That’s Original God, not gangsta.
I’ve been reading some forums lately that worry me some. Well, they don’t so much worry me as make me aware of the depth of human limitation and it’s contrast to the heights of human pride. As a human, I am immune to neither, and have my bouts with both; I just want to share my thoughts on this particular subject, because it’s way too important to back off of.
I’ve been reading about Open Theism. For the record, I think it has some serious problems, not the least of which is that God is held hostage by the future. Open theism limits God in a number of ways based on the human attributes ascribed to him throughout the Bible. To be sure, God cannot be limited to a human scope, or even a magnified human scope. He is so far beyond the bounds of humanity that we probably can’t even see his range, let alone figure it out.
I was at the Christianity.com Forums tonight and I was reading some pretty seething remarks. I don’t post on there very often, but I was compelled to do it this time. Here’s my post, opened with a quote from one of the more subdued and thoughtful posts already on the board.
quote:ORIGINAL: WesSavedByGrace
There are so many threads going right now in which people place limitations on God. I am going to try to put a thought in here that may help someone (hopefully!) see that God is not constrained.
Time is a creation for man to define the things he knows and to help him relate to all that is. God does not need time for any purpose. Since God is not constrained by time, would it not be easy to think of Him as existing in every moment past, present, and future? The year 2007 is not in God’s future. He is not constrained by future or any other dimension that we are relegated to.
The Lamb was slain before the creation, and that was possible because God already knew. He could see the crucifixion then! He does not choose not to know. To take that view is to keep Him constrained to existence in the here and now. Remember: He is the Alpha and the Omega. His existence is eternal in both directions!
I agree that God is not constrained to time the way we are, and that he exists in every moment at the same time. But since we are made in God’s image that means that He experiences emotions as well. Not the same way we do, because we are infinitely inferior, but emotions. If He planned every detail of every moment of an eternity that is laid out before him, moment by moment, how would he experience emotion? How could you be angry at the puppet you control? How could you be grieved by something you made happen?
Many of you will see this as putting limits on God. But aren’t you limiting him as well? What you have framed here is a discussion that has only two possibilities: Either God knows nothing about the future, or he planned every second of every person’s life. While the latter is possible, and the former is definitely unscriptural, aren’t we talking about the God of infinite possibility?
We often talk about the “unfathomable” God, but then we break him down and try to make him fathomable. But, what if the unfathomable God was able to know and not know at the same time? To say that he might choose not to know doesn’t constrain him to anything. He would be choosing not to know, and therefore free to know if he wanted to. What if he put up markers, major events in past, present, and future without filling in every moment? That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how that space will be filled in, he knows, but maybe he didn’t force it to happen. How does God make decisions if everything is already planned out? If you take this concept to it’s logical conclusion, God doesn’t even have control of anything because he would have planned out all of eternity before he even began to plan it in the first place! Doesn’t he have the ability to change his mind, or to let people have free will?
I know this is confusing to read, it’s confusing to write. But that’s the point, isn’t it? We don’t have the capacity to understand God, and we never will. That’s the mystery of the faith. We’ll never understand how or why he does the things he does, and maybe we shouldn’t try so hard.
Doesn’t the presumption that we can figure out how God works seem just…well, human? How ridiculous would it be to think that we could understand the mind of God, who created us and everything else in existence? What ever happened to the idea of mystery? Why must we systematize and categorize everything into bits and bytes? Can’t we just say, “God is great!” and live our lives for him? I’m all for scholarship and fighting to understand scripture, because we are called to do that. I don’t want to be feeding on spiritual milk for a lifetime. But sometimes it seems like people are tring to eat nails, thinking they’re fries.
The O.G. was beyond our understanding. And he still is.
