The God Effect – Chapter 6: God Is A Worker
God is a worker. As the first five chapters have pointed out, He is not “the man upstairs”. He is not faraway but is forever everywhere. His personality is the perfect combination of everything that makes Him completely and totally involved in everything. His love, righteousness, and justice look for ways to be used toward us.
Knowing what we do about who God is and what He is like, it makes sense to follow with how all those perfections come together when He is involved with us and all of creation. Imagine Him doing everything with perfect reasons for perfect results. That is what we talk about when we look at God’s works. And, just like His personality and greatnesses, everything about understanding what He does builds on everything that has been shown before it.
Sovereignty
One of the hardest things to grasp and accept about how God works is the idea that if all of His perfections actually are 100% true, then He has to be 100% in charge. Just think for a moment how, for example, perfect love has to work with perfect knowledge to make sure perfect justice gets done. There is no way that could happen unless God owns everything and completely holds the reins. He has total authority and is always the one in control of what He decides to do. On the other hand, this is not about being string puppets being manipulated down to every step we take or decision we make.
Think of sovereignty as the governmental part of God’s interactions with everything. It is His right and ability to take the management side, a mystery we cannot totally understand. It is the “macro”, not the “micro”. In a real sense, it is a position of kingship – which of course can be hard for westerners to live with. But that is how, as we saw above, things have to work. But remember, kings don’t tell you which car to buy or what coat to put on in foul weather. All of us operate under a government in our own way.
God’s sovereignty is not pointless or meaningless though. In it, God always works to showcase His holiness and glory for the benefit of everything and everyone under Him. For humans, the main benefit He wants for us is to bring us to Himself; to lure us out of the bad and take us into the person and ministry of Christ.
Providence
The action side of God’s government is what we call providence. It is what happens when He works His governmental authority. It is one thing to have the right or power to have authority, it is quite another thing to follow through with it. That follow-through is God bringing together the events around us of every kind so that He can accomplish what He has in mind. The Bible talks about how He orchestrates things in nature and even toward governments! Most important of all, God’s providence is intimately involved in peoples’ lives.
There are some very logical and necessary limits to how He does this work. Because of His character He sets boundaries. For instance, people have the free choice to do evil (sin) from the “small” stuff to the horrendous stuff. God allows that freedom. But, because of His holiness, love, justice, etc., He does not allow evil to get to the point that it could destroy goodness. Even though humans are capable of unimaginable depravity, they are never allowed to be totally evil. At the same time, because of His grace and mercy He allows prayer, accepts it, and honors it so that we always have a way to reach out to Him even in the worst of circumstances.
Creation
Everything around us, the whole universe, “speaks” to us of a beginning. At the same time, the physical sciences tell us that there is nothing physical that is or ever was eternal. Atheist intellectuals have tied themselves in knots since the dawn of modern science to find a way to prove otherwise and have failed. The problem is that when a person ignores or rejects what is logical about God and all the things that we have looked at so far, there is no room for serious thinking about beginnings. There are just roadblocks, no matter how sophisticated an atheist sounds.
The key to creation starts with knowing how God acts. Everything we know so far leaves no choice but to understand that He is always doing things non-stop. His personality is all about action and creativeness and His power is endless.
All of this leads to one thing: Everything that exists had to have a start and that beginning had to come out of absolutely nothing, zero, before it all came to exist. The conclusion is obvious – God had to have made everything out of His own power and will, instantly. There is no serious reason to think that He would lollygag around or use time and resources needlessly. Not only that, because of understanding Him to be “one-in-three” (remember Chapter Three), all of God had to have been involved in that unimaginable beginning.
It is worth admitting that there is an amount of faith involved here – but the same is just as true for any other less logical explanation of the beginning, like any idea that leaves God out of the picture or tries to downplay His work. After all, no one was there at the beginning, there is no way to test creation or redo it. The same holds true for “a big bang” or anything else. In the end, it’s a matter of which faith we choose – design and purpose by a Creator or everything starting from nothing by happenstance.
Most people don’t think about it, but what we believe about creation shapes a lot of how we view other parts of life. Without God in the picture, men and women end up having no special place or value in the world compared to any other living thing and no hope for a future after death. Everything from marriage to having the created ability to know the difference between truth and error depends on our special design.
Preservation
Here is a question: While God goes about working His sovereignty and providence, who is left to keep creation running and held together? There is only one logical answer, the one who made it all come into existence in the first place. If everything so far is true and makes sense that only God has the power, will, and ability to preserve it and us.