Making room for God in a changing world

Change is not always good. That should be obvious to anyone who has observed Congress for more than a minute, but unfortunately there seems to be a built-in human bias which assumes that we collectively get wiser as time passes.

This optimism bubbles up despite mankind being the race which up till now has given us the charming innovations of slavery, car bombs, and, of course, flying passenger airplanes into occupied skyscrapers. Not to mention — in the last century alone — two world wars, the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the nuclear bomb.

Oh yes, things are going swimmingly.

Mind you, I’m not against progress — I just don’t see much evidence that mankind should be put in charge of it.

Of course, that raises the question of who should, and this is where things get a bit tricky. PETA wants to put animals in the driver’s seat, and based on a recent experiment in New Zealand that put pooches behind the steering wheel, that may be just where they wind up. But of course if animals are in charge, it does raise the question of why they need a group called PEOPLE for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Maybe our pets aren’t really as smart as they look when we dress them up in glasses and varsity sweaters.

And by the way, wouldn’t we all be better off if the PETA folks were to enlist some of their critter friends to start a group called Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People. It does seem like, on the whole, people are subjected to much worse treatment than those cute, cuddly koalas. But that’s another story (see paragraph two of this story for an introductory course).

However, if people are not ethical enough to be in charge, and animals are not smart enough, who does that leave?

Nature? A bit too brutal for most people’s tastes, especially if you’ve ever lived through a good-sized hurricane, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption (RIP, Harry Truman — better known as the stubborn old man of Mount St. Helens).

Machines? Sorry, but I’ve seen the Terminator movies. If you don’t like human mayhem, you won’t like the mechanical version any better.

At this point, it seems like we are running out of options, which brings us to mankind’s leader of last resort — God. I mean if Rodney Dangerfield complained that he doesn’t get any respect, just imagine how God feels.

Creator of the universe? Check. All-powerful? Check. Omniscient? Check. The only chance you have of winning the lottery? Check. Sort of an afterthought for most people, if even thought of at all? Check.

Let’s face it, God gets a bad rap. People figure since he created the universe, he should be saddled with the blame for everything that goes wrong in it. This is the equivalent of me saying that my mom should get the blame for this column because she “created” me. OK, well, yeah, I’m sure a lot of you do blame her, but that’s another story. The point is, she did “create” me in a sense, but she did not equip me with a life where everything would unfold according to her plan.

Neither, from what I can tell, did God.

What, after all, would be the point? If God were going to just create a predictable universe, he could have left everything static and had the same effect. The only reason to create a dynamic universe is because it is interesting to see how things turn out.

 Unfortunately, with people in the mix, things seem to invariably turn out badly — if not at first, then after a hundred or a thousand years. And that seems to be true, even when people have good intentions.

Witness the Founding Fathers, and how their words and intentions have been twisted every which way until after just over 225 years, people in America actually think that our Constitution protects abortion, gay marriage, banning prayer in public places, and demanding that people pay for activities which they find to be morally abhorrent.

I guess that’s progress.

Or at least it’s the human version of progress, which is really just change that hopes for the best. Of course, when you jump out of a plane without a parachute, you can hope that you won’t be hurt when you hit the ground, but you are likely to be severely disappointed.

The spiritual version of progress, on the other hand, is a bit trickier. You can’t just do whatever you feel like and call it good. You have to seek out the good and then do it, whether you feel like it or not.

Whether you do that as a Christian or not is a cultural matter, and that gets us into the muck and mire of human cussedness. Everybody gets to do — and to like — whatever they want. Whether you like Christians or not is your business, but whether you like God or not is God’s business.

Aye, there’s the rub, and may well explain why people these days prefer human chaos to God’s direction. “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools...”

That little gem is from a book called the Bible, a book which our Founding Fathers found indispensable and which our modern culture deems disposable. Well, you pays your money and you makes your choice. Me, I’m sticking with the principles that got us here — the Ten Commandments, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

Weird, huh? Yep, in these modern times, I’m something of an anachronism — but I’d rather be one of those stubborn clingers to the truth than be a chaser after shadows.

I know it’s hard to let God be in charge — but really what choice do we have? Ultimately, if there is a God, we either try to get along with him, or we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves when things start to go south.

And overall, God really seems to do a pretty good job even by our high human standards. He got the Jews out of captivity in Egypt AND Babylon, he led them back from the Diaspora to the promised land of Israel, and he even figured out a way to get the attention of millions of people by allowing the wicked to destroy the perfect.

Do I know for sure that God did any of that? No, haven’t got a clue, but I do know what a mess mankind has made of things for the past hundred years as we have been excising God out of our daily life, our public square and our withering consciences.

So, if I have to put my faith in a power greater than myself — whose majesty is mysterious and whose ways are often unfathomable — I’m willing to do that. The alternative is putting my faith in the people who gave us Kim Jong-Un, Bashar Assad, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler and pet rocks. All in all, I think I am better off with God.