The Chicken and the Egg Part Deaux

God is self sufficient.  This is not what He wanted from man when He created him.  If man, was created like God to be self-sufficient, he would not need God. Therefore if God was going to create something for himself, or someone in our case, he would have to create a being that was not self sufficient. He would have to create a being that needed something outside itself to survive.  When He gave man need, He created something that in the end could choose to try to fulfill that need from another source than Him.

 

God didn’t create man to be this.  He created him to need.

He He provided the earth to provide for man’s needs.  By doing this He gave man dignity and the ability to have faith.  He did not want man to live his life waiting for the next handout from “The Great Pie In The Sky”.  He provided man with the means to provide for himself.

God create man to know Him this way either.

It was never His intention for man to see himself as the actual provider either.  No, He did not create the earth and all of its plants, animals, and ecosystems tell man to subdue and be fruitful and multiply, and then condemn him for doing it.  He wanted Adam and Eve after a long day’s work in the garden to kick back with the Creator during the cool of the day talk with God about all they had done in His creation.  He wanted to revel in their experiences.  This is why he walked with Adam and Eve in the garden. He wanted them to grow through His interaction with them. He wanted them to understand that they could eat the meat from the animals and eat fruit from the trees in the garden, mostly.

God wants us to revel in our experience of His provision for us.

When I take my family camping there is a lot of planning and preparation that goes into it.  Anything done outside is at least twice if not three of four times harder to do.  I have to make sure that all of the food is purchased and packed along with all of the utensils to cook, eat, and clean up afterwards.  The tent, air mattress, pillows, blankets, toiletries, towels, clothes shoes, 46 pairs of socks and underwear for each child, flashlights, extra batteries, extra flashlights…and no matter how hard I try I always do not think of everything.  OH, PROPANE!!!  I do not do all of this for me.  I could easily throw a bag together and spend a few days out in the sticks on my own.  I go through all of this so that I can have the experiences with my kids around the campfire eating s’mores.  I do it so that I can wake up early in the morning get the fire going and watch each of them wake up and shuffle out of the tent and curl up in a folding chair around the fire and just stare.  Much of the reason I set up this entire experience is to see them experience it.  God did the same thing for us when He made earth.  He wants us to enjoy ourselves and have a blast in what He has provided for us.  And He wants us to invite Him to be a part of it.  This is how He gets His kicks.  But man did not always follow God’s intended plan.

God wants to enjoy us enjoying His creation.

It was not His design for Adam and Eve to make choices that worked against His will.  However if He wanted Adam to be in relationship with Him of his own freewill.  If this did not happen, it would mean Adam really did not not have a choice anyways.  Its like the father who asked his child, “Do you want hamburgers or hamburgers?”  This is not really a choice. It is actually a mockery of having a choice, and God would have nothing to do with it.

So, which do YOU choose?

Because He had to give us a choice, He also created a way back when the time came that we would choose the choice that was not Him.  And that way was for His Son to die for the sins of men. And God had this plan the moment he started to speak the world in the universe into existence.  When He was making the earth that would provide for man He had already made the decision to give His Son.  He came before us and provided a way for us to come to Him no matter how many times we fail in the process, but hey what would you expect from a father?

 

 

 

And Now We See Through A Mirror Dimly…, But Hey It Is All I Have Got!

