God Takes The Long-Range View

Posted by Lorren on September 6, 2008

I’ve heard this said a couple of times recently… God knows everything that ever has or ever will happen, and he knew it from the beginning of time. He knew that Adam and Eve, you and I would sin before we were ever created… he knew that he would have to send his son to die for us… before he even started creating the heavens and the earth… yet he still created us anyway.

Why?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve designed and built things before. When I was a kid, I played with Legos. In high school, I started writing computer programs. If I was designing a computer program and I knew that it was going to go haywire before I built it, I’d scrap the whole thing and start over. So why didn’t God?

The only answer that I could think of, is that God takes the long-range viewpoint of things. For some reason, creating us, sending his son to die for us, and giving us the choice of whether to trust in him as our savior or not (knowing that many would not trust him and he would have to send them to hell) is better in his eyes than not creating us at all.

This age that we live in can not really be the end-all of what God made us for. We act like rebellious, spoiled children that always want to get our way, and complain because we don’t have enough. We sin. We don’t thank God for everything that he’s given us. We use his name as a curse word. Some of us openly claim to hate him. We make God ANGRY. Surely this isn’t what God created us for. It doesn’t give him pleasure when we act in rebellion.

But… if you look in the grand scheme of things, there must be something to come that is worth it to God to go through all of this. Heaven must be really good… because God has put up with us for 1000s of years already. KNOWING that he was going to have to deal with our sins and rebellion for 1000s of years, he still chose to create us.

A lot of us will go through things that in the short term are not pleasant, because in the end, we feel it will be worth it. People study hard in high school and college because doing so will help them make a better life for themselves… later. Farmers sow, water, and tend to crops because it will provide food to them at harvest time. Entrepreneurs work 60 hour weeks starting their business because later, it will provide a good living for them.

While our long-range plans might encompass 5 or 10 years, God’s long-range plans span a lot longer than that. We as a human race are putting him through 1000s of years of dealing with our sin and rebellion. Being infinitely good, our sin does not give him pleasure at all. Yet, he knows what is at the end, and going through this era is worth it to him. There is something in Heaven that is worth going through all of this, or he wouldn’t have made us to begin with.