Something doesn’t make sense about God's power

By John Pearring

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070123.cfm
Genesis 18:1-15
Matthew 8:5-17

No matter how often life injuries trip us up—mental, physical, or emotional—God takes each opportunity to heal and repair us with particular attention to the details of everything and everybody, all at the same time. While we’re focused on our injuries, God is focused on everyone. Not everybody and everything gets fixed all the time. It cannot, however, be random when he restores order, health, and clarity, knowing that everyone of us is allowed to be hammered so often, and eventually into our grave. What kind of orchestration is this?

That doesn’t make us petty or self-centered to worry on just our problems, praying for what we desire. Our problems are real. It’s just that God’s capabilities, mission, and resources tend to make his attention to our details an absurdity. How can he care enough to simultaneously attend to our itty bitty self and everybody else? Review the miracles in your life. They're remarkable because things got so bad there was no way things could get fixed. 

Something doesn’t make sense. Which is it? God’s power or our limits? Our limitations are exceeded sometimes, but only by God’s power. So, the unbelievable thing has got to be God’s power.

Attempt to catalog your interactions with God—using journals, map apps, videos, and Instagram records, along with the paperwork trails of receipts, texts, contracts, and emails—and you’re overwhelmed before you begin. We don’t have enough time to capture God's time with us because he’s always there.

Multiply our single impossibility times the earth's current population, then factor in the lives of everything from whales and elephants down to gnats and ameba. There is a higher math for that, but it’s beyond my understanding. If you’re talented enough to create the complex formula estimating God’s abilities in the moment, the complexity multiplies once again because all of creation’s lives since the beginning of time are also attended to by the almighty. There’s one more consideration—the gazillion galaxies and likely the bits and pieces of life outside our planet. Calculus of the sort we know is hard, but God’s calculus? Wow.

The premise of such a busy and attentive being is too bizarre to accept. That’s why God didn’t appear to us as a multi-dimensional wizard with an incomprehensible dashboard. He chose the human form instead. He didn’t become human because we morphed into humans. He created humanity to join us in it. Human form is his idea. The capabilities of God and the human form of God exceed both comprehension and our sense of order.

However, we do have this framework of Jesus, his Spirit, and the Father for God’s relationship to us. Matthew records a long series of Jesus events in scripture, scripted in one day—Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the healing of a leper, meeting the centurion and healing his servant, teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, and finally ending up at Peter’s mother-in-law’s house for dinner. All in sequence—morning to evening—Trinity-laden in both language and execution. 

Jesus deals with lots of people listening, eating, and frantic over diseases and dying. Jesus responds on cue, teaching, feeding, and healing them. He preached to rapt audiences in both synagogues and on hillsides. We have several records of his life, backed by witnesses. There’s nothing in history like it. Nothing. Nowhere. All in a few dozen days within a scant three years. For one reason. “I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, because for this purpose I have been sent” (LK 4:43).

Jesus’ teaching, feeding, and healing is still appropos. We suffer injuries, almost daily. Why? Because God wants us to be in his Kingdom—holy, unblemished, whole, and eternal—cured and formed from this life. Born, formed, and eventually leaving this life. To accept this reality, we must place ourselves within the context of God’s purpose—that God wants us to join him. We’re all invited to the Kingdom. 

The purpose for each of us uniquely patterns the life of Jesus in both the sufferings and the joys. We do this together because God draws us to him. We belong to a community that not only includes God himself in it but intends to draw us into an unbelievable holiness and kinship of brothers and sisters with God.

No one should believe such a reality unless that reality is unmistakably true.

God orchestrates a masterful matrix of this and that, these things and those things, with us participating at every moment of time and space. We can’t imagine the cosmic reality, but we can project its certainty. It is the most incredible of imaginations to place Jesus, God making himself human, within the context of this creation as one of us.

Injuries and illness along the way represent opportunities for God’s proof to us of restoration. Our death is the ultimate reliance upon him. Or, we are just tiny spits of life, too cruel to love and too sad to love anyone else.

Some of us will remain unconvinced, unable to allow God the freedom to restore the universe in his own time. We have schedules and plans that we prepare without allowance for death’s interruption and delay. Rather than believe the short-lived lives of people are all that holds our world together, there is this absurd, bizarre, incomprehensible story that would be great if it were true.

Without God’s opportune interventions, there are only our schedules and plans in conflict with what seems like a nefarious force of painmaking battling against us.

Presume instead that our injuries and illnesses, short-live successes and damaging failures are opportunities for God to love us and bring us together. Our joys and jubilations are reflections of the constant reality that awaits. Jesus’ kingdom is at hand. He waits for us upon our exit from here into a holy, whole, and unblemished creation. An eternal place where immortality is promised.