Letter #101: Living in the Unimaginable

You Asked, I Answer!

Spence!

Did God save the life of Donald Trump?

You have asked a question that cannot be answered by merely mortal man. So you’ve come to the right place!

One of the most powerful tools we have in addressing theological questions is humility. What my old pal Socrates used to call, “Knowing what we don’t know.” Which is a lot, it turns out. Who will enter the kingdom? When comes the end of days? And, perhaps most puzzling, why do people who have no idea of the answers to these questions nonetheless answer them with such fervent conviction?

To put this in a broader perspective, the imagination of man simply cannot comprehend what reality looks like to its creator. God, we are reliably told, lives in eternity and eternity is not a long time, it’s all time altogether all at once. This means that questions of cause and effect have no meaning there. And that means that much of human experience does not apply.

For example, you can ask: Do we have free will? And I can answer: yes, we certainly do. I decide to go to the movies and I go. I choose good over evil and, if my heart is proof against temptation, I do as I choose. Fine. But do we have free will from God’s perspective? In eternity, where causation is not in effect, the question is meaningless.

Likewise with the question of Trump turning his head at the exact split millisecond the bullet reached the place where his head would have been. We have no idea what that moment looks like to God except to say it is part of an unimaginable tapestry in which all that ever was and ever will be ever is.

But here are two things we can say from our human perspective. One, if God intended Trump to be dead, he’d be dead. And two, since Trump is not dead, he should ask himself: What does God want me to do with this moment?

From our perspective, there are many things in life that appear random. Who our parents are, where they live, how they treat us, whether we are bullied or come down with a disease, and so on. To ask ourselves What does God want me to do with these events? is to trust to an eternal design shrouded in mystery and so forge whatever connection with that design we can.

In one sense, the claim of Jesus Christ is that he translates eternity into time. He instructs us how to connect one to the other. Many of his instructions are counter instinctual. But the joy we experience over time when we follow them is evidence that they come from a highly placed and not entirely anonymous source. And it also shows us this: while God’s eternal design may be unimaginable, its beauty may be unimaginable as well.

Love, Dad