Q: Is God’s job harder than it used to be?
My wife Jeanne is a prophet. She hears from God very clearly and easily. But she usually defers to me for the more complex theological explanations for phenomena that she just naturally detects. She asked me recently, "Is God's job harder than it used to be? I seem to feel a lag when I pray… The responses to my prayers take longer…"
The typical fundamentalist answer is, "Of course not! 'God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.' 'With God nothing is impossible…'" And they would continue quoting scriptures until you got tired and went away.
My immediate answer was, "How could it not be?"
This is closely related the the basic theological problem of
Theodicy: 'How can a good and loving (by definition) God allow evil to exist. There's a lot we DO NOT know, but let's look at a few of the facts that we DO know.
God created the universe, established the laws governing the physical processes, and lets them run the way they are supposed to run. You do NOT blame God if you fall when you step off a cliff! Remember: Gravity - It's not just a good idea... It's the law!
God created the universe through the operation of the Holy Spirit. There are two aspects of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit
Theos is the aspect of the Holy Spirit that operates through the spirit of the believer. When we say that 'God lives within us' we are speaking of the Holy Spirit
Theos. The Holy Spirit
Materia is that sustaining controlling aspect of God’s Spirit that is in every particle of Creation. The 'amount' of Holy Spirit has not changed. The Holy Spirit is as infinite as God. The Holy Spirit
Materia is still present in every quantum particle or we wouldn't be here!
We don't usually think this way, but: There is no direct relation between bad
events and
blessings. Blessings are related to communication and relationship with God. Blessings are related to the infinite nature of God, the Holy Spirit Theos, and the Holy Spirit Materia.
Events, however, that's a different situation entirely.
At some time God also created the angels. After Man was created, angels were assigned functions as God's agent to accomplish His purposes on the Earth. Remember this: Angels were
created, they are
not born. There are still the same number now as there were when they were created.
In prehistoric times, there were only a few million people on the Earth. At the time of Christ, there may have been 250 million people on the whole planet. NOW there are 7 or 8 BILLION people on the Earth.
Assume at some point that the ratio Angels to People was 1 to 1 (perhaps around the time of Christ). The ratio now would be 1 to 50! Whatever the original number was, it is 1/50, or 2%, of that ratio now!
In contrast to relationship with God, which is related to the Holy Spirit,
events may be substantially related to angel to person ratio. In other words, management of events may be related to the
workload of angels!
This is the reason for the establishment of the Church, the gradual progression of revelation and theological insight, and the increased responsibility of the individual believer. (Christians know far more about God than Old Testament believers did and are also charged with more individual responsibility.) Unlike angel-to-person ratio, as the population increases, there is no reason that the Christian-to-population ratio can’t stay the same. (Although, at the present time, the ratio seems to be rapidly getting worse.)
If every Christian does not recognize all of the revelations of God’s power and provision, then the work just won’t get done.
