God's Job

A Question of Choice

As one reads through the Scripture you may notice that God never forces anyone to believe in Him, His Word, His Works, His prophets, or even His only begotten Son, Jesus. 

He always seems to leave room for doubt. Isn't that odd? Isn't that just like the nature of God? He leave us to choose, that is our gift of freewill in play.

I believe it has everything to do with the Nature of God. He is a God of love, and if you have been paying attention  you know that love requires choice. You must have the ability to make a decision to love, hate, or be indifferent all on your own. Otherwise, we would have obligation, duty, responsibility, or something else that isn't love. A sense of obligation, duty, or responsibility may grow from love but not the inverse. 

In a nation which has a volunteer armed forces, one joins the military because they love their country, and this leads to a feeling of duty to defend it. We don't have an intrinsic desire to join the service, which leads to the love of country. So, we love our country enough to die for it, that's giving up everything for the object of love. 

Our God is a pretty smart God, and He understands human nature far better than we understand His Nature. Love is something that you do for another without any expectation of return, reciprocity, or consideration. What He desires most from us is our love, not sacrifice, not money, not our unblemished attendance at church, but our love. 

This sounds pretty simple, at first, but there's more than just the lip service of love that He's asking for. If you love your mother or father, you want to do the things that make them happy. What good is my claiming to love my mom if I am stealing her cigarettes four times a day. My actions do not exhibit love, do they? 

The Lord says: "These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.

-Isaiah 29:13

He's looking for the genuine article, not the sales pitch. Even if you are the worst of sinners, He will accept your contrite heart over someone who feels that they are owed Salvation because they followed "the rules",  or operated on grudging obligation. 

If you have love in your heart towards God, how could you not have love for all His Creation? Do you see how the single act of loving God expands exponentially into love for all? 

It's a logic puzzle in a way, 

God is everything 
God is love 
Love is everything 
GOD=LOVE=EVERYTHING 

Everything that He desires from us and for us is Love. What a wonderful, beautiful God! 

Your good works are the product of Salvation, not progress in salvation. You can never earn your way to God, His Grace or eternal Life by your own merit. You don't have the capacity. You don't even know how to be good in the way God is good. We are too selfish and self-centered by vice of the human nature that clouds our judgments and perspectives. What appears right and just is a shadow of God's Right and Just. We can't really do much about it, it's our nature. But God can by applying His corrective lenses tinted with the Blood of Jesus Christ.

Praise God for his correction! 

Praise Him for His Mercy! 

Praise Him for His Love!

The Chosen People

I thought I'd choose a topic of choice, the Chosen People of God. Being chosen specifically by God as "His people" seems like a pretty glorious position to hold. Sure, it does until you look at the track record and earthly fate of these select few.

How few?... Less than 0.2% of the world's population. That means out of 1,000 people there are 2 people of the Jewish faith.

This is who all the antisemitism throughout human history has been directed against. During the 800 year period that we call The Dark Ages, Jews were forbidden from holding public offices, professional positions, or owning land. If they became too prosperous, too visible, or too easy a target a more severe treatment was regularly applied.

One of the few jobs that Jews could hold was money lender, since the lending of money at interest was considered the sin of Usury by the Catholic church. Another legal occupation for Jews at the time was entertainer. Showmanship was considered a lowly and sordid business back then.

Oddly enough, those ignorant of history think the large numbers of Jews in the banking and entertainment industries are evidence of a some grand Jewish conspiracy. In truth, it was a Christian conspiracy against the "Christ killers" being employed that produced the large number of Jews we see in these trades today.

Today banking and entertainment are big businesses largely because of the innovations and contributions of the minuscule 0.2% of the global human population we call "the Jews". It seems to be an insignificant percentage in the scope of the other 99.8% of humanity, doesn't it?

Let's put this number in perspective...

• If we took everyone on the planet and went to war against Belgium, that would be equal to the 0.2% the Jews comprise. 

• How about the world vs. the State of Pennsylvania? That's the numerical equivalent as well.

Jesus was one of those "chosen people", and arguably He still is, since He never required His own blood for Salvation. 

