God's weak link?
It’s liberating not to be an expert. Great to admit that there’s a million things that I simply don’t know. All I’m sure about is that I’m still curious.
For example, I don’t know for sure if the Earth is warming up or that the Poles are thawing at a faster rate than the oceans can absorb the water. I don’t know what the weather will do next week. I’m in the dark about the amount of electricity we need to save before the energy stocks dim. I’m swinging either way over the question of a hung Parliament. I’m poleaxed over the polls and dithering over the political debates raging daily.
I’m not sure whether we should be in Europe or whether Europe should be in us. I’m fairly easy about Quantitative Easing. I could be convinced that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is really a canny old man. I’m unsure over whether if you laid all the economists end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. Neither would I. I’m curious. Open to persuasion. The more I know, the more I don’t know.
I sense that God exists, yet I can’t prove it. I know that a lot of people don’t believe in him, yet he believes in them. If he’s omnipotent and omniscient then he is powerful enough to know everything and yet on the other hand if God is Love then he must hurt a lot when people he loves don’t reciprocate.
He could command them to love him – but lovers don’t command anyone to love them. It happens naturally. So that makes him vulnerable. He’s standing at the door and knocking and if we hear him and open the door then he comes in. That’s not a door-crashing God, it’s a meek, exposed Dad who loves his child knocking at the bedroom door hoping that the teenager will let him in so they can talk.
So what I thought I knew about God isn’t true. He doesn’t make us do anything. He asks, politely.
He woos us gently and he died in the process of proving his love. It doesn’t seem fair – and probably isn’t. I guess I don’t know the truth. I can only feel. That’s human and yet strangely God-like.
Luke 15:20 (New International Version)
But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
Hebrews 5:2 (New International Version)
He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness.
Maybe we are his weakness.
Roy Stannard's Blog 
An outstanding blog, Roy. I love it. Not least because it identifies God as someone who is accessible to me as a human being. I’ve grown to suspect that this ‘unprovable God’ is nice and likes me. It works for me so I’m sticking with it!
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His main weakness is that he doesn’t exist.
If a belief in a supernatural power helps some people get along, that’s sure OK with me!!!! If they chose to call that power ‘God’, that’s sure OK with me as well.
Go well
M
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Hi Mike – your comment demonstrates another of His weaknesses. All that effort, all that care, all that concern – just to be ignored!
Interesting that the same argument can’t be applied to Jesus of Nazareth who exists in secular histories – and CS Lewis commented of him that based on his public utterances he could only be Mad, Bad or the Son of God.
C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”
Lewis’s trilemma is based on the view that, in his words and deeds, Jesus was asserting a claim to be God. Lewis refers to what he says are Jesus’ claims:
1. To have authority to forgive sins—behaving as if he really was “the person chiefly offended in all offences”
2. To have always existed, and
3. To intend to come back to judge the world at the end of time.
Lewis argues that these claims logically exclude the possibility that Jesus was “a great moral teacher” because he believes that no one making such claims could possibly be rationally or morally reliable, unless he were God.
This was the stuff that I was trying in vain to get out whilst you hovered over me with a drill for all those years!
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Ah ha! There were certainly many people wandering around at that time preaching in a similar fashion. It was what went on in those uncertain days. The fact that it was your particular man that had his story written down many many years later is mere coincidence; all perfectly ripe for the old Chinese whispers to come into force and be bent to the will of whoever had political power in the end.
I am now reminded why I tended to threaten you with the drill all those years; it was to make sure you didn’t start quoting C S Lewis. I read Screwtape more years ago than I care to remember and wouldn’t wish to go over that ground again!!!! His bad or mad hypothesis (Lewis, not Screwtape!!!!) is of the pinch of salt variety; you can take it or leave it and I prefer to keep my blood pressure down!
Love to all; albeit from a strictly secular angle.
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