The God Who Gambles

...it is true that men are great at creation and manipulation. God, alas, is on another level.

I have been feeling a longing to move house of late. I have taken time to study the current world situation and that of my immediate environment. And my conclusion is always pretty much the same - the time to move is near. However, after much thought and I'll admit, a little prayer, I couldn't but feel a sense of déjà vu. I feel like I'm being mugged. Again.

We all have our illusions of freedom, a faith in our capacity to do what we want at any time we want with results that falls in line with our predictions. But the end game is always the same, isn't it? For many of us striving to make our lives more convenient, chasing riches, material wealth or whatever you may call it, all to improve our lot, we have noticed that more money doesn't change our inner circumstances. Being rich means you have more stuff, but if you are a paranoid person before you got rich, you stay paranoid. If you have the habit of lying before you became rich, that won't change. If you have a problem with pornography before, that definitely stays with you. Even self-help devotees know the pain of conquering a habit for another similar one to pop out and stick to you like a tick. Habits you thought you've conquered can rear its ugly head when you least suspect. This is the soap opera called life, where nothing is certain; a stage where you can count few things as foregone conclusions.

Whenever we move our life's chess pieces around on our side of the board, there is always another movement, not only on the other side of the board but on our own side as well. Which means as we manoeuvre our life situations, other hand moves another piece simultaneously in our lives as well. You may see this as some kind of double play, which isn't fair by most standards. But when it comes to things unseen, otherwise called "the spiritual" by spiritual people, that is how the game is played.

Man thinks his ability to run around and manipulate situations puts him at the apex of this world. This is technically true. Atheists and humanists are right. Humans are on a god level. We can create, change and manipulate. A quick look at what humans have achieved in the last hundred years testifies to this.  The best of us are good at planning, taking all variables into account and implementing actions. But when it matters most, the end results are not always up to us.

So it is true that men are great at creation and manipulation. God, alas, is on another level.

The book of Job shows God in one of His most carefree mood, showing the ability to switch things up at a whim and the audacity to back it up in the face of criticism. Despite my description, the book of Job can't be described as comforting. In the hard light of facts, it reveals a God who loves a gamble, using the lives of people at His disposal as chips while hedging his bets. Still, it shows a side of the God that is sovereign. Yes, that is the word. Sovereign. This "sovereign" tendency is not a quality that is the most pleasant to deal with. This is because this aspect of God operates outside of all influences, on earth and in heaven.

I aim to take a cursory look at the book of Job in the forthcoming months, at least for the rest of this year. My posts on this will be a bit sporadic (at least once a month). I aim to try, by God's help, to pick out little pockets of patterns that exist under this "sovereign" mannerism. But that is not all. The Job's interaction with people and God during his unfortunate calamity is also of interest to me. I hope to learn one or two things from it by using this book as a template. So yeah, let's see what we've got here.

** Photo used is "Creation" by raphaelstrada and made available under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license