Immortal invisible god only wise

One of the hardest things for most Christians is the tussle between the literal account of scripture and the reality of God. It challenges us theologically, as in the creation story, and personally, as in the dissonance between what the bible says and what we experience. 

Many feel that anything less than a literal take on creation diminishes God and deducts from His power. I disagree.

Did Jesus call on ten thousands of angels to help Him at Calvary or marshal a massive show of force? No. Because, as Ephesians 2 confirms, He revealed His WISDOM to principalities and powers. Victory lay in the subtle march to the cross its outworking.

Could God have destroyed Satan from the outset and removed all possibility of sin. I am sure He could have. Did Jesus have the power to destroy sin and Satan’s rebellion in a moment? Sure. He healed, did miracles, raised the dead and drove out demons.

However, when it came to the cross He set aside His power in favor of obedience and sacrifice. His apparent weakness obscured the power to restrain His might for a higher cause.

Never underestimate how much scrutiny he faced. Satan examined Him for 40 days to find no shred of evidence against Him. God knew Satan would look for any angle, for he so long stalled God from justly prosecuting his wrongdoings on the pretext of having never violated any law (had there been a law in heaven, heaven would have been sin-compromised).

Thus, Satan desperately needed to find a chink in Christ’s armor, any pretext to discredit him and destroy God’s ability to bring justice to his avowed foe.

That examination in the Wilderness was profoundly intense. However, it didn’t stop there. Jesus was under the spotlight throughout his life. If His enemies ever found but one, single indiscretion to make Him liable for His own sin, His death would have been for himself not for the prosecution of sin or the redemption of our souls. 

Not a grain of compromise was possible as Satan would have exploited that before God’s righteous throne and that would have suspended the course of justice.

Accordingly, every authority scrutinized Him: The Jewish Sanhedrin conceded that they lacked any legal basis for prosecution and turned to Pilate. The Romans thrice found no fault in Him. Satan also tested Him for 40 days and found nothing.

So how did God set about dealing with all of that? Firstly, He did not make the worlds - Jesus did (John 1). From the outset, God remained objectively aloof of all that was happening to ensure He would never have to recuse Himself as a righteous and objective judge. He could not control and manipulate what He had to judge.

However, Jesus could no more arrange a sham sacrifice. He had to do it to the letter, obeying every Law of Moses and every instruction of God, without wavering.

He also had to subject His life, to life, to be wholly under the law as a man, not as the rule maker or a reformer. He had to be subject to the same elements, the same struggle we all face; else, as with Job, Satan would have argued that God had crossed the line to be the judge of His own actions.

To enable a cross to happen at all, God had to create a context for Calvary, which He did through the eons that led to the cross. The tabernacle, the sacrifices, the priests and everything to do with the law, prepared the hearts of the Jew specifically and the world generally, for the cross. Without what preceded Him, His death would have been irrelevant.

However, to achieve that, God needed the law and for humans to be under the law, so that when Jesus died under the same law, Satan could never again argue for the absence of law.

To achieve all that, God needed to create man, but to do that He needed a world. That, in turn, needed a universe. However, to ensure His objectivity and the righteousness of His court, He had to create a self-sustaining world or He would have been both its judge and its instigator. It had to work autonomously within the laws predefined by its creator. It even had to be formed that way. 

That brings us to the creation. We assume that God is all-powerful. Some doubts about that are that Satan saw the possibility of usurping His throne and there was war in heaven. Indeed, there is an ongoing war between good and evil that is of cosmic proportions. Maybe it is not about power at all.  Maybe God is just restrained by His own righteous integrity.

Well, I don’t know, really. What I do know is that either He couldn’t create a universe in less than 24 hours, or He could not even create the world in a week, or His own counsel forbade Him to do so or it was just contrary to His purpose. The fact remains that even the most idealized model (24-hour days), sets limits on His abilities.

That is suitably controversial, but actually, it also makes Him more accessible and vulnerable to us.

He doesn’t seem anxious either in the act of creation or in His continuing relationship with humans, to bare His holy arm and throw His weight around. It is just not Him. Indeed, He seems to shun that kind of attention and remain understated, preferring to work quietly in the background, through relationships, transformed hearts and the march of history.

Thus, it is more likely that He did make the universe over a long, long time. He obviously knows the workings of that universe well enough to bend space-time, as Einstein predicted, so maybe for Him a thousand years was a day, as much as a day is a thousand years to us. Again, I don’t know.

What I do see is that He took time with everything since then. He steadily, but patiently built layer upon layer of truth and revelation, using preceding understandings and enablers to extend the frontiers further forward until the accumulation of history climaxed with the birth and sacrifice of His precious son, who was slain from the foundations of the world.

In so doing, He built many self-standing, autonomous systems – not just out there in the blackness of space, but down here too. I think of marriage, the family, the 12 self-governing tribes of Israel, the church, the principles of government and so on. He needed all of those systems to run on their own without His intervention so He could be a righteous, objective judge.

He also bounded everything within His physical and moral laws. Thus, He set the 4 physical laws of matter in the first second of the Big Bang, subjected Adam and Eve to a single law and imposed the Mosaic Law on Israel. Then He instituted laws and principles for the church.

All this points to a God who is anything but the wand-waving mystic that, by implication, the new earth creationists would have us believe. Yet it was never about science, logic, or what God can, or cannot do.  It is about the theology behind His actions. We need to understand why He does what He does so we can flow with Him and be one with Him. 

(c) Peter Missing: bethelstone@gmail.com