Butler In A Box August 19, 2012
Posted by lizp4 in Uncategorized.trackback
I always laugh when some pseudo-atheist smirks, “Okay, if God can do anything, how come He can’t make a rock He can’t move??” or words to that effect. There are variations on the theme, but most of them are just as silly. Occasionally, someone will wonder why God would make a beautiful world, and then populate it with mean people and other sinners. Etcetera.
But, there are a couple of things that God really can’t do, and they involve Himself. The most important one is this:
He can’t deny His Nature. HE IS WHO HE IS. He is Who He says He is. His Nature is that of the almighty Creator, and neither He nor anyone/anything can change that. We can say or do whatever we want about what we think of this, but it can’t be changed, either by Himself, or by us puny humans. God is God. Period. Any questions, take them up with HIM.
He has, out of love for us, His children, set boundaries on His own behavior. He can not violate our will, or force us to accept or love Him. Without this being built into our creation, we would be little more than robots; a bunch of “Yes-men.” We wouldn’t be able to turn our backs on Him, and even if we could, He could simply come to us and force us to return to Him. So, in order to have children who freely chose to love Him for His Own sake, He created each of us with a free will. Now, we choose Him, or not. Our choice. Our loss, if we choose not to love Him.
God can’t do our praying for us. He can’t do our forgiving, loving, or any other act of our wills. He CAN answer our prayers, and He can forgive those whom we forgive (or not), et cetera. But our share is always the same: We are expected to try to be like Him. Which brings us to the last thing on the list (although there are probably many more if we really think about it):
He can’t “be more like US.” We have been slaves to an idea of God as a nice old man with a long white beard and a walking stick. We put Him into manageable-sized boxes. We expect Him to do what we say, sort of like a divine butler. Some of us even believe that if we pray for it, God HAS to answer those prayers exactly. Sorry, folks. Time to turn in that image, and see the reality for what it is. God Almighty, Creator of the Universe, of Time, of Life, and of everything that exists isn’t the butler in a box. He isn’t your gofer, your sugar-daddy, or your yes-man.
We must learn to worship an uncreated Being without beginning or end, one who never changes nor lies, and Who loves us with a love of infinite dignity and purity, Who will answer our prayers whenever we pray. And, we need to learn that sometimes, that answer is going to be “No,” or “Later.”
And, it won’t do any good to try to fire Him. Lucifer already tried that, remember? And, remember that He is NOT the hired help, so thank Him once in a while.
Always makes me crazy. What part of “For my thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts” is so difficult to understand? Does the sheer lunacy of anthropomorphising the Creator not occur to them?
We puny hoo-mons are just that: puny humans. Some of us are simply so puny we can’t comprehend a God that’s bigger than a breadbox, so we pass on to others an idea of a holy gofer, a sort of hoary “Mr. Fixit.”
Finding out something of the extent of His holiness is one of the most humbling experiences I can think of. But most of us don’t want to be confronted with a concept we can’t minimize to fit our ability to think about it, so the idea continues. Puny thinkers, us.