COMPARING MAN'S WAYS TO THOSE OF GOD = foolishness

A Finnish driver's license

As a missionary in Finland roughly ten years ago, when teaching investigators about the Church and
its authority and the need for us all to acknowledge it and receive the saving ordinances from under its hands, I oftentimes used an analogy of how we get a drivers license. We discussed what would happen if you drove your car, got pulled over by the police and showed up a non-valid driver's license. We all agreed on the fact that authority/license to drive had to be handed down through the right channel and that there was only one way to do it right.

I now totally reject this idea. The Lord said the following:

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isa. 55:8-9)

With this concept in mind, how dare we compare the priesthood and authority of God to a man made system of dispersing the right (but not the competence) to drive a vehicle responsibly and the checks and balances put on this system? Isn't this in direct contradiction to the word of the Lord? Didn't he say that his ways are not our ways? Shouldn't we therefore conclude that we can't compare his ways to our ways?

If we would apply the way God distributes his authority to the way we get a driver's license, there would be no human institution anywhere near it. God would sit in his heaven and reach out to those few who actually showed that they'd learned the concepts of restraint, humility, kindness, love, patience, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness and so forth (go read Hel. 10 and D&C 121 for more on this). Those few are given their driver's license directly from God. What do they do when someone pulls them over? They've got no paper. They've got no credentials. They only got their relationship with God and his testimony of their right to drive.

Are there other areas where we compare our ways to God's and we're mislead by our conclusion? Instead of taking pride in how the Church compares so well to other man-led institutions, we should be cautioned by it and instead search for something vastly different.