Jesus was the Choicest of the Chosen, and look how that worked out for Him. He was nailed to a tree for telling people that they should be nice to each other and spend more time getting to know God. For this horrific agenda, He was treated like an abomination, like a worm, and despised by His own people, the Chosen People.  

If you recall from the Passion plays of your youth, the only one who offered Jesus the least bit of mercy on the cross was a Gentile, one of the Roman soldiers who had nail Him to it.

"I thirst", Jesus said as His tongue stuck to His jaw like a dried pot shard.

A Roman soldier dipped a sponge in wine mixed with gall (also called "sour wine" or" wine mixed with myrrh"), and raised it to the Savior's mouth, but Jesus refused the bitter painkiller to ease suffering.

He would remain there, in the agony, in thirst, suffocating under His own weight, and nothing would move from that place. 

This was His time, this was His place, and these were His chosen people. He came to pay the ransom, and there was no negotiating the price. This is what He was born to do.

So, do you still want to be "chosen by God" ? 

Well people, you already have been. Before He knit you in the womb, He knew you, and He knew the price He would have to pay in order to redeem you.

How's that for a testimony of the Love of God? Does it move you to tears?  If it doesn't, then you might be a sociopath. Don't worry, because God will fix you too, that's what He loves to do.

Maybe this would be more comprehensible if we brought this concept home...

Imagine you decide to have children, and by some miracle you get to know the children's destinies. You see their birth, their first steps, first words, first day of school, career, and marriages. Life is looking good for the kids and you're a proud parent, but then it all falls apart. They stop speaking to you and take the counsel of a known liar. Everything you taught the kids has been misconstrued and twisted in a bizarre manner that is the polar opposite of your instructions. You become the root and the reason for everything wrong in their lives.

Would you have these children? Well, would you?

I doubt that any of us would. We'd prefer to remain childless and enjoy our married life with our spouse. Well, that is not unlike the vision that God had, but He decided to have the children anyway. Those children are us. We were chosen by God.

We are grafted into the Children of the Promise, which leads one to wonder, "What is the point of a chosen people if we are all chosen in the end?"

The Jews are us in microcosm. We can see their mistakes, their trials, their egregious sins, and their glorious moments as teaching tools for all of us. They play the roles of a accessible, comprehensible, and digestible characters on a spiritual stage. This is why and for what the Jews are chosen.

• When things are going exceptionally well for us, we forget how we got there, or more accurately, "who" got us there. 

• We become enamored with our own greatness. Soon our pride and overconfidence precipitate our demise. After scrambling to keep the pieces together and failing to secure even one, we turn back to God.

• We witness miracles and quickly doubt there credibility, or at least there origin.

• We struggle to achieve our own holiness, only to exclude the Promises of God.

• We fight to protect God, and forget it is He who protects us.

• We make war to defend God, and demonstrate our lack of faith in His protection.

Look at yourself. Understand, for one moment in your life, look at what you have been witness to; this planet teeming with an enormous diversity of life, abundant resources, and an accommodating climate. Your very existence; built from molecules all of which have never been alive, but the sum of these lifeless parts constitute a living you. Is this the result of chemical accidents? The consequence of chance and circumstance?

I say, no. This is a miracle! You are a miracle! We are all wondrous, miraculous chosen children of God!

Now, I leave you to make your own choice. 

The Present

If you have some time, I'd like to teach you something about time. In time we have the Past, the Present, and the Future. Each of these have unique attributes

The Past 
Do you know why we refer to this part of time as" the past"? Because that is what it is, it is past and we can do nothing to change what has already occurred. We can learn from the experience, however we cannot change it. It is past us. But we tend to spend so much of our time dwelling on it,  ruminating over it, and wishing  could go back and do things differently. This is useless, and a waste of our limited lives.

The Future 
The future is what we look forward to, plan for, and too often fear. We need not be anxious about the future because God has it well in hand. There is one thing I can guaranty you about the future is there is a U in the fUture, and then there is a cross fuTure, and then there is another U in futUre. The first u was the old you, the one before the Cross. The new you, the one I typed last is the new you after the Cross.  So, God has got us in the future.

