Monday, January 28, 2019
637 - A Little Tiny Box
Spirituality Column #637
January 29, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Christianity
A Little Tiny Box
By Bob Walters
“The riddles of God
are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” – G.K. Chesterton
To anyone with even the barest
inkling of belief in the existence of God, it’s highly unlikely that that
person’s mind thinks of God as something small.
Confusing
and overrated maybe, but not small.
As one’s
faith grows, so does one’s perspective of God.
The crowd that says “There is no God!” or assumes that the pursuit of
science, logic, and evolution somehow replaces the “myth” of God, brings no one
any closer to joy, humanity, or understanding. That’s because man himself cannot create
eternal purpose; God does. Human disbelief
in God, or thinking God can be “replaced” by human cleverness may create a
temporal “How” but it falls short of and even ignores humanity’s greatest
question. “Why?”
Likewise,
the person who pursues faith only for the attainment of compensation or to
avoid punishment – you know: make it to heaven or to avoid hell – is trading-in
the enormity of God’s love and creativity for the smallness of a scorecard and
a transaction. Heaven and hell are
destinations, not purpose. Love, I
believe, is God’s purpose.
God’s
mysteries abound, no doubt. To me,
that’s the fun of it: that there is so much to learn, to think about, to feel,
to believe, to hope, to trust, and to love. Even when the answer of a situation
appears to be, “There is no answer,” that should teach us something about
whether we are asking the right questions or pursuing the right courses of
action. It’s always a mistake to answer,
“God doesn’t understand.”
But that’s
often the human default position.
Instead of trusting God - who shared not only His laws with the Jews but
then sent Jesus to reveal His love and purpose for all humanity – man goes
rogue. We tend to insert our own truths
– smallish opinions – and ideas of “what’s fair” into our perception of God. Why
do we shrink our existence like that? It
is only in divine truth and divine righteousness that we will discover the
purpose of God, and that’s bigger than anything humans can manufacture or
conceive.
So what is God’s purpose for
us? Well, His commands through Jesus are
to love God and to love others as ourselves.
I used to think that meant our only purpose in life is to glorify God,
accomplished by believing in Jesus and selflessly helping others.
Pretty good, I thought, but my friend
George Bebawi – I write about Him all the time – believes it’s bigger than that.
“If your only purpose is to glorify God, then you are merely a tool of God;
that is the Augustinian view,” George said.
“The Alexandrian view (Origen of Alexandria, second century AD) is that
God created us in His image to be free, and to love and enjoy each other in the
same way the community of the trinity – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – love and
enjoy each other.” That, friends, is a good purpose.
We are enduring, right now, a
season of extreme and difficult-to-watch cultural chaos where the small and
shortsighted ways of man seek to overturn the infinite, loving truths of
God. They can’t, but it’s scary and
disgusting to witness. I am sure that it
is man’s arrogance that properly occupies a tiny little box of purpose, and
God’s righteous magnificence that opens the expanse of the heavens to the
eternal truth of His love.
Christians need to think big. It is the world Satan is trying to make
small.
Walters
(Rlwcom@aol.com) keeps going back to how man blocks out the
big riddles of God by praising the small solutions of man. Talk about
“non-sustainable.”
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