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
What is the significance of 2 Chronicles 7:12–14?
The Lord says to Solomon, “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will…
Was Jesus Really Human Like the Rest of Us?
Did Jesus really live as a human like you and I do? Or did he walk around with special divine powers that we don’t have? In the previous post, I introduced the question: How was God both fully God and fully man? I explained the classical model of the Incarnation which views the incarnate Jesus…
How do you respond to Genesis 16:12?
The Lord describes Ishmael as “…a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him.” According to most Old Testament scholars the Lord is describing Ishmael’s descendants as much as he is describing Ishmael himself. The Lord foresaw that the nation which would descend from Ishmael (cf. 21:18) would…
What To Do With the Violent God of the Old Testament
For eight years Greg has been researching for and writing the book entitled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. In it he confronts the commonly held idea that the Old Testament depictions of God behaving violently should be held alongside of and equal to the God revealed through Jesus dying on the cross. But if the Old Testament…
How can prayer change God’s mind?
You’ve argued that since God is all-good, he’s always doing the most he can do in every situation to bring about good. But you have also argued that prayer can change God’s mind. How are these two beliefs compatible?
Did Jesus Have Two Minds?
As I laid out in the previous post, I believe Jesus is fully God and fully human. The question is: How is this possible? How do we talk about the way that Jesus was fully God and fully man? The Creed of Chalcedon (451) tries to answer the question this way: We, then, following the…