He closed His eyes and thought back to the Creation; the urge to produce beauty, to bring order from chaos and to allow other sentient beings to experience relationship. Such a mammoth task, even if you were God; made a little easier by His ability to stand outside time as well as space and to focus His gaze anywhere and any time He chose; but still, something He was immensely proud of and had always wanted others to share in.
How many times had He played out the free will experiment, breathing more of His own likeness into a dimly sentient part of His creation and watching as it developed emotions, the capacity to experience awe and wonder, and the ability to recognise and choose between moral options? So many inhabited worlds, so many paths, such delight in those societies which chose of their own free will to accept His Lordship over their lives and focus their attention on caring for their portion of His creation.
One in particular made Him smile; the angels. Created with an ethereal beauty and as able to exercise free will as any other part of His created order; yet choosing to remain utterly devoted to the Creator and to enjoy free and open communion with Him. He used them, yes; but with their full agreement. As messengers, they could enter His worlds and communicate with the inhabitants, calling their attention to the nature of God and encouraging them to persist in their ways of faithfulness.
So what had gone wrong in this little corner of the universe, Earth, third rock from the Sun? It didn’t help that one of the very few angels who had chosen to exercise his free will in opposition to God had chosen this world as home. But that wasn’t enough to explain the persistent savagery that threatened this world. So many people whose lives were predominantly characterised by quiet loving service; yet every one of them had a natural inclination to selfishness and cruelty, not found in any other of His worlds. Had He missed something in their character development? Was it simply too big an ask to choose an aggressive omnivore to bear His likeness? Their own philosophers looked around them and saw ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’, and used that as a kind of self-justification for their unsavoury inclinations; but it didn’t have to be that way.
In all of His other carbon-based worlds, the taking of another life to fuel your own was a sacred rite, exercised with moderation. Why only here was there so much wanton violence? And quite apart from the obvious physical violence, there was a plethora of more subtle forms: emotional violence, subjugation and a multiplicity of modes of manipulation. At heart it amounted to an inherent assumption that each person had a right to bend others to their will, rather than to seek the common good. In its most benevolent form this led to well-intentioned but poorly executed humanitarianism; at its most malevolent, to despotism.
How many times had He played out the free will experiment, breathing more of His own likeness into a dimly sentient part of His creation and watching as it developed emotions, the capacity to experience awe and wonder, and the ability to recognise and choose between moral options? So many inhabited worlds, so many paths, such delight in those societies which chose of their own free will to accept His Lordship over their lives and focus their attention on caring for their portion of His creation.
One in particular made Him smile; the angels. Created with an ethereal beauty and as able to exercise free will as any other part of His created order; yet choosing to remain utterly devoted to the Creator and to enjoy free and open communion with Him. He used them, yes; but with their full agreement. As messengers, they could enter His worlds and communicate with the inhabitants, calling their attention to the nature of God and encouraging them to persist in their ways of faithfulness.
So what had gone wrong in this little corner of the universe, Earth, third rock from the Sun? It didn’t help that one of the very few angels who had chosen to exercise his free will in opposition to God had chosen this world as home. But that wasn’t enough to explain the persistent savagery that threatened this world. So many people whose lives were predominantly characterised by quiet loving service; yet every one of them had a natural inclination to selfishness and cruelty, not found in any other of His worlds. Had He missed something in their character development? Was it simply too big an ask to choose an aggressive omnivore to bear His likeness? Their own philosophers looked around them and saw ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’, and used that as a kind of self-justification for their unsavoury inclinations; but it didn’t have to be that way.
In all of His other carbon-based worlds, the taking of another life to fuel your own was a sacred rite, exercised with moderation. Why only here was there so much wanton violence? And quite apart from the obvious physical violence, there was a plethora of more subtle forms: emotional violence, subjugation and a multiplicity of modes of manipulation. At heart it amounted to an inherent assumption that each person had a right to bend others to their will, rather than to seek the common good. In its most benevolent form this led to well-intentioned but poorly executed humanitarianism; at its most malevolent, to despotism.