One student who is currently doing our Scripture Under Scrutiny courses, has emailed me a bunch of their questions. I will post my answers here over the next week or so. These Notes will also import into our Facebook Page, so feel free to head over there and discuss further.
He wrote:
"I'm struggling to work out how it isn't one big setup, or a game. Godmade us for his pleasure, and is omnipotent. So He could've stopped
Satan from tempting us, but didn't. So He allowed us to fall and become
separated. Then all people have original sin from then on due to some
intrinsic rebellion, so humans have to sacrifice animals to be forgiven
in the OT. Then God saves us with Jesus, but He was in control of the
whole thing! I know that God wants us to come to Him freely and
not feel forced, but it sounds like the whole story has been set up so
that we're failing from the start and need a saviour.
Right, so 1. How do you see this?"
My response:
If we really want to understand what the answer might be if Christianity were true, we have to work hard to see things from that point of view. A question like this can be asked from such a sceptical point of view that you won't find the answer convincing, because you're unintentionally assumed that it can't be true.
What I mean is: if Christianity were actually true, then we need to begin by acknowledging that these are some of the deepest, biggest most complex things we could dwell upon. It's not an intellectual cop-out to say that we are touching on mystery here. If anything, that shows intellectual integrity. If we can't make everything completely neat and tidy, that is because we are dealing with matters of time and eternity, creator and creation.
This very recognition is the most important part of my answer, too. I want to say that the kind of links we make between God's power and God's responsibility don't necessarily follow. Just because God is all powerful and in control of all things doesn't logically make him responsible for our evil doing. It might seem like common sense that he is responsible. But then we aren't used to thinking about how eternal beings relate to time. Normal causation may not neatly apply.
There are other things that make God's relationship to this world complex: human free-will does make the whole picture complicated, and warn us against making snap assumptions about God's motives - as if he is just pulling puppet strings. The Bible can happily speak of both God's control over all things and yet at the same time fully uphold the reality of human freedom and action. It's not very precise to say he could've stopped Satan from tempting us.
Likewise, there are complexities in the way we need to think about God's plans and purposes. There are passages in the Bible that speak about God's ultimate plan for Christ to come and save a sinful world. And yet there are also passages that uphold the value of the original world, before sin entered it, and that speak of the human rebellion as a evil corruption of God's purposes for his good creation. We mustn't flatten these out too much, so that we reason that God only made the world so that people would sin.
That's the long answer. The short answer is:
'It might seem like it's one big game but it's not.'
Why not?
'Because that's not the way God relates to the world.'
How does he relate to the world?
'It's beyond our understanding to fully grasp.'
