are still sinners, of course, but that is all paid for. We are like compulsive gamblers, and God has agreed to pay all our gambling debts, content that we are having fun. Would this be eternal blessedness, paradise? It sounds to me to be more like this world, and what we have made of it. Or maybe just hell on earth. Sheep may safely graze, and wolves may safely prey on them. The lion lies down with the lamb and eats it for lunch. The infant plays over the viper’s hole and is bitten. The Father takes no notice; his children make of each other a living torment, and the God of love says that all is well. I will not labour this point, but simply recall what we are really promised:
The wolf lives with the lamb, the panther lies down with the kid, calf and lion cub feed together with a little boy to lead them. The cow and the bear make friends, their young lie down together. The lion eats straw like the ox. The infant plays over the cobra’s hole; into the viper’s lair the young child puts his hand. They do no hurt, no harm, on all my holy mountain, for the country is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters swell the sea.
Isaiah 11:6–9
Jesus Christ does not offer a game of ‘let’s pretend’. He offers you the real possibility of being freed from your sins. In which case, there is the real possibility that you will refuse his offer. He will not turn the blind eye, for your sake. His promise is to do what no human alone can do, which is to restore the basic trust that was lost, to make all creation new, so as to have you back with him, whole and entire. In this light, we can understand what Jesus is talking about. The eternal sin, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, is not a stone cast at the honour of a touchy God. It is your refusal of his offer to give you his love, to teach you how to love him, and your neighbour, let alone your enemies; the offer to fill you with his Holy Spirit.
God will not punish you. But you might; in fact, you do. I’ll try to explain in the next chapter.
Has the Lord lost patience? Is that his way?
Micah 2:7
Of course, it would be very easy for God to punish us. He is the Creator of all things, sustaining in being all that is seen and even more that is unseen. At any moment he could destroy you, rewrite history so that you never were. He could do things undreamed of by even the most expert ethnic cleanser. It would be equally easy for him to free you from your sins, make you perfect, just like that. But he is not going to do either of those things, obvious as they might seem. He has a better idea altogether, though much more difficult and perhaps impossible:
Such is the richness of the grace he has showered on us in all wisdom and insight. He has let us know the mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made in Christ from the beginning to act upon when the times had run their course to an end.
Ephesians 1:8–9
So, what is this plan, and why is it hidden? The two questions have one answer. Let us think for a moment about God as the Creator of heaven and earth. It is hard to imagine what this means. We are familiar with making things, be they kitchen units or works of art and poetry. Parents have the most sublime experience of all in the creation of a completely new person. When we create, it involves assembling or rearranging bits of matter, or thoughts. God, in contrast, created everything out of nothing. This involves two ideas. First, God started it all off: ‘Let there be light’, and so on. On its own, however, this idea does not capture much. God would be like the Queen, in the United Kingdom, smashing a bottle against a ship to launch it, blessing all who sail in it, and that’s that.
The full truth is rather less comfortable, because it brings God very, very near. You do not need the Queen to launch the ship, though she does do it very well. It could be anyone sober enough to heft the bottle in the right direction. It could also be a machine suitably programmed. Or, why bother with an intervention? Just let the ship slide. In the same way, God the Creator need not be at all like the Father revealed in his Word by the Holy Spirit. It could be any kind of god with sufficient strength to give the big push. Or, the universe might just have happened. The notion of a Creator might just be a useful myth to take us beyond the boundaries of the language of science, the kind of confusion that comes from perplexing questions like ‘what was there before there was anything?’
The idea of the Christian doctrine of creation is this: behind every happening, every thing, every thought, every action, all movements, is the creating power of God. In gaps between nanoseconds, he sustains it in being. There is only one force in the world, which is the action of God. Nothing happens otherwise.
Hold on, though. Aren’t we free beings, with choice? What about all the catastrophes and natural disasters; am I saying that God wills those? Am I saying that God is responsible for evil actions by tyrants and people like us? In asking these questions, we are coming to understand what sin is. A sinful act is not sinful primarily because it offends God, or because it infringes some abstract law code. It is sinful because it is an exercise of the power to act, given by God, in an evil way, a way that counts against God’s purpose in creating us.
Philosophers have argued for centuries – and there is no reason for them to stop – about how it is possible for an all-powerful Creator to have made free creatures. Surely in some remote way, he still has control. This is the nasty bit that hurts. There is nothing in creation that can withstand the power of God, except for one thing, which is a human being saying ‘no’. Why? Because that is how God made it. For some reason, known only to himself, he wanted to make little beings that would accept his love and love him in return. So he gave us the ability to move, act and think for ourselves. If God were like us, he might wish he had not bothered.
Another doctrine
It is from thinking like this, however, that we get a glimpse of the inner reality of God. The argument is tricky, and largely unconvincing, because the subject is too big. Nobody expects to be able to divide one by zero, and so we should not be surprised at the mystery and complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is just trying to do what every doctrine does: express in intelligible sentences something that cannot be said, but that our need tells us to be so. Before I state the doctrine, a short passage from the writings of John Paul II illustrates the starting point:
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being which is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.
Redemptor Hominis, 10
Mothers and fathers have a particular insight into this truth, that we find fullness of life in giving life, in nurturing it, and in setting it free. The question here is why we are like that. God could have made little things that would freely love him in an one-to-one way. I love God, you love God, she loves God … isolated cells of devotion.
But I love you, too (quite easy, really, if we have not met!); and you love so-and-so, and he loves you, or loves you not. Once you think of it, this is a staggering fact, the most important thing about human beings. The ancient philosophers used to say ‘man is a political animal’, meaning that we are intrinsically, and by nature, interactive in relation to others. If you have never thought about that, think about it now. Nor is it simply true of humanity; the whole creation is promiscuously interactional, though maybe only we have the ability to choose it, or resist it. It need not have been so, except that
God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven,
