'By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.'
- Hebrews 11v3
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained; What is man, that You are mindful of him? And the son of man, that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than God, And crowned him with glory and honour.
- Psalm 8v3-5
God is the Almighty Creator of All. He is good. There's no darkness, no guile, no malice in Him. His intention toward His creation is always good. The Bible calls this all self-evident truth, in Romans 1. Man is guilty of denial and elaborate excuse, if he professes to be an atheist, or if he denigrates the character of God. If he does it long enough, God will give him over to a powerful delusion. His delusion will start to look convincing to him. Most of the world, for example, inherently knows unguided, atheistic evolution of species is implausible rubbish. But clever people start to believe it. They construe at best very ambivalent information as fully scientific support for it.
So He's your God in the creative sense whether you acknowledge it or not. Man is called to much more than simply acknowledging he has a Divine Creator though. God has a view on this, on what our purpose is. He has a very strong view and passionate will for us all.
What is that view and call? The true call of man is the same thing as the Divine creative intent for man. Man was made uniquely to be 'a little lower than God'. The word 'Elohim' in verse 5 of Psalm 8 is often translated 'angels', following the King James Version. But 'Elohim' is translated as 'God' 2083 times in the KJV Old Testament, and only once, here, as 'angels'. 'Elohim' is, interestingly, a plural Hebrew noun, here in the Old Testament, originally the Jewish Tanakh. Think 'Trinity', although orthodox Judaism won't agree with you. He wants you to rule and reign with Him. You are called to be in uniquely close relationship with Him. Humanity, each man and woman, has a high and unique calling. More generally, we are the crown of His creation. We all have unique common capacities by creation, making this manner of relationship with God Almighty possible. We can reflect and analyse and ourselves create, imagine and conceptualise in ways uniquely parallel with God Himself. You are made in a very wonderful way, as David realised in Psalm 139. If you seem to be a wreck, you are a wreck of someone very noble. A restorable, redeemable wreck in Christ. If you're already in Christ, you are in reality a victor, not a wreck. For those who are not, to enter into your Divine identity and destiny He must become your God, in the redemptive and adoptive sense. He holds out such an invitation; He wants you as His son or daughter. He loves you.
The world is subject to a contrary spirit, Satan, or the devil. He has usurped mankind's right dominion, and flipped and distorted our original value and perspectives. As we experience the New Birth described in John 3, and labour in the Word of God, and encounter His presence, our vision and our identity are rectified and restored. The Kingdom starts to come on Earth as it already is in heaven. Satan will be progressively and then finally cast down and kicked out, along with those who cling to his ways.
Creator
God's character and nature encompass our entire existence. I'm a physicist by training so I see the scientific aspect to my statement. Physics is man's attempt to understand the 'nuts and bolts' of the creation. But physics is just the background fabric to how we exist. Man always looks for cause and effect, but God conflated a creation out of nothing we can detect or deduce. What do I mean? I mean He caused many attributes and properties to arise out of nothing. Man cannot evaluate this sort of final cause. We are more than our physical fabric.
God is more multi-facetted than analytical science. He's much bigger. He frames every facet of our lives. Emotions and relationships didn't evolve, they were ordained of God. They are, along with many things, part of the creative intent, rather than being a meaningless by-product of chance physical processes. Man is the crowning glory of God's achievement in creation. He therefore also had the furthest to fall, and fall we have.
It's true that this world is now full of the contradictions of love and predation, but not because we got here by the mechanism of Darwinism, riddled with contradictions and cause-effect paradoxes as that 'science' is. It is paradoxical because we fell, and aligned with malicious spiritual intent, with the origin and personhood of evil. If we have a character attribute, or an intellectual or other gifting, we have it because He made it possible for that attribute to even exist. He then granted us a nature able to express it. If we corrupt something, then we can only corrupt it because God first made it good. Indeed everything in the Universe, even the Universe itself, merely reflects a measure of God Himself. He reaches out to a world He made, a world He decreed that man should have charge over. His gift and calling are irrevocable. He then allowed man to become detached from Himself, because man chose to break faith with Him. This occurred in Adam, our progenitor. That is the bottom line of Genesis Chapter 3. This, by birth, is how we now find ourselves. Sinners, out of joint with our Creator. We search in vain for rationalisations and distractions from who we truly are. We try to glorify ourselves, when we need to share in the Divine nature and Glory. We are lost sinners in need of redemption and adoption.
Redeemer
We are now in the church age. What does that mean? First and foremost, it affirms that God is redemptive, because real true church is the people living in the benefit of this redemption. He has made a way for redemption from our sin and failure in Adam, and, more than that, to enter life as He originally planned and wished, what the Bible calls eternal life. The price for entry? He has paid it in Christ in full, so it's a free gift and invitation, open to all. Not only is it open to all, the one who issues the invitation wishes, even yearns, for all to accept. God has made himself vulnerable to the rejection of those he created. A group of people, an 'ecclesia', have responded, and will continue to respond, in good faith, to what God has done in redemption. Translated, the Greek, 'ecclesia' is 'a called out group or assembly, existing and meeting for a purpose'. It is now the focus of God's attention. The members are people who have a very high call. But, crucially, God is the one who nurtures and empowers them to meet it. That sentence bears reading until it sinks in. We are called to share in His Very Nature and Life, not merely to proclaim it. It is God's power and strength, not ours. Otherwise the call to proclaim the Gospel would be an intolerable burden. It is actually a light burden. It's undergirded, supported, financed, overseen, empowered, by God, through the intimately-present agency of His Holy Spirit. We the church are called to represent His nature to humanity at large, individually and as a group.
The true church is Almighty God's only plan, intention and initiative to raise up the sons and daughters to rule and reign with Him over His vast and wonderful creation.
