We have a bad habit of refusing to accept what God does because it doesn’t look like we expected it to.
It was not just the divine kings and the philosophers who were scandalized by the coming of Jesus. In the prologue to his gospel, the Apostle John remembers, “He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him.” The very idea of a divine human being was a scandal to the religious establishment…a scandal that had been vexing them in their own Scriptures going back 500 years before Christ.
During that time, the entire nation was enslaved and deported to captivity in Babylon, an experience that God told them (correctly) would cure them of idolatry forever. The prophet Daniel was an advisor to the Babylonian kings, and one day Daniel saw a vision that was nothing but trouble. He saw “one like the Son of Man” — a human, in other words — riding on the clouds. Now, this is already a problem, because in Daniel’s world, only God rides on the clouds. A human being can’t do that. But it got worse. The Son of Man rode on the clouds to the Ancient of Days (God, again), and received a kingdom from Him. For a good Jewish boy whose nation has just given up worshipping idols, this is one too many gods — and one of them is a human. The whole thing is no good. Daniel 7 says he was grieved in his spirit. In the dream, he gets an explanation for part of what he sees, but this part of the vision is not explained, and even after he’s given an interpretation, he says that his thoughts greatly troubled him, and he kept the matter to himself.
The riddle posed by that vision had been troubling interpreters ever since Daniel wrote it down. And the religious powers that be had a very hard time accepting that a child born to a construction worker could be the answer to the riddle.
What is God doing in your life that doesn’t look like you expected?
Full Contact Christianity 