Is it just me? Tell the truth. Am I the only Christian, who has, at times, lost his peace, and grew discouraged and disillusioned, over the way God has chosen to carry out His master plan?
I know that we are not supposed to question God. I know that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and that His ways are not our ways. I know that God’s thoughts and ways are so much higher than ours that it is hard for us to even formulate meaningful questions about why He has chosen to implement His master plan, in the way that He has. Nevertheless, indulge me, and please bear with me, as I ask such a question, and attempt to explain one of the most troubling aspects of God’s master plan. (Romans 9:20; Isaiah 55:8-9)
The Scriptures provide a bird’s eye view of God’s master plan and we, as Christians, are supposed to accept our lot in life, and trust that the Captain of our Salvation is working all things together for our good. Nevertheless, we are also supposed to be honest with God, ourselves, and with each other. (2 Peter 1:2; Ecclesiastes 5:18; Hebrews 2:10; Romans 8:28; Acts 5:4; Psalm 15:2; Ephesians 4:25)
I accept the life that God has given me, but I still pray and ask Him to deliver me out of the various afflictions that come upon me, and the many unpleasantries I encounter. (James 5:13) Sometimes God delivers me, and sometimes He does not. At the end of the day, however, I trust that God is using everything that happens in my life for my eternal good. (Romans 8:28)
Setting the Stage
The famous American theoretical physicist John Wheeler, who coined the terms, “Black Hole“and “Worm Hole“, among many others, once said, “It from Bit (his book) symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.” John Wheeler also said that when he was young, he thought that everything was made of atoms, later, he came to understand that everything was made of energy fields, but, now that he is old, he realizes that everything is information.
Wheeler and others came to realize that everything that exists is information, and this is exactly what the Bible has taught for thousands of years. Robert Jastrow, who was a famous American astronomer and planetary physicist, put it this way, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
This band of theologians tells us that God spoke the universe into existence. (Genesis 1:1-2:3) God’s thoughts, sent forth as words, stretched out the fabric of space-time. God’s thoughts, sent forth as words, created the four fundamental forces: The gravitational force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the strong nuclear force. God’s thoughts, sent forth as words, created the fundamental particles that carry or interact with the fundamental forces, such as photons, up and down quarks, W and Z bosons, neutrinos and the Higgs boson, in order to create matter. God’s words created the much theorized, and yet all elusive “ether” that forms the very fabric of space-time. The ether is information, and this divine thought matrix creates the laws of physics, which govern everything in the material realm. From time to time, however, God thinks thoughts, and speaks words that supersede the normal protocols of the laws of physics, to perform miracles that testify of His providence.
Here is the bottom line: Information from the mind of God, is everything. (Hebrews 11:3) Information from the mind of God is the stage, information from the mind of God is every prop on the stage, and information from the mind of God is everyone, who acts out His divine drama. Information from the mind of God sometimes interacts with information from human minds and these interactions influence energy fields and particles, and produce counterintuitive effects, and these strange effects have led to some very bizarre interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Lights, Camera, Action
God’s thoughts, sent forth as words, configured matter into microscopic cities (cells) that contained molecular factories and molecular machines, which built proteins. The microscopic cities got their instructions on how to operate from tiny packs of information (the DNA) that God put in them. God designed the environment inside the microscopic city to ensure that it formed a context, which extracted meaning from (interpreted) the semantic information contained in DNA. The semantic information directed the building of more proteins, and shuttled them to locations to build a scaffolding on which even more proteins were deposited to form a root structure and an above ground body, in an organism that we call a plant.
Guided by the instruction set, the instruction set, in the plant copied itself, and encased itself in a detachable nodule (a seed). When this seed fell to the ground, and decayed in the soil, it released its information and this information built molecular factories that utilized the nutrients in the soil and the energy from the environment to perfectly replicate the plant.
After God created these special living organisms, He created something even more special. God spoke, and sent forth His thoughts, and the information that comprised His thoughts arranged energy and matter and formed microscopic cities (cells) with molecular factories that replicated, to form bodies of flesh. The fleshly bodies (the animals) interacted with the environment, and with each other in ways that were far more complex than the plants. Like the plants, the animals also possessed a seed that allowed them to replicate themselves.
