Wednesday, June 3, 2015

God



Orthodox Christian theology tells us that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. That is to say, He is all powerful, all knowing and everywhere all the time. Nothing is beyond Him as David points out in Psalm 139. There are in fact many scriptures that point to the all knowing, all powerful nature and character of the Lord God. I mean, what kind of God would He be if He were not these things? A lesser God maybe?

But if He is all these things, and I do believe He is, can He also choose not to know something or not to be somewhere or not to do something simply because He is God? Or maybe because it suits His long term purposes? I am thinking He does sometimes stand aloof and does not act even though He knows for reasons that we will never comprehend in this life, but I also believe there are other issues at work here.

We Christians like to believe God is in control here on our planet and throughout the universe all the time. Given what I just said above, I am going to suggest that He is in fact not in total control here and that it is by His choice and more directly the choices of the human race that history plays itself out. If you stop and think about it, when He gave us choice way back in the day of creation, He surrendered a certain amount of control to us. In the end, that choice cost Him and it ultimately plays itself out on Calvary, but He did give us power over our destiny. We, in turn, gave it to the evil spiritual powers and we have been following that lead ever since. 

God Does have a plan. Giving up His control over our environment is part of that plan. What the end game is will be interesting. We know from Revelation that God's people win and we know that it is only through God's foreknowledge that this will happen. We just have to wait out the game.

Someone who I read frequently compares God to a game designer and I believe that to be an apt description. God set it up. It's His software. He will be able to update it when it's time. We just have to do what He already knows we will do.