So looking through that dimly lit, foggy, skewed-image  forming mirror, I have decided that there is not much that I can see.  It seems the human condition to always want better.  I want the latest smart phone app or, TV technology, the thinnest screen and clearest picture and sharpest black .  The reality is that we will never be able to improve some things.  The human will always be lacking without divine completion.  We were made to be whole with Him so apart from Him it is no wonder we are incomplete.  That also goes with our spiritual perception.  We will never mature to the point that the mirror through which we see ourselves and our Saviour is crystal clear.  What and who we are viewing through it may make more sense through either clarity over time or just staring at it long enough over time.  That fog that exists through us and the Creator is there for a reason.  First there is not some angel up in heaven whose responsibility it is to man (or angel) the proverbial fog machine that clouds our vision.  That lack of complete understanding about the nature and person of God and His plan comes from who He is and who we are and the massive difference in between.  No matter how close we get to God on this earth, we will do not have the faculties through these five senses to comprehend Him.  We must have patience for the future and faith for the present.  We should think of ourselves as newborn babies.  A newborn can easily get over stimulated.  When they do, their natural response to that is to go to sleep.  It also reminds me of a Windows EVO phone commercial where this purple alienoid is walking towards the phone and blacks out on the way to it.  God is just too overwhelming.  There is more to take in than we have the ability to process or accept or even know.  Even when we do not have the senses to experience and comprehend it all it is also more concentrated than the world around us, so that the bit that does get through is also too much for us to withstand.  Hence the fog.  The protective liner between what is unadulterated God and the filtered down particles of Him that we can stand to understand.  If you could imagine Stephen W. Hawkins, an astro- physicists thought to be the smartest man of our times, teaching third graders the his theory of Quantum Cosmology, M-theory and the Anthropic Principle.  There is no way that this is going to go anywhere productive.  There is a third grader whose eyes are rolling back in his head right now.  It would be more beneficial to the third grader to learn about the planets of his solar system instead.  If Stephen Hawkins were to be the one to do this it would seem such a waste of his time, yet this is what God does.  He cannot share all that He is, because even if all that we are could be available to us, just the piece of Him we are fathoming is too much to comprehend.  So on such a cosmically larger margin of thought God teaches planets while we as souls are housed within these fleshly bodies knowing that there will come a day when He will not have to remediate, but will be able share His whole self.

<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-s This is only delving into the thoughts of God.  It does not begin to touch upon His actions, His person, His physical presence.  To think on that for a while, Since the creation of the world, God has not been present in the world in the fulness of His three parts.  Ever since then, it has either been one or the other of the Three.  I have had moments in my life where I have felt the overwhelming presence of the Holy Spirit that it left me aghast and without breath.  That is again the filtered presence of one Person of God.  When we stand before the throne of God it will be in front of all Three.  Isaiah 6 now makes a lot more sense.  The seraphim's behavior in the throne room and their total inability to do anything else but worship and say the same words over and over, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts.", has more meaning now in this context.  There is nothing greater that they can say about their God, and even that falls short, so they continue to repeat it to add multiple exclamation to their inadequate speech.

          This is why we see through a mirror dimly.  Until such a day as our souls shed this fallible tent, we may see a little clearly what is on the other side as time goes on, but it will ever be to us evrything.

What Came First the Chicken or the Egg? Part 1

          I am a 7th grade reading teacher.  One of the concepts that I teach my students is cause and effect.  This is the axiom that in literature when looking at events and trying to understand the “Why?” one must understand the relationship between cause and effect.  That is that there is always the agent or an act beginning an event which results in a change in someone or something.  If you understand the cause, then you will understand the “Why?”.  This concept is true in real life as well.  Consider these ponderings: 1)Why does Al Gore propport that global warming is the cause of man?  2)Why does my car use so much gasoline?  3)Why am I so much like my dad?  These are all effects.  They are not the “why”, but the reason we ask.  They are the things that went “BUMP!” at night that make us ask, “Why did that happen?”  They bring notice to the dynamics at work.  We must look at what led to these to get to the cause or the answer to that which piqued our interests.  The following are my conjecture to the answers:  1)Al Gore makes loads of cash and receives the much craved recognition he has missed since his long gone political career.  2)My car needs an oil change, or another more fuel efficient car to drive it, or it needs a driver whose foot is a little more of a welter weight than a lead weight.  And I am a lot like my father because… because, well I have not figured that one out yet. 

