Thursday, March 2, 2023

God the Maintainer

 Isaiah 45:7 King James Version

7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

People debate whether or not "evil" here is legitimate. For that subject, "evil" until modern times did not mean wickedness but calamity or disaster. A man that brings disaster is an evil man is the correct way to read any instance of "evil" in the Bible. Evil is not necessarily sin. But that's not what I care about now about the verse. 

Rather, notice for the bad things, darkness and evil, are created instantly by God, 

While light and peace are made and formed by God, a slower, deliberate process. 

When God created the heavens and the earth instantly in Genesis 1:1 and the earth was without form and void, it was darkness. It took God saying and forming the words "Let there be light" in order to bring light. Good things come from a slow process.

I'm bad at maintaining things. I'm a set-it-and-forget-it kind of guy. I aim to do everything perfect for that one big impact and splash, and then just go on with my life and never checking up on things after that, and then I get surprised when things go downhill.

In these recent years, I have grown to appreciate God being a Father that maintains things and is very active today as He was in the ages when the Bible was written and before that.

My biological dad is the opposite of me. He is a great maintainer of things. He's always repairing, always doing preventative maintenance of cars, house, relationships, and so on, while I actively avoid doing that.

Many people expect God to be a set-it-and-forget-it type God, a deistic God. Deism says that God wound up the universe like a clock in the very beginning, and never intervenes anymore, never maintains things. This is often called "practical atheism", God exists, but we live like He doesn't do anything.

Many Christians would deny that they are deists, and maybe in some aspects they aren't, but that belief shows up in how they treat, say, God's word today, thinking God no more has anything to do with its transmission, or the miraculous workings of God, or how awry current events, politics, and rumors of wars, and assume God isn't working at all today.

God is a Father and He maintains in the present, a slow process, like a husbandman growing fruit, vines, and trees.

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