Divine Order: a season for all things

A question often heaved at Christians (often, by Christians) relates to the apparent contradiction between the coexistence of God's 'plan' and His 'will', especially if He is omniscient. In other words, if God knows what will happen, how can He have a plan that he wills us to follow, but which is still contingent on our obedience?

Again, I feel that the paradox is incorrectly presented. We have a very chronological perception of life. What we fail to take into consideration, however, is that (thanks to Christ), our life is not chronologically bound. Life on earth, to be sure, is finite - but a fundamental pillar of Christianity is that we are eternal beings.

If time is not an issue, then neither is this artificial timeline of causation. Christ's Kingdom is an eternal one. We come to Christ because he calls us, and yet each person has a choice. I propose that Christ's will is in actuality not a 'plan' as such, but rather an 'order'. It is not a system of causation, like a row of dominos, or even like Robert Frost reaching a fork in the road and picking one of two paths (see previous post). Rather, it is an entire existence; a holiness; a 'Divine Order'.

How would such an order appear? The Garden of Eden would bear close resemblence (essentially, Heaven). Everything is in balance. Male and female, God and man, Church and Christ, night and day, Heaven and Earth, water and land, mankind and animal, work and rest.

After sin, many remnants of this balance remain (if they did not, the Earth's proximity to the sun would mean that we would either smoulder or freeze), but many do not. It is not unreasonable to assert that natural disasters would not have occured in the Garden. Mental disorders, stress, hatred, violence, starvation - this are all symptomso of the abuse of the Holy Balance.

There is nothing new under the sun, according to Ecclesiastes. Our task is not to create the balance, but to discover it; to harmonise what exists, according to how God has ordained. How to discover this balance? I feel that other cultures often have a better grasp of this very spiritual way of living, even (or especially) non-Christian ones. When oriental cultures utilise 'unorthodox medicine', when Jews follow dietary laws and procedures of cleanliness, when the Spanish take a 'siesta' - these are all very spiritual attempts to tap into the spirituality of life that lies beneath everything we do, but which was veiled when sin came into the World.

Ironically, our attempts to alter this balance make us worse off and lead to the disorders mentioned above: depression, global warming, obesity/malnutrition, etc. Moreover, when people attempt to replace the balance, i.e. to create something out of nothing, God does not allow such alchemy to come to fruition. Furthermore, it is probably in God's mercy that such attempts are decimated before they are completed; for a temporary period of restoration to the Holy Order, however painful, is surely better than a permanent system of counterfeit order, which will inevitably be rife with dysfunction, mismanagement, and ultimately, death. The Tower of Babel was an attempt to supplant God's Divine Order with a man-made one, with devastating consequences, and other political ventures are comparable. Recent attempts to 'create life' in that weird Collider thing resulted in disaster. The creation of money that does not exist led to current financial crisis. For this reason, I am not afraid of the prospects of scientific research, such as stem cells. After all, there is nothing new under the sun.

All the strands of this argument are best summed up by Solomon: "He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." There is a season for all things.

"Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?"