April 24, 2005
God and the Unliftable Stone
This question was posed to me by a friend this past week:
"If God is all powerful, then how can He create a stone that is unliftable? Because if He cannot lift it, than there is a limitation on his power. Conversely, if He can lift it then He is unable to create an unliftable stone, which also means His power is limited."
Here's my response...(with a few editorial changes)
"Can Shakespeare write something into one of his plays that he cannot control or unwrite? Your paradoxical question is only significant when it operates within the confines of a system based on the rules of the human understanding of the world (i.e. logic, science, etc.). To question whether or not God can create a stone that He cannot lift is to believe in the premise that a writer - in his normal, everyday life - is confined to the rules that he writes into his novels.
See, when Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, he was able to create everything about the world in which his characters operated. He, through words, was able to create Athens and the woods outside of Athens (the setting, or for our purposes, the world) as well as the political power structures within that world (i.e. the rule of Theseus as Duke of Athens, Oberon and Titania's rule of the Fairy World, the lack of political structure within the woods, etc.), and even the rules upon which the reality of the play rested (i.e. how gravity operates in the play the same way it does in real life, yet fairies can turn people's heads into animal heads and give people potions that dictate who they fall in love with). The foundation upon which the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream rests is the product of the desires and the creative capacity of one William Shakespeare.
All of those details about A Midsummer Night's Dream are superfluous except in that they illustrate, in my opinion, how your question, while intellectually stimulating, is ultimately inconsequential. Questioning whether or not God can create a stone that even He can't lift is to forget that God, like Shakespeare with regard to any of the facets of his plays, can add, alter, omit, or erase anything that He does not want to be in His story - if He so chooses - especially a minute detail like a stone. As the Author of Creation, He has that capacity. But more importantly, He has the ability to scrap the entire play - that is, to say, He can shred the entire draft of this life and replace it with a restored Creation, the universe where the Devil, and therein sin, is defeated once and for all.
See, while this life is important, I think God views it, in part, the same way a writer views his work: a writer (or a good writer, at least) will pour his heart and soul into that which he creates - doing his best to push his creativity to its furthest reaches and, inevitably, engendering his work with all that he himself (as a human being) is; yet, the writer also understands that his work is just his work, and his work has no bearing on who he is as a person nor does his work exhibit any kind of influence on his life - if he so desires it - once he has created it. In short, we might say that a writer will pour himself out, in love, while he creates his work, but his work, ultimately, is a fictional world that lives on a printed page (or in a computer) and only comes to life with the help the human imagination (whether that be his own or his audience, reader, etc).
That is not to say that our world is a fiction or some kind of unreality (i.e. the Matrix, except with God as the Architect). But we must not forget that God is the Creator of our world. He made the world. Yet He could never be confined by it - even if He chose to write Himself into it. God does not operate within the boundaries of logic - or even theology, for that matter. Both are, in my opinion, creations of man, made possible by God's gift to humanity of intellectual thought. To believe in the premise that God operates within such confines is to believe that Shakespeare's actual head can be turned into an ass's head just as easily as Bottom's. And that is a supposition that I can't buy into."
Posted by Kevin Carey at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
My Take on Sexuality
There has always been much debate in the church over marriage, sexuality, homosexuality, and everything in between. Many people have many different opinions, but the only opinion that actually matters is what God says. I want to lay out what I believe God says about sexuality. I understand that some people have very strong opinions on this subject, but I hope whoever reads this will hear me out...
The story of sexuality does not originate in our modern time; it begins at creation. We must pay careful attention to the way God designed us. We must also pay careful attention to how God designed our relationships with each other to parallel our relationship with him.
First, God created man in his own image (Genesis 1:27). He created Adam and Eve and told them; be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it; (Genesis 1:28). In other words, make more people and produce life. A man-woman relationship was designed by God to produce more people, just as our relationship with Christ should bring about more Christians. If a Christian does not produce any spiritual fruit at all, you have to wonder if that person is even connected to the Vine. If we do not abide in Christ, we will miss the point of life and bear no fruit (John 15). In the same way, if the union of two people cannot produce physical life (as in the case of same sex-marriage), then it clearly goes against God's original design. While Adam was able to produce life with Eve, he could not have carried out God's command by having sex with a man.
Now we move to another original purpose of man and woman. Genesis 2:24-25 says that "a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." Biblical sex is defined as shameless oneness. Man and woman will become one- and not just physically, but emotionally, socially, mentally, and spiritually as well. Two people become one in every aspect of our beings. It's no wonder why it hurts so much to break up after a long, intimate relationship; it's because the two people are becoming one, and it's painfully difficult to pull that oneness apart. Now check out the parallel: In the same way we become one with each other, we as Christians have become one with God (Roman 6:5). When we ask Christ to be our savior, he comes to live inside our hearts by his Holy Spirit (Ezekiel 36:26, 1 Corin 3:16). Understand that God created marriage between man and woman, husband and wife, bride and groom. Marriage is a symbol of Christ’s spiritual relationship with the church. A bride is united with the groom and they become one with each other just as we are united with Christ and become one with Him.
Ephesians 5:22-33 explains the parallel between Christ and the church, and husband and wife: "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish...This is a profound mystery- but I am talking about Christ and the church..."
Understand the big picture in this passage: the relationship between a husband and wife represents Christ's relationship with his people. Christians are the bride and Christ is the groom. We are "married" to Christ. Revelation 21 paints the picture of what will happen in the end times: "I saw a new heaven and a new earth...I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband" (verses 1,2). When we turn our backs on God, we commit adultery in our hearts. In the old testament, God often refers to Israel as an adulteress wife: "Have you seen what faithless Israel has done? She has gone on every high hill and under every spreading tree and has committed adultery there...I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries" (Jeremiah 3:6,8).
Finally, the most powerful argument for traditional marriage and biblical sexuality comes in Deuteronomy 22. In that time, if a man accused his wife of not being a virgin, the woman's parents would bring proof of her virginity. This proof was simply a piece of cloth with her blood on it. This is the blood that every woman bleeds the first time she has intercourse with a man. God set it up so that the union between husband and wife is based on a blood covenant. Sound familiar? Our union with Christ is also based on a blood covenant, and this is not a coincidence. Christ's blood that was shed on the cross is the payment for our sins, and allows us to become one with him again.
From the very beginning, God established these eternal principles. Sexuality must be examined from an eternal perspective. We must look at the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, in order to understand how God designed sexuality. He created man and woman to become one with each other in marriage through a blood covenant. This would be a symbol of Christ's relationship with the church. We become one with Christ when we ask him to be our savior, through a blood covenant. Same-sex union does not contain oneness, it does not produce life, and there is no blood covenant at all. It is clearly unnatural and not what God intended for us.
I hope this helps. Please respond or add comments. I'd like to hear what everyone has to say on this subject.
Posted by Chris Jensen at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)
