Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters by Green Chris E. W

Author:Green, Chris E. W. [Green, Chris E. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532635663
Publisher: Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2018-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

What are we to say about this moment? How is it related to the will of God? And what of all the other moments of tragedy, injustice, and evil that take place in the world? Why doesn’t God intervene to save this little girl? Or the thousands of other children who starved to death during the famine? If God can stop it from happening, then why doesn’t he? If God cannot stop it, then what do we mean when we talk about God being sovereign? We need not say that God “had a plan” in which the death of this child played some necessary part. And we don’t need to say that God could not do anything about it, not even because of chosen self-limitations: God does not have to be less than God for creatures to be all that they are. It is best, I think, to say that this death took place not as the will of God, but within the unfolding of that will of God. Difficult as it is for us to imagine, that moment, like every moment, remains open to the will of God—God even now is still active then and there, in a time closed to us as past. Hence, we must patiently endure until God’s will is finally, fully done. And when that will is done, then we will see that God indeed is good, that even death cannot separate us from his love.

This is the heart of our hope: until the end of everything, God never does everything God can do. That is why we pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. For now, we live in the tense moment between what God has done and what God has yet to do. “Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face” (1 Cor 13 :12 ). This is why the earliest Christians prayed, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus”: it was a cry for God to finish what he has started. And so for this little girl, whose name we do not know, we pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and we wait expectantly, confidently for that to happen in the end.

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In history, God has not yet acted fully—except in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In him, we have seen already what we do not yet see anywhere else for anyone else. As the writer of Hebrews says: “Now in subjecting all things to [human beings, as promised in Psalm 8], God left nothing outside their control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus ” (Heb 2:8–9 a). That is, we do not see human beings in their rightful, promised place. We do not see the world set right. But our hope is that what has already happened to Jesus, what is already true for him as the Last Adam and the head of new creation, will be true of us too in the end.

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