Opus 2026-461: The Organic God

This is not a statement about how God does not use pesticides and such.  This is not a woke view of Almighty God.  This is a simple observation about how God operates.

It’s hard to get people to give you a definition of what it means to be organic.  Its basic meaning makes it rather a joke to talk about organic food.  All food is organic.  It is the carbon and nutrients in it which are produced by nature for the most part which make it food.  So if it’s food, it is organic.

When I think of organic, I think of people who are willing to work through the natural process more than through quick fixes, like pesticides and additives.  That tends to be the way God works, and that tends to frustrate us to no end.

When we pray for miracles, we expect, miracles.  By that we mean something that steps outside of the ordinary, suspend the laws of nature, and gives us instant gratification.  Keep in mind that even when God produces something that we would call a miracle, there’s a good chance that because He is outside of time He is able to continue to work through natural processes.

For instance, consider the prayer for rain.  We are having that in Texas quite a bit.  When it rains, we thank God for that rain.  We don’t stop to think about all of the different processes that have gone into making that rain.  You’ve got air currents.  You have water vapor that has to be created by the sun and heat.  You have to move that water vapor across thousands of miles and create exactly the right atmospheric conditions for the vapor to turn into a liquid and for gravity to pull it toward the Earth.  That’s a pretty complex operation and to be honest with you and because He is outside time, God is quite able to arrange the natural world to produce the results He wants.

Or take for instance someone who is miraculously cured.  It’s considered an answer to prayer.  It is an answer to prayer, but it is not an instantaneous unplanned answer to prayer.  God is able to look through time to know whether you are going to be praying and you decide whether He is going to answer.  In the process He can start things moving because He knows what He’s going to do.  So what to you looks like an instant miraculous cure is really the result of millions of microbes and cells and chemicals being moved around to produce that result.

Or think of how when the Babylonians come and smash Jerusalem and destroy the temple.  That didn’t happen overnight.  First of all, God had been very patient.  He had waited hundreds of years before He brought the final reckoning.  In the process of waiting He is giving adequate provision for repentance and for change.  Being outside of time He can see the direction things are going and how they’re going to develop.  Did He suddenly make a Babylonian army appear out of water vapor on the border of Israel or outside of the walls of Jerusalem?  No.  He spent years bringing Babylon to a position where they could field an army.  Each soldier had to take each step in order to get to Jerusalem.  God laid it out far ahead of time, knowing the free decisions that His chosen people were going to make, and knowing that they need to be dealt with in the proper manner.

Is God capable of suspending all of the laws of the universe that He has spent so much time getting in place?  Of course.  Does he need to?  No.  This goes back to my reasoning about the question of can God make a square circle.  Not in our frame of reference, but He probably could do so in His frame of reference because He is outside of time, and the universe, and what we consider the laws of nature.  We could not understand it if it were right in front of us.  That doesn’t mean that God can’t do it.

So again I submit that God must be organic.

homo unius libri