Remember the movie A Few Good Men? It’s the one where Jack Nicholson yells “You can’t handle the truth!” If you know the scene, what seems to have set Jack off was Tom Cruise’s character demanding answers “he thought he was entitled to”.

We’re bad to play this scene out with God, getting frustrated that we don’t have all the answers, and feeling entitled to the truth we think He’s unfairly withholding from us. The funny thing is, Jack’s line actually works from God’s perspective. We can’t handle the truth. But God isn’t hiding it from us. We know the truth. We just can’t handle it.

I mean, really, how much simpler could God have made it? He put it in writing. He sent us the perfect demonstration. Not a metaphorical one either. A literal fellow human, like us, to show us how it was done. And while He was here, He told us exactly what to do. It’s not like He gave us the instruction manual for cracking the Da Vinci Code. He told us to love God, love each other, and He’d do the rest. That’s it.

It’s not complicated at all. But we can’t handle it because it’s too simple. It doesn’t give us anything to be proud of. No mountain to climb, no race to win, nothing at all to feed our ego. It robs us of any sense of accomplishment and requires us to accept the simple fact that we can’t do anything without God. Put simply, it requires us to admit the truth that deep down, we already know, but can’t handle. At least not without Him.