An Exercise in “Perhaps”

God has revealed Himself to us in Scripture, but He has not revealed every detail of His sovereign plan. This is why we must be careful in pronouncing a specific purpose behind His actions. As we’ve discussed in a previous post, sometimes He gives us the “why” in Scripture, but many times in our lives we are left to wonder. And as implied in another post, we are best advised to couch our ideas about God’s intentions in specific events with “perhaps.”

What follows is an exercise in speculation. What I am about to propose, I have absolutely no evidence for. In other words, I could be completely wrong. But that’s why I’m starting with “perhaps.”

Before we begin, though, let’s build up to our moment of speculation with some things we do know.

Throughout Scripture, God uses created things to explain higher truths. He uses the physical to illuminate the spiritual. Whether it be through similes, metaphors, analogies, parables, or anthropomorphisms, God helps our finite brains grasp truths about His infinite self through things that we are familiar with. Bread, water, light, sheep, shepherds, trees, birds, crops, weeds, wages, invitations, the justice system, money--these are just the examples off the top of my head that God uses in the Bible to help us understand realities about ourselves, Himself, and our relationship to Him.

And this practice is often lauded and looked to as an example of how we ourselves can teach—with illustrations that people will understand. Look at what Jesus did, people will say. He stepped into our world, and used the things that were there to “speak our language.”

This idea isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it implies a sort of reactionary element of Jesus’ ministry and even of God’s working in the Old Testament, i.e. Jesus came to earth and looked around for something that would be a good illustration of what He was wanting to communicate, or God found something that the prophets would understand and decided to use it in His revelation to them.

But God is not reactionary. He is all-knowing and is outside of time.

Now that we’ve got all of that laid out, let’s get to our point of speculation…

Perhaps part of God’s intention in creating these things in the first place was to provide a means of revealing to us truths about His character and His realm.

What if God created eagles to show us how he gently cares for His children? (see Deut. 32:11)

What if God created sheep not only to provide wool for clothing and blankets (and in some cases meat) but also so that we would have an understanding of what total dependency (and stupidity) look like and would thus recognize how much we are dependent and stupid and how much we need a good, kind Shepherd? (see Psalm 23; John 10)

What if God created fish not only to provide food but also to give us a frame of reference for what it means to draw others toward the kingdom of God? (see Matt. 4:19)

What if God created light so that we would know there was something better than darkness? (see John 12:46)

And--this one might be harder to swallow--what if God allowed slavery to exist partly so that we would see the horror of bondage and recognize our terrible plight and the beauty of our Redeemer? (see Titus 3:3-7; Hebrews 2:14-15; Romans 8:15)

Or what if he designed infants to need milk before solid food so that we could see that new believers need patient discipling? (see 1 Cor. 3:2; Heb. 5:12-13; 1 Pet. 2:2)

Then, instead of thinking of Jesus as stepping into our world and using what happened to be there, it’s more like Jesus entered into His world and revealed Himself through His creation that He had put there all along.

Al Mohler in his new book, The Prayer that Turns the World Upside Down, points to Moses’s words in Deuteronomy 8:3 to show “that God designed physical needs [e.g. in this case, hunger] to point to our deeper spiritual needs. Our need for daily physical sustenance is a faint echo of our daily need of spiritual sustenance and satisfaction from God” (p. 117). This verse is one of the cases where God does reveal the “why”:

“He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” (Deut. 8:3, NIV)

If God uses the physical to point to the spiritual, then perhaps He conceived creation itself with this purpose in mind. 

Again, these “what ifs” are pure speculation. I do not know the mind of God apart from what He has revealed in His Word. But I do know that He is sovereign, creative, and love itself. So if He did design and create parts of this world for the “future” purpose of using them to demonstrate His goodness and His love for us, I wouldn’t in the least be surprised.

Source: Mohler, R. Albert, Jr. The Prayer that Turns the World Upside Down: The Lord’s Prayer as a Manifesto for Revolution, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2018.