Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Maylan Schurch
Friday, September 19, 2025
A couple of weeks ago, on a post-breakfast walk around our housing development, I discovered that one of those large storage-pod containers was parked squarely on someone’s driveway. At one of its lower corners was this challenge: “Scan me.”
I didn’t scan it, mainly because the name of the company was right there on the side of the pod, and I didn’t need such a pod for myself. Also, I don’t exactly know where my scanning app is on my phone at this point – I use it so seldom.
But there was something charming in this challenge. It seemed to be saying, “No surprises here! I’ll be transparent if you take the trouble to check me out!”
And that is exactly what human beings are encouraged to take part in with their Creator. It goes both ways.
For example, King David opened his heart and begged God to “scan” him:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me, and know my anxieties; And see if there is any wicked way in me, And lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23 – 24 NKJV)
And many times in the Bible, God challenges us to study His own words and ways so that we can satisfy ourselves about His love and justice. Satan, speaking through a serpentine ventriloquist dummy, lied about God during his conversation with Eve in Genesis 3. Ever since, God has been on trial. (In fact, there’s an entire theological topic about this, called “Theodicy,” which seek to discover whether the Almighty is consistently righteous.)
You see, rather than responding to Satan’s lies with obstinate cover-ups, God has opened His heart. Though He could have instructed the Bible’s 40 or so authors to report only positive events, happenings which made Him look good, God allows the full truth of the complex cosmic conflict to be revealed. None of the Bible people we name our kids after had lives free of sinless acts. God recorded history truthfully, and in many an agonized passage in the prophets, He tried to reason with His rebellious children.
A good place to contemplate the character of God is to read the verses about Him in the link just below.
https://www.bibleinfo.com/en/topics/god