The animals roamed the earth searching for energy deposits, and they interacted extensively with other animals. Some animals banded together to search for energy deposits, and some animals were” lone rangers”. Unlike the plants, however, the animals didn’t bury their seed in dirt, so that it would release its information and energy and extract nutrients from soil, they planted it in the opposite sex of an animal just like itself. As a male animal planted its seed in a female animal, the energy and information in the male’s seed planted itself in a package of biological soil (the female’s egg) and the energy and information found in both the seed and the soil interacted and built microscopic cities with factories that were driven by molecular machines that replicated themselves (divided) and constructed an animal of the same kind.
God encoded special information (instincts) in animals that gave them the ability to interact with each other and the environment in unique ways to survive, and reproduce. Interactions between instinct, brain, body and environment produced energy flow patterns in the brain and body, giving them each a unique physical soul. The animal soul is not spiritual or eternal, it is a temporal biological device that empowers an animal to interact with the environment and with other animals and with humans, and we call the patterns of interactions, the personality of an animal. Anyone, who does not think that animals have personalities, has not met my cat.
After God released the information that created space-time, energy, matter, nonliving things, plants, and animals, He created the “crown jewel” of the universe. God used the same kind of microscopic cities, molecular machines and factories to create the body of His crown jewel, which is why the crown jewel possesses some animal attributes, but He also set the crown jewel apart from the animals in a very special way. God took dirt from the ground and formed it, and blew His Own breath into it, imparting His own likeness and image into His crown jewel. Then, God gave Adam a helpmate, so he would not be alone. God put Adam to sleep and brought forth Eve from his body, and they were supposed to rule and subdue the whole earth.
God gave man attributes that enabled him to rule over and subdue the earth, and everything in it. Like God, man is a relational being, who can extend love, grace and mercy to others. Man has free will, and he looks inside himself, and examines his own thoughts and actions. Man has a conscience, knows right from wrong, and has a sense of justice. Man is creative. Man has an analytical mind and is capable of abstract thought. Man has language that allows him to communicate complex information, and transmit it across the boundaries of space-time.
Here is, by far, the most important distinction between animals and man: God breathed His breath into man. God is a Spirit, so when He breathed His breath into man’s nostrils, man became a living spirit. A spirit being is an eternal being that never ceases to exist. Plants and animals die, and cease to exist, but when a man’s body dies, his spirit goes to its next destination. And since man is a spirit being, he can communicate and fellowship with God.
Houston, we have a Problem
God planted a garden that had everything that the plants, animals, and man needed. God gave man one law to obey, which was that he could eat anything in the garden, except for the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God warned Adam and told him that if he ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he would surely die. Adam and Eve could have eaten from any tree in the garden, including the Tree of Life, but the crafty serpent temped Eve, and she ate the forbidden fruit, and unfortunately, Adam followed her.
When Adam chose to disobey God’s commandment, he was rejecting God’s sovereign rule, and declaring himself to be an autonomous being. Adam and Eve died spiritually and their union with God was severed and their conscience sprang to life, and they knew good and evil. Knowing that their disobedience was evil, and that they were naked, they made garments from fig leaves to cover their nakedness, so they would not be ashamed and self-condemned.
Adam and Eve had been God conscious, but now they were self-conscious. When God came to visit with Adam and Eve, in the garden, they quickly realized that the garments that they had made for themselves were inadequate, so they hid from God. Graciously, God killed an animal and clothed them with its fur. Death entered the world, and blood covered their sins.
Everything changed that day.
God announced a solution for Adam and Eve’s spiritual death. God proclaimed the Gospel in its seed form. God said Eve’s Seed would crush the head of the serpent, and only suffer a bruised heel. (Genesis 3:15) Even though God had warned them not to sin or they would die, they believed the Gospel, and Adam named Eve,” the mother of all living“, which showed that in spite of their death sentence they believed that they would live to produce offspring.
