The God of the Bible speaks (Genesis 1, John 1). That is a truth that deserves volumes of books of explanation. I’m going to give it a few sentences. In short, what that means is that God communicates, and who he is, that is, he himself, is his message. There could be no better message because there is no better reality than the ultimately reality that we call God.
Psalm 139:16 informs us that God not only God speaks; he also writes. David says, “in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
To be clear, Psalm 139:16 is a metaphor. I don’t believe the psalmist meant for us to imagine that God has a literal book of pages and ink on a shelf in a literal heavenly library with my every day written out on it. The point, however, is obvious: Like an author carefully writes out every page of his book, so, too, has God planned out every last moment of our lives, from beginning to end, from first to final breath, and he did it before my first day ever began. Other verses confirm this reality. Consider Isaiah 46:9-10: “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose'” (ESV). God planned the end of the story “from the beginning.”
It is this comparison, the comparison of God to a writer, the great novelist of the universe, if you will, that continues to prove the most helpful to me personally in understanding certain aspects of God’s relationship to his creation than any other paradigm I’ve yet come across.
Could not the paradigm of God as Author assist us in at least some ways to understand how God has “written” his universe?
I will state at the outset that this analogy, like any other, is not perfect. At some point it, too, breaks down. I mean, come on. We’re talking about God. However, that does not mean we don’t labor to create new categories in our minds needed to better understand God and his ways, and that does not mean that analogies are not helpful to create some of those categories. I think of it this way: If reality works in such and such a way within the confines of one paradigm, why can’t it work in a similar way within the confines of another paradigm? Namely, if reality works in a specific way when it comes to the relationship that exists between an author and his piece of writing, why can’t reality work in similar ways when it comes to the relationship that exists between God and his creation? Could not the paradigm of God as Author assist us in at least some ways to understand how God has “written” his universe? I would say Psalm 139:16 is among many other things an invitation for us to consider the idea.
In a series of posts, I’d like to explore this paradigm, the paradigm of God as Author. Each post will examine a specific aspect in which this paradigm might help us better understand God as the sovereign Creator over his creation.
Today I’d like to consider how thinking of God as Author helps us understand the purposefulness of all things. In other words, none of the details of our personal lives or of the greater story of history as a whole is a fluke, a whim, or an unnecessary extra. First, let’s examine an author’s purposefulness when he writes the details of his story, and then we’ll compare that to God’s purposefulness in writing every last detail of the story called the history of the universe.
Authors, good ones anyway, abide by a principle known as Chekhov’s gun. First described by Anton Chekhov in several of his letters, a paraphrased version of the rule goes like this: If there’s a gun hanging over the fireplace at the beginning of a story, it had better go off before the story is over. The point is that no detail in a story should be superfluous. Each one should add to the depth and significance of the overall story in a meaningful way, even if its purpose is not obvious at the beginning. All meaningless details must go. If it’s in the story, it must be there intentionally. The greatest stories abide by this principle down to what’s hanging over the fireplace. And we as readers love to reach the end of a good tale and then walk back through the story line to make such connections.
This principle demands that the author consider each and every detail and choose them all with explicit purpose. Good writing, you might say, is in the details. Lazy writing with meaningless details thrown in all wily-nily will not satisfy the reader. We as readers long to see how all the pieces fit together, and all that’s random and meaningless will only cause confusion and frustration. Who doesn’t love getting to the end of an episode of Columbo and finally seeing how the good detective put all the seemingly insignificant details together to bust the bad guy? And isn’t our frustration at the end of any given episode always in proportion to the number of loose ends?
The illusion of random occurrence and meaninglessness will be rolled back, and we’ll finally see that all details were carefully planned with a specific purpose.
I would argue this desire for purposefulness in every last detail is in our very makeup as human beings. Good human authors write this way precisely because we were created in God’s image and God writes history this way. Human authors reflect the ultimate, divine Author in the way we write.