The Present
Do you know why we call it the present? Because it is a gift from God. Use the present!

Where are we?

What was God doing before Creation?  Since God is eternal, He spent an eternity doing other things, didn't He? That's a very long time,  an eternity, isn't it? We know about the Creation and a little before but not much else. There are some exo-biblical books that speak to this question. They speak of the Fall of Lucifer and the third of the Host of Heaven that followed him in the angelic rebellion. However, this still leaves us with an eternity unaccounted as to the thoughts and activities of God.

Odd,  don't you think?

Whilst you ponder that anomaly, here's another vexing thought...

Where did God Create Creation?

We know that God is omnipresent, so if we follow the logic of this understanding, there was only God. He was both omnipresent and only present. There could be nothing outside of God. So, I will posit the question again...

Where did God Create Creation?

There can be only one possible answer, and the answer is equally astounding.

God must have Created Creation within Himself. A bubble of space  within the Creator, which He Created in order that Creation could exist. This seems logical  and comprehensible enough in a cursory examination of the concept, but like quantum physics if you claim to understand the subject,  you haven't been paying attention!

There is another immediate physics correlation that jumps into play, why can't physicist tell us what happened before the Universe came barging (or "Banging" as they may prefer)  into existence? The most respected theoreticians assure us that they can calculate with deafening precision exactly what happened back to 0.000001 seconds after "The Event", but when you push for anything prior, the best answer I've received was, "I'll be beggared if I know!"

This was from a very revered physicist at Fermilab National Laboratory outside Chicago. I'll withhold his name,  but we both know that is exactly what he said.

He's no slouch, this man could probably program Perl code in his head while making lobster bisque and talking Bear's football with you.

So, what's the boggle? Why can't he (the nameless one), you, or anyone else calculate back to "The Event", or even before? Well, the issue is that physicists require constant Laws of the Universe to do their math problems, and prior to that time... they didn't exist.

Yup, there was no speed of light speed limit written in stone. Come to think of it, there was no stone on which it could have been carved. The technological innovations of the Neolithic was billions of years in the future. There was no gravity, no strong or weak forces. Electromagnetism was but a twinkle: in the eye of... there were no eyes either! Drat! Physics is as useful as phrenology without the stuff physicists depend upon to do the stuff they do. Which, may I add, would bore you to tears if you knew the tedium they endure when they're not telling people how fascinating physics is in a ultra graphic enhanced PBS special.

God has remained unperturbed by the vast array of academics bashing their skulls against their desks in the hope of something useful falling out.

The Rabbis of ancient time had pondered the same question that stumps the Stanford PhD, mystified any MIT grad, and confounds Cornell alumnus,

"Where are we?"

Luckily, the Rabbis were not obsessed with the semi-useful tool we call "scientific method", so they weren't stuck on the idea of having to reproduce Creation in a laboratory environment. We have become so shackled to scientific method that we can't be certain if Albert Einstein existed since we cannot reproduce him in a lab.

This is the limitations of falling in love with a rule, ritual, or a law, your mind stagnates and fails to grow into the infinite mind of God.

Our science has become a slave to a single method to the exclusion of all others. This is a handicap to our society, our science,  and ultimately to our spirituality.

Many bright students can't conceive of something that cannot be quantified, analysed, qualified, and isolated in a sample jar. None of which can one do with the Almighty.

So, the rabbis, being sufficiently pragmatic to avail themselves of other methodologies, came to the conclusion that determined where God began Creation.

It was and still is within Himself. He began with a formless void, much in the same way the Earth was when He commenced all the fine detail work that we enjoy in our world that we share with all our brothers and sisters who were more finely crafted than anything else in all of God's Creation.

As we stare out into the night sky misty eyed, slack jawed, and terrified at the expanding vastness of space we forget that all this, all of everything, is but an infinitesimal speck within the bosom of infinitely powerful and infinitely loving God.

That is where we are...

Praise God!

And now for the answer to my initial question, what was God doing before Creation... Being lonely.

The Jesus Administration

UNDER REVISION