Will Of God 8 – Fallen
The whole creation has been groaning in travail (Romans 8:22).
God willed the universe – and you and me – into being. But something is out of kilter. The world’s great beauty is twisted. The glory of the human body is perverted into something tawdry; brilliant minds hack into computers instead of curing cancer; lovely species are snuffed out by machinery belching smoke. Since Cain and Abel, brothers, and then nations, find reasons to stomp on and kill each other instead of befriending and helping each other.
The flawedness isn’t just out there: it’s in me, in all of us. Dark impulses muddy our souls, and even when we strive to do good we exhibit a creepy self-righteousness. The problem with the world isn’t merely the sum total of individual mistakes: whole systems, governments, corporations, and societies become riddled with ungodliness. History hasn’t always been a chronicle of moral progress.
Theologians describe our world as “fallen.” God made everything good, but we twist and ruin it; we want to be God instead of letting God be God. We mimic Adam and Eve, and find ourselves outside the garden God intended for us (Genesis 3). Evil and the tragic vaunt themselves.
The first Christians were accused of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6) – which is what the world needs. God’s will isn’t just more or an improved version of what we find in our society. God’s will is subversive. We should expect preachers to “step on our toes.” We should develop a taste for the Church that loves enough to provide correction: “Why should men love the Church? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget. She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft. She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts” (T.S. Eliot). God’s will usually is detectable as going against the grain of our culture.
Without submitting to the scalpel of God’s surgical procedures, coping with the pain and working through convalescence to a renewed self, and even being drawn to the cross, we remain stuck in the paralysis of the status quo, and we will never know God’s will.