God’s Dilema
We now come square up to what appears to us humans as God’s dilemma. But what confronts reason as an unresolved paradox is surmounted by faith which acts on revealed facts, though often it cannot explain them: and faith is equally assured that what it now sees dimly and with seeming contradictions will yet prove to be the very summit of God’s wisdom, God’s artistry, the highest perfection of God’s creation. A person can only be a person with other persons. We can only be ourselves with our fellows. I-Thou is a different quality of relationship from I-It. God is The Person. He can reveal His glory through other forms of creation. He can only reveal Himself, or be Himself, through selves. Person through persons. But just there arises the problem. A person is only a person by the endowment of self-consciousness, which is freedom, the created spirit made in the image of the Creator Spirit.
When we say that a person is endowed with self-consciousness, which is freedom, what do we mean? Penetrate into a self, God’s self, our self, we find desire. A self desires to please itself, to express itself, and so on. How does God, the primal Self, do that? By the begetting of His Son to be the object of His love, and the Son receiving and returning the love of the Father; and the Spirit of the Father and the Son proceeding forth to express the same love-nature in all creation. But a self can please and express itself in an opposite manner. Others can be for its benefit, not it for others. Self-loving, not self-giving can be its motivation. When we speak of a self-conscious self, we therefore mean a person capable of recognizing the opposites which are the basis of all manifested life, and who has freedom of choice. God, the Original Self, has been fixed in choice through all eternity. His self-life is the love-life of pure self-giving, for God is the Eternal Three loving and serving each other. In that sense we may say that there has been a cross in the heart of God through all eternity, for He has eternally died to the possibility of being a self-loving self, and all the powers of His selfhood have been poured into self-giving service, in which He finds the consummation of all the desires of self, “His good pleasure which He has purposed in Himself,” so that He is joy, He is peace, because He is love.
Here is the reason that we are persons in a secondary sense. We are persons to contain and manifest The Person. All the universe contains and manifests Him as Person. But, being created in His own image, we are self-conscious selves; at our center we are spirits, even as he is Spirit, and having the same basic selfhood as God, we are free to make the choice of the two alternatives. Therefore we have to be awakened to an understanding of how fearfully and wonderfully we are made, to be freely, lovingly, intelligently the containers of the One Person in the universe who is the God of self-giving love, Father, Son and Spirit, so that He can express His love-nature through our natures, and we find the delight and entire satisfaction of our created natures in being as he is, living as He lives, loving as He loves. But understanding that we are free selves with our normal capacity of self-love and self-pleasing, it is fearfully possible that a decision in reverse might be made, and a tremendous rupture in the harmony of creation, by some created person choosing to follow the hitherto unknown and unexposed route of self-interest, rejecting the purpose of his creation and making his own self-sufficiency his god.
That is what we know did happen, by the Bible records of the fall of Lucifer and the fall of Adam. In this sense created beings, who are forever in God, and live and move in Him, so far as their created life is concerned, yet live lives which produce the direct opposite of God, all the evil of self-love in place of all the good of self-giving, and defiantly delight to do so. Yet they are still God’s sons, as Satan himself is called (Job 1:6), and God’s offspring (Acts 17:28). They are children of God’s wrath, children of darkness, experiencing the reverse side of love: its hate, its anger, its judgment. And God’s power in them is in reverse, giving them over to their sins, hardening their hearts, fitting them to destruction. Here is the answer to the question, Are evil doers an expression of God? Are evil deeds His doing? Yet in saying this we must still go back to God Himself in the perfection of His wisdom and love. He works all things after the counsel of His own will, Paul says, and that will is the good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself. Only Omnipotence can give freedom, because, being Omnipotence, the freedom is still contained within it. No one less than Almighty God can give freedom, because the free can then escape the reach of the giver. But not with God. Yet it is a paradox. That is why we said that the ultimate plan and purpose of God is beyond human understanding, and demands nothing less than the humble faith of the creature in the Creator. We humans in God’s image are free. We know we are. We act as such. Yet in the ultimate sense our freedom is contained within the established purposes and power of God from eternity, and ultimately all serves Him and is to His glory, good and evil alike. Who can embrace that paradox? Only believers.
