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By MERLIN SHORB
■UMMhannock New*
Gueat Columnist
Is everything that happens ika yUl of God? Sotm*. thing terrible comes to pass, and we conclude it ’ must have been God’s wilL It shouldn’t have happened, but since it did, God willed it!
What we tend to forget is that Cod’d good intentions for the world are not always being carried out by God’s creatures. The words we say, “Thy will be done on earth...” imply that God’s will is hot being deployed on earth “as it is in heaven.”
This determinism in the church that conveniently blames God when things go wrong; this determinism makes a scapegoat out of God, and presents Christians as copping out. Any thinking person will naturally conclude we are shirking responsibility by fabricating a deterministic god on whom we can lay the blame for our own negligence.
Fortunately, this deterministic god is not the Lord of the Bible. The Bible pictures God’s plans as being resisted, and actually rejected, by God’s creatures. It is true that God’s ultimate plans for human history cannot be thwarted. But it is also true that people can abort “God’s purpose for themselves.” (Luke 7)
This is a rock-bottom distinction... essential for any fruitful insight into the will of God. It is comforting to know that finite creatures as we cannot throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of the universe. But it is just
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