What Is God Doing, and What Is He Like?

You can always count on this blogsite to ask and answer the easy questions!

One must acknowledge first of all that God is intelligent and all-present to an extent and in ways that we cannot begin to fathom.  But here are some thoughts I had on what His relationship with us might be like:

Think of Him as permeating everything even though He is not part of all things, but separate.  And with His omnipresence He can fine-tune everything, but also allow everything to operate on its own to the extent He wants it to.  The Holy Spirit is an ether that’s everywhere.

And what does God want His creation to do?  Well, He wants people to love each other and to love Him, and He must get some satisfaction from our pleasure in loving Him and each other and the wonders of His creation.  So he tweaks and nudges us and everything so that we love and are loved, but without doing it so hard that we lose our freedom of action.  The way a parent plays with an infant or a very young child is instructive here:  The parent of course controls the child’s environment and protects him and encourages him to see this and play with that and learn to do this and learn not to do that.  And yet, the child’s will is not obliterated, he is still his own self.

All this continues all your life, with God shaping you — sometimes relaxing His grip, or changing it, to account for circumstances, including your age and maturity.  And He is doing this for everyone and everything else, too.  He’s conducting a beautiful symphony, weaving a fantastic tapestry.

He can ratchet His presence up, and He can ratchet it down.  When you feel His nudges — to do this, and not to do that — pay attention!

To love Him we must first know Him, recognize Him, believe in Him, and all this is necessary too if we are most reliably — as reliably as can with with our feeble faculties — to love one another.  God wants us to act in certain ways and not act in the other ways and to become something special.

All this does not seem to me to be so far-fetched.  Does it to you?  And to achieve all this the other tenets of Christian faith do not seem to me to be so far-fetched either:  God’s decision to have Scripture, for example, to choose a people, then to send His Son, and so on (see the discussion on another post on this blogsite, here).