upside-down thinking

So I got to thinking Sunday, about God's ways being not like our ways. We were singing a song about how the church was always victorious or something, and my mind flashed back to Ganieda's post about the Holocaust (and something else I'd recently read, forget what now) and I thought, "How was that time a victory for the church?" But rather than sinking into a depression and calling God a liar, I remembered that God doesn't look at things quite the same way as we do.

In God's "economy" (as they say), the martyrs won. In man's eyes they lost; they died horrible deaths. But they kept their faith, they finished the fight, and they overcame the devil and the world. What greater victory is there?

So, back to the holocaust for a minute. I remembered Schindler, and got to wondering about him. I just read a short bio on Wikipedia because, other than the name, I knew nothing about him. He was a Catholic, who joined the Nazi party out of nationalism (now there's a good argument for Anabaptists against getting too attached to your world), and used his position to gain wealth, with which he protected some 800-1200 Jews. He may not have been the ideal Christian, but he did have a good victory even in horrible times. And there were many others who sacrificed much to overcome the world.

Anyway, I'm not very eloquent, but hopefully I make sense at least. What sparked this again today was reading the following foot note in my Geneva Bible (1 Corinthians 1:17):

The reason why he used not the pomp of words and painted speech: because it was God's will to bring the world to his obedience by that way, whereby the most idiots among men might understand, that this work was done of God himself without thee art of man. Therefore as salvation is set forth unto us in the Gospel by the cross of Christ, than which nothing is more contemptable, and more far from life, so God would hace the manner of the preaching of the cross most different from those means, with which men do use to draw and entice others, either to hear or believe: therefore it pleased him by a certain kind of most wise folly, to triumph over the most foolish wisdom of the world, as he had said before by Isaiah: that he would. And hereby this we may gather, that both the doctors which were puffed up with ambitious eloquence, and also their hearers strayed far away from the end and mark of their vocation.

Which also reminds me of Ganeida's post on scouting, and Bob's comments on the story of Jesus and the 153 fish - "Throw your nets on the other side" - don't do it man's logical way, do it God's supernatural way.