We read in Scripture of “the works of the Lord”, of His hand doing this and His breath doing that, how He spoke and created the world by the Word, but though this is beautiful to contemplate and easy to understand and relate to forms we see in our experience, does He really produce sound with a mouth, or move tendons and muscle to work His divine hand? I would think not. From all else that the Bible tells us about the pervasive, preeminent “BEing” of God, it seems to me that while His Spirit, writing through the authors of the Bible, tells us of the ways in which He acts upon our world as being similar to our interactions with it, perhaps this is simply a literary aid to our understanding, and not really the most accurate explanation of reality – simply a parable or analogy, if you will. It seems to me more consistent with my understanding of Who and What God is, to say that His DOing is simply an extension of His BEing, not some separate force that operates at some times and not others.
For me, what I do is different from who I am, because unlike God, I am bound by time and space. My eternal soul still must obey the laws of the physical world in which I live, and those laws dictate that when the essence of my being wills something, I must then marshal my physical body to do something to accomplish it. There is a disconnect. But with God, He is not bound by time or space. He is pervasive in all reality, so for Him, doesn’t it make sense that His will would not require some separate action to accomplish? That there would be no disconnect? He told Moses, “I AM”, not “I DO”.
This is a difficult concept – that the will and works of the Lord aren’t so much things that He makes happen, but things that happen as a natural outflow of the very nature of His existence.
If this is the case, how can we try and relate this idea to our own lives? When faced with a moral choice, we must make a decision as to what road to choose, the flesh or the spirit. But if and as we continually practice the presence of God, would it not seem reasonable that as the power of the Holy Spirit grows in us, we would require less and less conscious decision-making and would simply do automatically that which is in line with the being we are becoming? Yes! Sanctification then is realized not so much as the things I do, but the person I am in Christ, when His will in me is no longer something I must choose to accept and act on, but something that is simply the natural outflow of a life that is one with Him. “God in Christ, and Christ in you.”
Phillip Gonzales
1/16/07
