God Did Not Create You

Try to stand aside from all preconceptions about God and spiritual matters. Then ask yourself: How did I get here?

The obvious, unambiguous answer is that your mother gave birth to you. And therein lies an incredible, staggering mystery.

We all are unfortunately comfortable with such claims as, “God made me this way” or “God knew what he was doing when he made me this way” or “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Or statements such as these that I copied directly from online Christian web pages:

“Give thanks to God for whatever happens in life. Nothing is a mistake.”

“God doesn’t make mistakes! No one is ‘born gay.’”

“I’m OK with the way God made me.”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“Everyone is made just how they were meant to be made.”

[A parent speaking to a child born without arms or legs] “God doesn’t make mistakes.”

[A parent speaking of a child born with a severe disability] “This is who God created her to be.”

The conundrum

The foregoing statements reveal a profound misunderstanding of God that for the most part pervades our entire culture, for God had nothing to do with it!

The same holds true for extremely talented, genius, creative, beautiful people: They are not that way because God made them that way. Whether born with what society considers defects or what society labels as perfection, kids are that way because of their parents’ genes! God didn’t make them—their parents made them.

For starters: God does not intend for people to suffer pain or sickness or deformity or disability of any kind. That is merely a subtopic of the so-called “problem of evil” that queries why, if God is good, bad things happen. The biblical record shouts from the very beginning that God is the source of all that is good and is not the author of evil and pain. Most evil happens because of choices made by human beings (as well as evil spiritual minions with whom humans, knowingly or unknowingly, hobnob and cooperate).

God created the universe so that it conforms with highly complex physical laws (thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, gravity, relativity, laws of motion, etc.). Most things that humans experience on this planet result from the working out of basic laws of physics and chemistry (and psychology, biochemistry, etc.). The man who was killed in a collision a few miles from my house the other month was not killed because “God called him home,” or because “God needed him more than his family did,” or because it was “his time to go,” etc. He was killed because that elderly woman ran a stop sign and he happened to be in front of her.

I am NOT espousing a Deistic view of God (i.e., that he wound up the universe like a child’s toy and then stepped back, avoiding any interaction). That is in no way the biblical picture, nor the experience of people who for centuries have known and interacted with God. God is incredibly active in the affairs of human beings. But so are the laws of physics. According to Genesis (and to Revelation), God’s intention from the beginning was for people to run things on this planet. God “stepped back” only in the sense that he said, “OK, Kiddos, let’s see what you can do with this place. I’m around all the time, so you can consult me whenever you want, but I’m excited to see what you will create. After all, I made you to be very much like myself—creative, adventurous, completely free, and with great spiritual power. You’re in charge.”

But we humans blew it, and evil entered the world, and it’s not been a pretty picture ever since. But God is still around! He still does stuff! Yet to a large degree he’s continuing to defer to human choices. That was his original intent. If an evil is to be prevented, for the most part it will happen because a human intervenes either physically or spiritually—for humans have enormous spiritual authority and power. That’s how God created us. And when we are reconciled to God through the salvation that is in Jesus, we have access to an immeasurably robust “arsenal,” if you will. But most of the time nothing happens unless/until a human accesses that spiritual power (e.g., through prayer).

This God is bigger

You see, the God I’m describing is bigger than the one most people acknowledge who knows everything, does everything, plans everything, etc. It takes a much bigger God, as it were, to create beings who are SO much like him that they are totally free, they are incredibly creative, they can even come up with stuff that he hadn’t thought of!

Similarly, MUCH bigger than the traditional god who is claimed to have “created” each of us is the majestic, brilliant God who was clever enough to make free, creative beings who themselves would be the source of creating other free, creative beings. Do you see that that God is immeasurably greater than the traditional deity? He made us so that we create new life! How jaw-dropping is that?! This idea in no way downplays or takes away from the glory of our Lord. Just the opposite. Every time a new child is born, we can only marvel at God’s infinite wisdom and grace and creativity in giving to his creatures near-god-like abilities to produce other near-god-like creatures. Astoundingly inventive and cool!

The implications

This understanding has far-reaching implications that are inextricable from this present eons-long eclipse. God’s creatures continue to produce more near-god-like human creatures—but, for the time being, within a matrix of darkness and evil that is held at bay only tenuously by the efforts of those humans who love the Light. And so the pain, the sickness, the genetic errors, the hatred, the violence, the suffering continue until the Day when our Lord will announce, “Enough!”

In the meantime let no one say that their disability or illness, their loved one’s death, their economic calamity, is simply “God’s will.” That is an affront to God. Your God wants joy and perfection for you and for all.

The fix

Even though God tends to directly intervene in the affairs of humans only when his children say it should be so, thus appearing to let chaos and calamity reign unchecked, he has done something—the “Deeper Magic” that powers of evil can’t comprehend—that is so far beyond the imaginings of humans and angels that all his creatures can only watch in humble amazement and adoration. He has borne all evil, all suffering, all darkness within himself through the death on a Roman cross of Yeshua the Messiah. The Lamb of God has taken away the sin of the world! He has promised, he has guaranteed, through measureless pain to himself, that all his creatures who want to do so will be able to look back on the mortal phase of their lives and proclaim, “No matter the intense suffering I experienced in that baneful life, I AM THANKFUL that I was born, even into that dark world; for the joy I now know, and will know forever, overwhelms that season of pain as the oceans overwhelm a live coal tossed into them.”