So it is not that God has left a little quaint old movement on earth to ponder His nature. It is not even that the church represents an attempt by God to help restrain and reform society. It is not that the church of God is seeking to prevail against extremely strong forces which dominate the world, forces which govern how things really are. These are all weak views of church, although some contain truth. They are not Biblical, and they all represent how men, inside or outside the church, see things. His church is not a small, or tentative, initiative. How do we even imagine that Almighty God would have such trivial, secondary and incomplete ambitions? This God who made the heaven and the earth is the God who will also dismantle them. The God of the unimaginable vastness of space is greater even than that vastness. His subtlety and gentleness are only partly conveyed by the equally unimaginably-intricate scale of the sub-atomic particles, quarks, neutrinos and the like. His being, His existence, is not incumbent on even the universe in its enormity. It's not incumbent on the tiny particles and fields of Quantum Theory. He just is. God is great beyond our knowledge and imagining. His glory is 'high above all nations, above the heavens', from Psalm 113v4. Describing his God, Paul endorsed a phrase from the Greek poets of Athens. 'In Him we live and move and have our being'. This God has called and chosen a body of people to work with and live through. They are called to be His Children. It is His call on you, because you are a man or woman or child. I've answered that call. Have you? This call is not a small thing. Nor is the children's present and developing task. Their task is to reign with God. To inherit the Earth. To judge angels. For starters, to mention a few aspects. God is uniquely completely and sufficiently committed to our emancipation. But we must accept the call.
So what went wrong before all this? Ever since the Fall of Adam, it has been the nature of man to exalt himself. Indeed, the very temptation offered him in Genesis 2 was for him to become wise in his own sight. and so it continues. To read the media is to see man seeking to exalt his own wisdom, or to refine his own thoughts, and to argue about who is seeing things right. God's thoughts toward us are not our own thoughts about ourselves. He isn't confused, we are. Our own thoughts about ourselves are rootless, unstable and meandering. They're confused and divided. We make up ways of thinking and legitimise them with academic language, thinking the style imparts reality and substance. It doesn't. Truth is in the Word of God. You humbly receive it. It is not for you even to decide how God is going to express Himself. You can, after the event, try and deduce how He has already expressed Himself. It is certainly worth doing. For example, Genesis Chapters 1 to 3 are what God has given us regarding our origins and inclinations. Man's job is to receive it meekly. You may, if you wish, think about how we are to interpret what he gives as Holy Scripture. But you can't tell God what He needs to tell man and how He is going to do it. The foundational aspect of that has already been done. It's the Bible. If you're going to look at what God wants everyone to know about how and why the world was made, read early Genesis. Read the Bible as a whole, and study it, to determine what God has done for man and what He requires from him. Do you take parts of it as poetry, or allegory, or as literal fact in your present academic idiom? It looks to me like God has left that up to you. The vital truths are accurately conveyed. A fool attempts to dismiss those truths on technicalities.
The person who approaches God looking at how to 'work' Him for their own desires and goals will fall flat on their face. Either in frustration or in worship. God has come as a man. When He did, He picked up on how we were approaching Him.
“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, “‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’ (Matthew 11:16-17)
Children are seeking to set the mood, and expecting others to play along. Two things.
First, it's play. It's not for real. For reality, you need God, not what man on his own gets up to. Man's moods and whims do not determine reality. They are play, and evil play at that. Jesus called us evil, in our natural state. He didn't say 'although you do evil', He said 'although you are evil'. Read Matthew 7v11. One Day some will be chosen for Reality.
Second, from the quoted Matthew 11 illustration, people very often want to set the agenda, and here it's the emotional agenda. In the next two verses Jesus continues the theme. John the Baptist came in an austere spirit, and was criticised. Jesus came with a light heart of celebration, and He was also castigated for that. Man is territorial and manipulative, and wants to ensure he can 'call the shots'. But Jesus is Lord of All. It's best to yield to him voluntarily. Ultimately everyone will have to, but that's not God's preference. He wants hearts won over by love, not coercion.
He's Creator and Redeemer. He's Almighty, supremely glorious, Lord over realms we cannot currently contemplate or imagine, host to wonders our mortal minds could not yet fathom. Yet He truly desires, enjoys and treasures intimacy with the crown of His creation, mankind. He sees how you are, but He sees how he knows you can be in union with Him. You are not merely another animal. You are made, uniquely in the image of God. In what sense? Certainly in the emotional and relational sense. In many giftings and attributes also. And in the age to come? I'm sure we'll be amazed. But first we need a childhood, as it were. We need to grow and develop into true Sons. We need to go through this often adverse life as discipline and training; as preparation. that's a wonderful thing. God has caused everything, even in this fallen world, to work for your eternal good. We shouldn't be ashamed of the Gospel, quite the opposite.
So how big is your God? Are you meek in your own view? Do you bow before his Lordship? Are you willing to adopt a posture of servanthood? Do you want to reign with Him? Will you come under the shadow of the Almighty? Will you accept the apprenticeship aspect of true sonship? That all comes with knowing Him, so that's eternal life, the only viable future. That's the only thread, the only path, through this mortal existence, making any real sense at all. You'll be sustained in it and through it.
Get on Almighty God's tack through this often stormy mortal existence. If you haven't yet done so, Confess Jesus as Lord with your mouth. Believe in your heart He rose from the dead. Then you'll be saved; Romans 10v9.
When you've done that, He's invested in you more than you understand. He's committed to you as a beloved son or daughter. He has your best interests at heart, and His idea of your best interests is wildly beyond your own, in accuracy, effectiveness and in scope. When you yearn from deep within, it's these things, from the heart of God to you, which you are really longing for.