         

 Now I will apply the concept of cause and effect, to spiritual matters.  God wanted a created being in His own image who would choose to worship Him.  Why did God create man if He knew he would sin, that is to choose to walk away from Him?  And when man fell, why did God bother with him?  Why didn’t He just wipe the slate clean and start over again?  We assume that there is a cause and effect relationship here.  God created man and man sinned.  This must mean that God created sin, or the worst case scenario man sinned without God knowing it would happen.  This would mean that God’s plan was flawed.  When man sinned it put a kink in His perfect creation.  Everything was working well the balance of nature and the circle of life and now man had to choose to walk out on God.  Well isn’t that just brilliant.  The Macau was not made in His image.  The Ferret was not shaped in His likeness.  The only one of God’s creation who God did not speak into existence was man.  He took us from the dust of the ground and molded us with His own hands.  What better way to make man than for the one whose image he would inherit to shape him?  After all of this the Creator God looked upon it and said that it was “very good”.  That is an adverb more than the rest of the creation got.  They were only deemed “good”.  Notice what word was missing, “perfect”.  Man was not perfect when God created him.  If he was then anything that he did would also have to be perfect like choosing to disobey God.  No God knew from the beginning what was going to go down.  He did not create sin.  Apart from man, creation, I would argue, is perfect.  The difference that man brought to the scene was choice.  Perfection is to function according to design.  We can choose to sabotage ourselves all day long and many times do.  God does have a perfect design for us and we can choose to follow it.  And when we do, our lives will be functioning in the perfection they were intended.  The problem is that we live in a fallen world where men’s choices have splattered all over God’s perfection.  That does not mean that the snow flake has mutated to now have eight points or that the sun rises somewhere else than where is always does.  It means that like an oily viscous film, the choices of man, have scattered pell-mell over God’s perfection.  And all of God’s creation cannot wait for the redemption of man.  That is a time when nature can take a bath knowing that the nature of man will have also been scrubbed too.  God knew all of this was going to happen from the beginning.  It does not change His plans, it is part of the Plan.  And that is why we can trust in the Plan and in this the only true God, who knew what would happen from the beginning.

Amazing Love

How amazing is it that the living Creator would not just recognize the need for pardon and instead of sit back in judgement, come down to Earth in love.  It is easy because of the immensity of the act of the Creator to think that salvation is soley an act commited on our behalf.  It was not.  It ws inevitable because of the choice if the Creator.  He is a Godof love, yes.  But His love is not based on us; it is not affected by us.  We are the ones affected by it.  His love is not based on an emotion.  It is based on a decision the three of God made before creation.  Before the foundations of the world were laid, the need for intervention was evident.  Don’t be deceived into thinking that God is some automaton feeling nothing.  It is just that He being not a man, is not controlled by emotion.  He saves not because any of us deserve it, none of us do.  Once we cross the line into sin it does not matter how far we go.  Once someone breaks the barrier of water, they are wet.  The deeper you go does not make you wetter, only farther from getting dry. He looks at us as either wet with sin or dry with His righteousness.  He wants us dry.  He saves us to return us back to the plan when life and the universe began.  None of this is a mistake.  He knew where man would head when He created us.  To us it seems to be this huge mess.  A grand splatter accross the great expanse of time.  If we look at it from the perspective of eternity, it and all of time are miniscule.  To us who live in it, and walk in it still, just our time or at most the time of history is so vast.  Some people have committed themselves to the study of one era and study it their whole life leaving their meager legacy of knowledge for another to come after them to make more of a dent on the subject.  This life is ponderous.  How much more the eternity after it?  In the great expanse of eternity, how important will the next few thousand years be?  What about the next ten minutes?  The God who lives in this kind of reality, this kind of timelessness, the opportunity to spend it with Him.  he has seen it right to offer it to us as well, if we would jus fall back in line with the plan to get us there.  This is not a new plan.  We are not on plan B.  We are kust returning to the course that was started so mnay years ago.  As with God, everything us a process, so has man’s time on the earth.  It has taken us this long to progress to get closer ti getting back to the plan.  If we hold onto the things that are not eternal, we choose against His will and plan.  And therefore, we choose to be seperated from that plan and from Him.  Our choice got us into this mess and God has allowed that our choice for Him will get us out.  We must trust the process He has laid out before us.  He us the way, the truth and the lufe.  No man comes to the Father except through Him.  We must run the race, finish the course, and keep our eyes on Him the Author and Finisher of our faith.  He is the one we should consider that we not lose heart.