Adam and Eve’s faith in the Gospel afforded them a limited superficial fellowship with God through sacrifices, and it saved them from the fate of being eternally separated from God. Even though Adam and Eve were “saved” and had limited fellowship with God, they had broken the law, and would have to suffer the earthly consequences of their disobedience.
When Adam rebelled against God and broke His law, God set entropy into motion. Over time, entropy transformed every ordered system into a disordered system. Entropy attacked non-living things, and living things, and slowly brought their highly ordered systems into disorder. Consequently, over time, non-living things decayed and disintegrated, and living things died.
From this point forward, every self-declared sovereign agent (human being) desired to establish his own kingdom, and this brought them into conflict with one another and produced enmity between them, which is the source of most of the conflicts between men that ultimately produces war. This is also the origin of the enmity between man and God. Man wants to rule his own life, and he resents and resists God’s sovereign right to rule over him.
The world was a different place now. Nonliving things decayed. Plants were infected with the enmity that man loosed within the earth, and thorns and thistles began to choke out the plants that man ate to stay alive. Animals were also infected with the enmity that man loosed within the earth, and they began to attack and kill each other, and attack and kill men. Men began to exploit, enslave and kill each other in a competition to establish their own kingdoms. Men began to hate God, because they didn’t want to abdicate their throne and bow to Him.
God saved Adam and Eve from spiritual and eternal death, but they would still have to suffer the consequences of their rebellion, here on the earth. Adam and Eve would have to suffer in a fallen world, and eventually die. God had no choice, He had to keep His word. Adam and Eve had to die, so He drove them out of the Garden of Eden, and He placed guards around the Tree of Life, in order to prevent them from defying Him and eating its fruit and living forever.
A Sad, Sad World
Adam and Eve now lived in a world ruled by entropy, enmity, and death. Work, conflict, pain, suffering, sorrow, sickness and death was now Adam and Eve’s lot in life. And since we all came from the loins of Adam and Eve, work, conflict, pain, suffering, sorrow, sickness and death is our lot in life too. This is why the Scriptures say the day of our death is better than the day of our birth, because we are born into this fallen world, where we will work, come into conflict with others, experience pain, suffering, sorrow, and get sick and die. (Ecclesiastes 7:1) It’s a sad, sad world, but regrettably, it’s the world our parents (Adam and Eve) chose for us.
Often people, who reject the reality of God, do so on the basis of “the problem of evil“. The argument goes something like this: If there is a God, who is both all-powerful, and all-loving, then why would He allow people to commit horrible crimes against each other, and murder each other in horrific ways, why would He allow horrific accidents, horrific weather events, and horrific diseases to maim people and take their lives? If this God has the power to stop all these horrific things from happening, but He does not, He is not truly all-loving. Or if this God can not stop these horrible things from happening, He is not all-powerful. So, this proves that the Christian God, who is supposedly all-loving, and all-powerful does not actually exist.
This is a very powerful argument. It is a powerful argument, because it is so troubling, and because it affects everyone. No one wants to be in pain. No one wants to suffer. No one wants to grieve. No one wants to get a disease. No one wants to die. Yet, all these things happen to both, believers and unbelievers. It is a very persuasive argument for the unbeliever, because it reenforces his worldview of cosmic, chemical, and biological evolution, where there is no meaning, or purpose behind our existence, only random accidents. It can be troubling for believers too, because we know that God loves us, and His Son shed His blood for us, to take away our sins, and give us eternal life, so why would He allow us to suffer, get sick and die?
A troubling question
I offered a general outline of how God’s thoughts and words created everything, because I wanted to emphasize the fact that He could have thought different thoughts and spoke different words, and by doing so, created us differently and created a different universe.
God could have created us, in a way that ensured that we would never rebel against Him. God could have designed a universe in which we forever lay naked under shade trees, eating fruit, drinking wine and reproducing. God could have designed our lives to be never-ending parties.
Instead, God created us, in a way that pretty much ensured that we would rebel against Him, and that we would live in a sad, sad world full of conflict, pain, suffering, disease and death.
Why?
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