God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts. This is a well-known belief among Christians which comes from Isaiah 55:8-9. What impact does that have for us though?
We start out looking at Jean Piaget’s studies with children. Children, at early ages, have not fully developed to understand this world. Take a toy and hide it under a blanket in front of a one year old child and the child believes the toy does not exist anymore. Try using an analogy with a five year old and the child will not understand, the same way an eight year old cannot reason. Children are not developed to handle these concepts yet. In knowing this, we must recognize that we must not use adult concepts for children, but use things proper for their understanding.
Like children who cannot understand the thinking of adults, so can adults cannot understand the thinking of God. In trying to, we run into paradoxes. One of these is, If God is all-good and omnipotent, why is there evil? Another is, if God created us and is omniscient and the sustainer of history, how can human freedom exist? The authors claim that that these paradoxes and questions become less troubling once we realize that if God thought like us, then he would not be God because we would be gods as well.
C.S Lewis says that in these scenarios, we should think about ourselves like a child with a thorn in their finger. A child does not know what is happening when a thorn is stuck in their finger, all they know is that it is painful. The child must put their trust, or faith, in their caregiver to remove the thorn even though it may hurt more. Like the child, we must put our faith in God.
The authors make it clear that they do not wish for people to “give up the struggle”(p.41) and “stop trying to turn childish beliefs into more mature ones.”(p.41) Instead, they tell us to continue on pondering the paradoxes and not use the “God’s ways are not our ways” as a cop-out. We must look at these paradoxes like unsolved puzzles that will eventually be solved due to our careful analysis of it.
In closing, we must remember that God’s ways are like an adult’s ways to a child. We cannot comprehend them, but we can try.
This chapter was like running on a treadmill. You feel like you have walked miles, but have really gotten no further than you have started. That is a personal perspective. We started out with “God’s ways are not our ways?” and ended with, “Yep, they are not. Keep looking at those paradoxes though.” I am not watching “Looper,” I am reading a book. My personal rant beside, this chapter was not boring. It sought to present that some things are not answerable to science, nor are they answerable to us, but that is no reason we should not study those things. The seemingly unsolvable puzzles are not for everyone. Most will turn their noses up at them and use the cop-out mentioned two paragraphs above. We are not called to turn our noses up at the unsolvable, we are called to rule the earth and subdue it. God may not be of this earth, and I am not presuming to tell anyone that they should call out God for a one on one, but if we are created in his image, should we not try to solve these paradoxes to know him better? We could wait until the day when the trumpets blow and we are called up to him and ask him, but what the fun in that. We are called to pursue knowledge, and in the pursuit with that knowledge, we should find ourselves in a closer relationship to God.
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