If God Wrote A Novel
By JOHN YOUNG
Authors strive to give their stories an unexpected twist. Disaster is averted at the last moment, the least likely suspect turns out to be the murderer, there is a surprise solution to the locked room mystery. O. Henry is famous for specializing in short stories with a twist at the end.
It’s not irreverent to suggest that if God wrote a novel, it would have a surprise conclusion. In a sense God has written a drama that is full of surprises, namely, the drama of the created world. It contains very surprising characters and some of them do very surprising things.
God has created beings that are purely spiritual, like Himself, and He has also created things that are purely material, such as stones. But He has also made creatures that are part spiritual and part material: human beings. And He has endowed them with free will, which leads them to do strange and unexpected things.
Man is the crown of (material) creation, but acts like the clown of creation. Chesterton put it well, in his characteristic manner, when he called man the only wild animal.
God has made a corruptible world which will become incorruptible and will last for all eternity. The death of each human being is an end and also a beginning, for it leads to everlasting existence. Heresy leads to truth as the matter is more fully investigated, which should make us moderately optimistic about the future.
The Divine paradoxes are seen more clearly if we look at what God has done in regard to human sin. Because sin is an offense against an Infinite Being it might seem that it could never be atoned for. Our actions are necessarily finite, for we are finite beings, so we can’t completely make up for our sins.
God could have chosen to accept such poor reparation as we are capable of. But He didn’t. He is infinitely merciful but also infinitely just, and He required complete satisfaction for the billions of sins committed by the human race. How could this be achieved?
Since man had sinned it should be man who would make reparation. But a finite being can’t do an infinite act, and such an act was necessary for complete reparation to be made for human sin. So God did the one thing that could achieve this: He became man.
God the Son became man and died on the cross to make satisfaction for all the sins of the human race from Adam till the end of the world. It was man who made this reparation, for Christ is truly man; but the reparation had infinite value because made by an Infinite Person: the second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
That was a surprising twist! But there was another. Sin got into the human race through Satan tempting Adam and Eve. And God brought about our Redemption through a temptation from Satan.
In fact it was through Satan doing what may have seemed to him the supreme insult to God. He entered into Judas, as Scripture tells us, and Judas betrayed Christ, leading to the crucifixion. Satan killed God! Jesus is God and Man, but being a Divine Person all His acts are actions of God. God died on the cross.
Here is a great paradox. Satan brought about the death of God made Man, and that very act freed us from the power of Satan and opened Heaven for us.
Not only did God become man but the circumstances were surprising. He entered our world in an obscure province of the Roman Empire and did nothing spectacular for thirty years, spending His adult life to that point by working as a carpenter.
Then He spent less than three years spreading His Divine message before ascending into Heaven and leaving some chosen followers to spread the message. And the men he chose appeared to be quite unfit for that enormous task. They weren’t scholars and didn’t seem particularly bright.
Admittedly they had an excellent teacher. Arnold Lunn made the dry comment, in answer to people who criticized the Apostles’ lack of education, that being taught by Christ for three years may have been an even better education than three years at Oxford!
If we look at the history of the Church, we see that the paradoxes continue. The divinely revealed religion seems in its many crises to be a weak human thing contending against overwhelming forces. St. Jerome’s comment on the Arian heresy was: “The whole world groaned to find itself Arian.” But the Church won.
Time after time in the course of her history the Church founded by Christ has seemed headed for extinction, or to turn into something else. As Chesterton says the Church has seemed like a sinking ship, but always comes up again with the flag still flying. The paradoxical thing about these crises is that they always lead to a stronger Church.
Again, in periods of great persecution, with numerous martyrs, instead of the Church becoming weaker she becomes stronger. Hence the expression:
“The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.”
Looking at today’s problems in the Church, and seeing how serious they are, it is easy to become pessimistic. Such pessimism is unjustified, as history indicates. However that must not lead to complacency; we are capable of choosing an unhappy end for our own life.
But the Divine story has surprising twists and we can be certain it has a happy ending.
