God’s Mind: 'It’s a Great Matter to Believe There is a God’
The most logical place to seek to know God’s mind is to consult the only book he admits that he wrote, the Bible. Even though a case could be made that he was behind every book ever published, every sentence crafted, and every word ever spoken. My first question is, “What was God thinking that caused him to create the universe?” It seems illogical to think that a being that is what he reveals himself to be with the capacity that would be required to create the universe, would exist in a vacuum. This is especially true if the Trinity is more than an illustrative accommodation to reduce God’s complexities to three relatable traits for human consumption. Man has created more rustic, mean, lusty, and vengeful gods in Greek mythology, in ancient culture, and subsequently in post-Judaistic religion, including Islam. Eastern mysticism doesn’t actually challenge the human to know objective knowledge of God in any meaningful way. First, God is not personal. There are millions of choices, and the goal is nowhere, nirvana, no place, utopia. These approaches are amorphous and unsatisfying and don’t solve any real problems such as elimination of death, decay, evil, final justice, and eternity.
Why did God start it all?
The first admission is that God has secrets and he doesn’t plan to share them with us anytime soon.[1] The bad news is that we can’t know his secrets. The good news is we are only accountable to what he has revealed. It is also clear that God’s ways are a mystery to us and beyond our comprehension.[2] It seems clear that he had a purpose, “The Lord has made everything for his own purposes, even the wicked for a day of disaster.” (Proverbs 16:4). There is a string of thought presented in scripture that God created the world for his pleasure and for his glory.[3] Furthermore, God created humans for his pleasure as well.[4] There is a line of thought that God was lonely and created us for fellowship. This of course, is to make God needy, incomplete, and co-dependent on us or some other cosmic toy. Paul, in speaking to curious skeptics in Athens put it this way,
“He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs-for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him-though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”
Acts 17:24-28 NLT
It is a fool’s errand to seek a total and complete answer at this time. What is quite smart is to grab hold of what we do know. God very well may have other projects and creations, but the primary reason he created was because a being with his capacity must act, must create, must share - it is his nature. The reason we know this is because we are like him.
“Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.”
Genesis 1:26 NLT
He gave us the same basic personality and capacities as he possessed. We, of course, were made a little lower than the angels, but also privileged in our relationship to God which angels envy. God created everything and declared it “very good.” He set the rules, provided the space, and set up the first two humans in a paradise. But sin entered into the picture and smashed their relationship, destroyed their paradise, and expelled them from God’s continued presence. Alienation, the curse upon relationships, children, families, work, childbirth, and the earth itself, became the new reality. God began to immediately redirect his energy toward redemption and rescue. Even God lamented what had happened to this creation and sent the flood. He reset the earth and its population.
One of the mysteries of God’s thought process is the conditions he sets for our happiness. There is much in the Bible that speaks of God being jealous for his people. He wants no other gods before himself. He makes a major point that he alone is the one to be worshipped, obeyed, and followed. He set up his favored nation Israel with rules of life, down to their actual diet, daily practices, and their marriages, who they can marry and who they should not marry. And for this life he has created, he requires that he receive all the credit and that we take none for our obedience. The apostle Paul sums it all up when he writes, “Whatever you do, do it for the glory of God.” (I Corinthians 10:31). The Bible claims this is the case on the merits alone. We owe our very existence to him, he is worthy because he has saved us from alienation to him as our creator. It seems that we humans naturally, with some assistance from the Spirit of God, long for this relationship and desire to be reunited with our creator. There is another side to the story, and this is where Lucifer’s mind comes into play.
Jesus as a contradiction
Jesus is God incarnate. So, a God who is sovereign, who requires no rivals, disciplines the disobedient, and even calls upon his subjects to worship him becomes a man. And, as that man, is a living contradiction to what he is as a God and what he demands along with his followers. He becomes in a sense one of his own followers and proceeds to provide an example of a good life. This mysterious action is described by Jesus himself.
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”
Mt. 11:28-30 NLT
Humility is not normally associated with sovereign beings. The secret to happiness for non-sovereign beings is to follow Jesus’ human example of laying aside privilege and a pursuit of power and pleasure as primary goals, and submitting to a loving Father who has our best interests in mind. It is contradictory to what swirls around us, but brings great pleasure to God and to us. The world is populated with millions of proud, competent men and women who, contrary to others, will drop to their knees in praise and adoration to a loving heavenly Father. Because of their lived experience or spiritual knowledge gained over time, they are convinced that it is the reasonable thing to do. We start thinking this is possible when we read the prayers of Jesus to his Father in John 5, his long conversation with him in John 17, or his prayer of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is our leader, we are his disciples. So, we follow him into this mysterious realm of spiritual knowledge that transforms us and confuses those around us. The mystery of incarnation. The mystery of joyous worship. The mystery of letting go of one’s life in order to get it back even better. This all befuddles the reason and logic of the unbeliever. You may recall the statement of Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “This message of the cross is foolish to those headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God.”
An example from India
People from the western philosophical tradition would hold to the principle of non self-contradiction. If A is true, then non A is not true. For example, “If ten religions were different and each claimed to be true, then they could all be false, but only one could be true.” But missionary statesman, Lesslie Newbigin, points out from his 37 years in India that Indian philosophy denies the principle of non self-contradiction. Indian philosophy says that both A and non A can be true. They consider the principle of non self-contradiction as one of the weaknesses of western philosophy, whereas in their context both things can be true.
It could be said that the incarnation itself violates the law of non self-contradiction. God is not man and man is not God. But in Christ’s example, God becomes man and the church said Jesus was God and man united in one person forever. This is slippery ground, but it could be said that being humble is being strong, not weak. That giving God all the glory enhances your own life in a way that brings joy to you that otherwise would be unattainable. The incarnation declares that the deepest truths about God and man are not accessible to reason or logic. God has chosen to communicate with his beloved creatures through creation, instinct, intellect, the body, the material world, and finally, the incarnation. It could be said that the vast majority of humans have heard him loud and clear until the incarnation. Even the great skeptics of his miraculous works and deity have sought his wisdom. This is seen in works such as Albert Switzer’s 1906 edition of The Quest of the Historical Jesus. They have made the fundamental error of trying to extract Jesus’ teaching from his life claims. As the great C.S. Lewis wrote,
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. How would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.”[5]
[1] Deuteronomy 29:29
[2] Isaiah 55:8-13
[3] Romans 11:36, Colossians 1:16, Revelation 4:11, Isaiah 43:7, Ephesians 3:9,10
[4] Ephesians 2:8-10, Philippians 2:12-13
[5] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
