Have you ever been completely wrong about someone you love? Dead wrong. The kind of wrong where you were 100% certain you knew what was going on, only to discover later you had no clue what was actually happening?
The Israelites found themselves in exactly this position. After years of faithful warfare alongside their brothers, the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh were finally heading home across the Jordan. On their way, they did something. They built an altar, an altar of imposing size. When the rest of Israel heard about it, they immediately assumed the worst: rebellion, idolatry, covenant breaking.
Their observation was accurate. There was indeed an altar. But their interpretation was completely wrong.
We do this all the time, don’t we? We observe behavior and immediately think we know what it means. Your spouse seems distant, so they must not love you anymore. Your spouse is quiet, so they must be angry. Your spouse looks at their phone, so they must be hiding something. We observe behaviors through our own lenses, our own ways of thinking, our own past experiences, and we assume we know what their actions mean.
The Israelites were ready to go to war over a misunderstanding. How many of our relationships are suffering similar damage today because we assume we understand motives rather than creating space for explanation?
Here’s the sobering reality: we assume everyone thinks the way we think because we’ve only got one brain. But God has created each person uniquely, with different backgrounds, different neurologies, different ways of processing the world. What seems obvious to us might be completely foreign to someone else.
THE DANGER OF ASSUMPTIONS
