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April 20, 2005
God a micro-manager?
Sometimes you hear people saying things in relation to God and His action or inaction in respect of events or personal crisis, and you wonder at the image that the speaker has of God. Do they really envisage God as someone who, having given them free will, is going to be stood at their shoulder all day and every day, micro-managing their every action? Do they really think that, having made us in His image, He is then going to intervene in every aspect of our lives, in the natural cycle of the planet, in the cycles of life, death, and evolution any further than in the grandest scheme of things?
There can be little doubt that He does care for each and every individual. The gospels tell us that He knows when the least animal in His creation is in danger, or is killed, so He does care on an individual level, but we must also face the fact that He does not give us what we want. He gives us what we need in order that we may fulfil our potential in His creation. The great Saint Augustine of Hippo expressed the view that we, through Christ, have become "like God", a statement which on the face of it, contradicts the Genesis view that we are "created in the image of God". But does it? After all, if, in the Fall of Man, we lost our direct link to God, then in Christ it is restored - but this still does not mean that God is going to micro-manage our lives! We still have choices, and though God may not like some of the choices we make, He is not going to interfere in them!
I like to think that God has a way of getting us to follow a certain course or pathway through life. At times we go off in our own direction and get into difficulties of our own making. Things don't work out as we would like, or they go very sour indeed. Suddenly we blame God - "if only God had prevented this", or "God should have shown me the way He wanted me to go!" Perhaps He did, but we weren't listening or looking in the direction He suggested or pointed.
We are all God's creatures, He gave us freedom of choice, He gave us the intelligence to explore this life to the full, if we wished to. But, is our present shape, form, existence necessarily "the image of God"? Frankly, I find that hard to get to grips with. Firstly because in this form and existence, I am bound by the Laws of Physics, gravity, and perhaps more importantly - time! God is not bound by any of those; He may act within them for the purposes of His creation, but He is the Master of it all and not the servant. My image of God, if image it can be called, is of a being of immense spiritual dimensions, one who is simultaneously in our past, present, and future. One who is, then, now, and for the ages of ages. This is not the sort of being who is going to interfere by micro-managing the minutiae of my daily existence, but He is going to keep an eye on what I'm up to and be available when I inevitably take a wrong turn.
If I am made in the image of this God, then it is a part of me that is not visible to the naked eye. In short, I believe that it is my soul which is "in the image of God" and that it is in this spiritual form that I am able to interact with Him on any and all matters relating to my life, both in this plain of existence and in the next. Praying to Him for a lottery win, or for Him to patch up a relationship I have ruined is just not going to happen; those are things I must work out for myself under His guidance, but there is no waving of a magic wand to "make it all better". That is micro-management.
There are, of course, some dangers in exercising our "free will". One, or at least one of these, is that we can become so wrapped up in the pursuit of our own gratification that we become so unaware of God that we isolate ourselves and find ourselves completely out of touch with Him. It is tempting, then, to point to events like the Asian tsunami and the Indonesian earthquakes and ask "why, if there is a God, doesn't He prevent this?" To do so is to completely misunderstand God. The earth is as much a living organism as we are; it is still "forming" and changing - it is the very fact that it is in this state that makes it habitable to us. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and so on are a part of that process of change and formation. Having set the process in motion, God is, as with having given us free will, unlikely to intervene in the natural course of events. He does not micro-manage us or the earth, He is the policy director, we are the implementors.
Like any good manager, God is always ready to offer advice, to help us "brainstorm" a solution, or to provide a shoulder to cry on. He does answer prayers, He is there to listen, and He does care about us individually, but, having given us freewill and we having elected to use it, He is now bound by His own generosity and nature to allow us to go our own way. Although we are created in the image of God, and in Christ have become like God, we can only really become fully aware of that when we pass from this life to the next. No doubt, once there, we will begin to appreciate just how much God does in our daily lives that we are not even aware of, but perhaps most importantly, we will also come to understand just why we are not micro-managed from birth to death in this life - and almost certainly in the next.
Posted by The Gray Monk at April 20, 2005 10:28 AM