June 2, 2010
The Humble God
The key to becoming like God is to be righteous. We become more righteous by becoming more right. The best way to become more right is for someone with all the information in existence (God) to guide us. We can only accept that guidance if we are willing to be contrastive, otherwise known as humility. But if the key to righteousness is humility, and God is completely righteous, then is God humble? Does God think contrastively? I say yes.
The Right plan
I believe that our entire history on this planet is the process of God contrastively proving that His plan for our righteous is the correct one.
God’s specific plan for our righteousness is called “salvation”. It is the plan that He has had from the beginning, and its something that we will discuss in detail in a future post.
Do-it-yourself righteousness?
God’s plan is the right plan (because He’s God after all), but it’s not the only plan. As we’ve seen in the last couple of posts, it is theoretically possible to become completely righteous by using contrastive thinking to get rid of all our wrong thoughts, and allow God to give us the right information to replace the wrong ones. Then as long as we choose to only do and say what God tells us for the rest of our lives, we could use our complete knowledge of righteousness to be completely just, and presto! We can walk up to God’s throne and say, “move over, there are two of us now!”
While this is theoretically possible, God knows that it is practically impossible, because only someone with a nature that is always and completely right and just would always choose to be right and just. And of course man’s nature is NOT right and just.
Right, but not Just
With this correct information about our nature and our inability to always choose righteousness of our own volition, God could have rightly implemented his ultimate plan for us on a unilateral basis right after creation. This would have been right. But it would not have been just.
It would have been unjust not to allow man every reasonable opportunity and situation to take the righteous path of choosing God of his own free will, no matter how improbable.
If God would have unilaterally implemented his plan, man could justly ask, “well God, how do we know that your way was best? If we’d been given the opportunity to do it on our own, how do you know we wouldn’t have chosen you?”
As long as there is even a hypothetical chance that man could choose righteousness outside of His plan, a just God has to allow man that opportunity.
As I said before, our entire history on earth is the story of man experiencing and living out God’s contrastive process. Gaining an understanding of this process will help bring resolution to many of the questions and “mysteries” that many of us have about how and why God does things the way he does.
So far we’ve looked at why God has a contrastive process for our righteousness, next week we’ll examine how He does it.
Related Podcast: How to Think Like God
Remember to subscribe to this blog to receive new posts when they are published
