47. How our free choices share in God’s sovereign government
47. HOW OUR FREE CHOICES SHARE IN GOD’S SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENT
If the governor of all things is God and we are not God, doesn’t that reduce us to passivity?
As to the design of government, God governs all things immediately; whereas in its execution He governs some things by means of others. . . .
It is a greater perfection for a thing to be good in itself and also the cause of goodness in others, than only to be good in itself. Therefore God so governs things that He makes some of them to be causes of others in government, as a master who not only imparts knowledge to his pupils but gives also the faculty of teaching others. . . .
If God governed alone, things would be deprived of the perfection of causality (I,103,6).
God does not micromanage. He exalts His subordinates, as a good parent does to his children, a good CEO to his middle management and a good President to his cabinet. Like a good teacher, He teaches His students to teach themselves and each other.
Therefore divine grace exalts, perfects, and uses human beings and human nature rather than demeaning it, rivaling it, or ignoring it. It even does this to sub-human nature: the more God has His way in a dog, the doggier it is. The more grace, the more nature, as the more light, the more color. One color may exclude and rival another (or they may blend), but light is no rival to any color. It transcends all color, therefore rivals none, as God transcends all creatures and therefore rivals none.
Therefore we are truly free when God is most active in our lives. We are tempted to think the opposite: that when we are free, we are free from God’s influence; that when we have clearly and consciously chosen freely some good thing (any good thing, physical or moral), God has not done anything. It is exactly the opposite: that is when God is most present in us. Our divine destiny and our human freedom, our conformity to God and our liberty from idolatry and addiction, are two sides of the same life, just as the destiny of the plot and the free will of the characters are two sides of the same story in every good story ever told.
Why is this? Because God governs by reason and love, not by force; by gentle persuasion and winsome love. When Elijah met Him, He was not in the fire or the earthquake or the hurricane, but in the still, small voice. We meet Him there too. (That’s why He put that story in His book for us.)
The closest pre-Christian thinking ever came to this remarkable and revolutionary idea is probably the Tao Te Ching. (See Christ the Eternal Tao by Hiermonk Damascine.) God, like the nature He created, acts most powerfully when He is most invisible.