When it comes to reading the story of the history of the universe, sure, we might have to slog through countless chapters in order to understand the significance of any given detail, but someday we’ll get it. The illusion of random occurrence and meaninglessness will be rolled back, and we’ll finally see that all details were carefully planned with a specific purpose. That goes for sparrows (not one of which falls to the ground apart from the Father), and it goes for human beings (some of whom God created for honor and some of whom he created for dishonor). It’s true for the greater history of mankind as well as for our own personal histories.
For example, it took thousands of years for the full significance of the first animal sacrifice ever made in Genesis 3 to become clear to readers of human history. It’s easy to skip right over it. All it says is “And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” That’s it. But when we read that verse in light of the entire animal sacrificial system instituted by Moses thousands of years later and even more so in light of the life and death of Jesus Christ thousands of years after that whereby in the case of Moses one animal dies for the sins of the Jewish people and in the case of Jesus one man dies in place of all God’s people globally, that seemingly superfluous detail that God took an animal, killed it, and used its hide to cover Adam and Eve takes on incredible new meaning. There in the Garden of Eden God was foreshadowing both the Mosaic Law and ultimately the sacrificial death of Jesus to cover the sins of sinners the world over.
That’s an example on a global scale. God does the same in the case of the stories of individuals. For example, when I was in high school, randomly, it seemed, I developed an acute interest in languages, and as a result I wanted to take a foreign language in high school. However, at the time the only language my high school offered was Spanish, so for me, Spanish it was. I took four years of it. Where would this take me? Well, to make a very long story very short, eventually my love for language took me to Spain where I met a certain Spaniard who eventually became my wife. Would I have chosen French or German or Chinese had my high school offered them? Maybe. I knew they had offered other foreign languages at my high school in the past. But the seemingly random and nonconsequential fact that my high school only offered Spanish the years I attended set me down a path that led me to the woman with whom by God’s good grace I’ll spend the rest of my life.
Every last detail of your life is like that. Every one. Like, none excluded. The good, the bad, the highs, the lows, all the beauty, and all the ugliness was penned by the Master Author before you were ever born. And every detail—from every last freckle to every last teardrop you’ve ever shed—is significant because God is a good author. One day, they will all fit together to form a mind-numbingly beautiful whole.
I want to make three caveats here.
One, I don’t mean to say that God is essentially pragmatic in assigning the meaning and usefulness of the details he includes in his story of the universe. That is, I don’t think ultimately all details will have been included in God’s narrative so that some other specific event would happen. For example, beauty is not pragmatic, and God is very much about aesthetics. This means that beautiful lilies that live for a day and die the next are significant in that they reveal in the very short time they exist the creative genius of God and beckon us to trust that the one who cares for them also cares for us. That is a mega-meaningful existence to what may otherwise seem like a load of wasted creativity on God’s part.
This leads to the second caveat. The significance of any given detail will be significant from God’s perspective and not necessarily from ours. His ways (and his estimation of significance) are higher than ours. It should be no surprise to us that because of his seat so far above the universe he’s created, he’s able to appreciate every last tile of the mosaic of history with more clarity and exactness than we ever could from our much lower seats. Even stars that shine in corners of the universe with no human being to ever behold them will nonetheless declare God’s glory by their very being, and again, there’s not much higher a call any created thing could fulfill than that.
Three, out of the details that God wrote for us specifically and that we are able to directly observe, in this life we might never experience the significance them all. Most times we’ll be left wondering. Why did that happen? Probably the true importance of most seemingly random details in our lives will only be seen from the shores of eternity. And that’s true for the details of the greater story of history, too.
There’s much more left to plumb, so stay tuned for future posts in this series as we seek to understand how the paradigm of God as Author might shed insights into how God relates to his great novel we call the universe.
Are there any particular aspects of the paradigm of God as Author that have impacted you? If so, I’d love to hear them in the comments below.