This sums up a lot of what I
believe and have had to think my way through over the last through years.
Enjoy.
“After the fall from Paradise,
history entered a new phase. Creation God had done by Himself, starting with
nothing and ending with the universe in all its splendor. The new work is
Re-Creation, and for this God employs the very human beings who had originally
spoiled His work. Creation progressed through stages: first stars, then the sky
and sea, and on through plants and animals, and finally man and woman.
Re-creation reverses the sequence, starting with man and woman and culminating
in the restoration of all the rest.
In many ways the act of Re-creation
is harder that creation, for it relies on flawed human beings. Surely, it has
cost God more: the death of His Son. Still, God insists on healing the world
from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.
As I studied Job, it struck me that
The Wager was, at its heart, a stark reenactment of God’s original question in
creation: Will the humans choose for or against me? From God’s point of view
that has been the central question of history, beginning with Adam and
continuing on through Job and every man and woman who has ever lived. The Wager
in the Book of Job called into question the whole human experiment.
Satan denied that human beings are
truly free. We have freedom to descend, of course—Adam and all his descedants
proved that. But freedom to ascend, to believe God fro no other reason than,
well…for no reason at all? Can a person believe even when God appears to him as
an enemy? Or is faith one more product of environement and circumstance? The
opening chapters of Job expose Satan as the first great behaviorist: Job was
conditioned to love God, he implied. Take away the rewards, and watch his faith
crumble. The Wager put Satan’s theory to the test.
I have come to see Job’s trials as
a crucial test of human freedom, an important issue in modern times as well. In
our century, it takes faith to believe that a human being amounts to more than
a combination of DNA programming, instincts of the gene pool, cultural
conditioning, and the impersonal forces of history. Yet even in this
behaviorist century, we want to believe differently. We want to believe that
the thousand hard and easy choices we make each day somehow count. And the Book
of Job insists that they do; one person’s faith can make a difference. There
isa role for human beings, after all, and by fulfilling that role Job set a
pattern for anyone who ever faces doubt or hardship…
Why the delay? Why does God let
evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive, on this planet? Why does He let
us do slowly and blunderingly what He could do in an eyeblink?
He holds back for our sakes.
Re-creation involves us; we are, in fact, at the center of His plan. The Wager,
the motive behind all human history, is to develop us, not God. Our very
existence announces to the powers in the universe that restoration is under
way. Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling
of a bell, and a faith like Job’s reverberates throughout the universe.”
(Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God, pg. 191-2, 194)
