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Has the Lord lost patience? Is that his way?

Micah 2:7

Of course, it would be very easy for God to punish us. He is the Creator of all things, sustaining in being all that is seen and even more that is unseen. At any moment he could destroy you, rewrite history so that you never were. He could do things undreamed of by even the most expert ethnic cleanser. It would be equally easy for him to free you from your sins, make you perfect, just like that. But he is not going to do either of those things, obvious as they might seem. He has a better idea altogether, though much more difficult and perhaps impossible:

Such is the richness of the grace he has showered on us in all wisdom and insight. He has let us know the mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made in Christ from the beginning to act upon when the times had run their course to an end.

Ephesians 1:8–9

So, what is this plan, and why is it hidden? The two questions have one answer. Let us think for a moment about God as the Creator of heaven and earth. It is hard to imagine what this means. We are familiar with making things, be they kitchen units or works of art and poetry. Parents have the most sublime experience of all in the creation of a completely new person. When we create, it involves assembling or rearranging bits of matter, or thoughts. God, in contrast, created everything out of nothing. This involves two ideas. First, God started it all off: ‘Let there be light’, and so on. On its own, however, this idea does not capture much. God would be like the Queen, in the United Kingdom, smashing a bottle against a ship to launch it, blessing all who sail in it, and that’s that.

The full truth is rather less comfortable, because it brings God very, very near. You do not need the Queen to launch the ship, though she does do it very well. It could be anyone sober enough to heft the bottle in the right direction. It could also be a machine suitably programmed. Or, why bother with an intervention? Just let the ship slide. In the same way, God the Creator need not be at all like the Father revealed in his Word by the Holy Spirit. It could be any kind of god with sufficient strength to give the big push. Or, the universe might just have happened. The notion of a Creator might just be a useful myth to take us beyond the boundaries of the language of science, the kind of confusion that comes from perplexing questions like ‘what was there before there was anything?’

The idea of the Christian doctrine of creation is this: behind every happening, every thing, every thought, every action, all movements, is the creating power of God. In gaps between nanoseconds, he sustains it in being. There is only one force in the world, which is the action of God. Nothing happens otherwise.

Hold on, though. Aren’t we free beings, with choice? What about all the catastrophes and natural disasters; am I saying that God wills those? Am I saying that God is responsible for evil actions by tyrants and people like us? In asking these questions, we are coming to understand what sin is. A sinful act is not sinful primarily because it offends God, or because it infringes some abstract law code. It is sinful because it is an exercise of the power to act, given by God, in an evil way, a way that counts against God’s purpose in creating us.

Philosophers have argued for centuries – and there is no reason for them to stop – about how it is possible for an all-powerful Creator to have made free creatures. Surely in some remote way, he still has control. This is the nasty bit that hurts. There is nothing in creation that can withstand the power of God, except for one thing, which is a human being saying ‘no’. Why? Because that is how God made it. For some reason, known only to himself, he wanted to make little beings that would accept his love and love him in return. So he gave us the ability to move, act and think for ourselves. If God were like us, he might wish he had not bothered.