alternative to human thought, even a convenient device for saving them the bother of thinking. They expect God to flash on to their inner screen answers to their questions and solutions to their problems, in such a way as to bypass their minds. And of course God is free to do this; perhaps occasionally he does. But Scripture gives us the warrant to insist that God’s normal way of guiding us is rational, not irrational, namely through the very thought process which he has created in us. Psalm 32 makes this clear. Verse 8 contains a marvelous threefold promise of divine guidance, in which God says, ‘I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you’ (RSV ‘counsel you with my eye upon you’). But *how* will God fulfill his promise? Verse 9 continues: ‘Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding, but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you.’ If we put together the promise and the prohibition, what God is saying to us is this: ‘I promise that I will guide you, and show you the way to go. But do not expect me to guide you as you guide horses and mules (namely by force, not intelligence), for the simple reason that you are neither a horse nor a mule. They lack “understanding”, but you don’t. Indeed, I myself have given you the precious gift of understanding. Use it! Then I will guide you *through* your minds.
— John Stott (source not quoted)
