We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Does God Intervene?
Given the vast influence of angelic and human free will, what influence does God have in determining what comes to pass? While God has an important role to play in anticipating and creatively responding to decisions agents make, is God only a responder? Does he have anything to do with what’s going on in creation?
The question is extremely important because Christianity is founded on the assumption that God can and does unilaterally intervene in the affairs of humans. The biblical portrait of God is one who responds to events. He is a God who at times supernaturally intervenes to alter the course of history and of individual lives.
If we start with Jesus as the revelation of God, we can’t avoid concluding that God intervenes in the world. Indeed Jesus is the supreme instance of God intervening in human affairs. In Christ God became human! If that doesn’t constitute supernatural intervention, nothing does!
Christ’s ministry was centered on demonstrating God’s supernatural power in counteracting the tragic effects of the kingdom of darkness. He announced the kingdom of God was at hand and proved it by supernaturally healing and delivering people from demonic oppression. And he taught us to pray that his Father’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” The rest of the biblical narrative concurs with this perspective, for it is woven around miracles that God performed on behalf of his people, often in response to prayer. From the parting of the Red Sea to the miracles of the early church, the Bible witnesses to a miracle-working God.
From a Christ-centered perspective, God’s ability to break into history is the foundation of our confidence in him. If God can part the Red Sea, become a human being, die on a cross and rise from the dead, then we can trust him to intervene and redeem today’s tragic circumstances. Even more fundamentally, we can trust that he will someday vanquish all his foes once and for all, bring this present age to a close, and set up a kingdom of love that will never end. We are confident that things will not always go on as they are precisely because God is not bound to the natural processes.
—Adapted from Is God to Blame? pages 108-109
Photo credit: A.day.in.the.life.of.C via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Free Will, Jesus, Miracles, Open Theism
Related Reading
Did Jesus Instruct Us to Arm Ourselves?
Over the past few posts, I’ve been dealing with the passages that are frequently used to argue how Jesus condoned violence. One of these takes place just after the last supper and just before Jesus and his disciples were going to travel to the Mount of Olives to pray. To prepare his disciples, Jesus tells them;…
Jesus’ Different Kind of Nation
God called Abraham to form a unique nation by which “all peoples of the earth will be blessed.” The unique call of the descendants of Abraham was to become a nation of servant-priests whom God would use to reunite the nations of the world under his loving Lordship. The vision of a reunited humanity is…
The Image of God
Distorted from digma.com Is the image of God you hold in your heart one that attracts or repels you?
How Much of the Future is Settled? How Much is Open? (podcast)
Greg considers the mathematical nature of determinacy. Episode 566 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0566.mp3
Our True Eternal Home
In becoming our sin and bearing the death-consequences of sin, Christ has opened the way for us to participate in the fellowship of the triune God. Because of the cross, we are now free to abide in Christ and to have Christ abide in us (John 15:4-10). The word “abide”(menno) means “to take up residence.”…
Do You Need to Starve a Little?
Sarah (Rosenau) Korf via Compfight Here’s a challenging reflection on Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent by Kurt Willems. He notes that Lent is a season where we choose to starve ourselves of our little idols in order to join Jesus in the desert, and he lists several benefits of this particular kind of…