Belonging to God (reprise III)

When I think of belonging to God I think of an absolute ownership, an ownership that knows no bounds in right or privilege. This is a direct consequence of belonging by existence and belonging by being made. I certainly own my tan sedan, and I am allowed to drive it on Missouri roads, provided I pay my personal property tax and obtain the proper licenses (licenses that expire, sometimes unnoticed, as a certain police officer made clear to me not long ago). I have a right to drive it on the road. But only on the right side of the road. I may not take my car out and meander it down the left side of roads. My ownership of the car is bounded, and so is my ownership of anything else. Even the ownership of my cherished life’s freedom (thank you, Lord, for allowing me to live in this free land) is bounded by seemingly numberless volumes of laws and regulations.

But my belonging to God in the sense of ownership is not like that. He is under no obligation to a higher authority (as if there could be one) to act toward me in any way other than what His desire might dictate. Someone might object that we are free to violate His desires, and hence his ownership is not complete. But we must remember that it was His inscrutable desire to bestow us this freedom, and that this freedom is after all only finite. Like penciled lines in a perspective drawing, the lines of our freedom all converge into His ultimate purpose at some vanishing point nearer to eternity.

In this age it is difficult to imagine the completeness of God’s ownership of us. While the legacy of the Enlightenment may have helped to unveil the dignity of the individual in the company of men, I think it has also served to shroud the humility of man in the company of God. In human society we might claim unalienable rights, but bare before the indescribable presence of God nothing is unalienable, and that is an idea very hard to get used to. But we must try, if we wish to think clearly.

Perhaps what is most difficult is to recognize that God is under no moral obligation whatsoever regarding His various creations. He very well may be just and righteous and merciful toward His creations (and praise to Him, He is), but not because He is obliged to do so. It is only because that is the expression of who He is. If I bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies (as if I ever do such things), and take a steaming hot sheet of a dozen or so of them out of the oven, what is my obligation toward those cookies? What is my obligation to the cookie that falls on the floor as I am sliding them onto the countertop to cool? I am perfectly within my rights to throw that cookie away. But wait a minute. What about the most beautiful, moist, steamy, and delectable cookie of the whole batch — the one beckoning me by smell and sight to be the first one I devour? Do I not also have the right to throw it away as well on a whim or for some other deep unrevealed reason, be it sublimity or madness? Yes, the cookies belong to me to such an extent that I may throw any one of them or all of them away for any reason whatsoever…or I might crown even the dumpiest, driest, darkest, crustiest, and most disfigured one with a mountain of chocolate cream and a cherry. Please, don’t mistake my meaning. I am not saying that God acts on capricious whims or that there is any madness in Him. Quite the contrary (history might bear out that misunderstood genius sometimes appears to be madness, at first — often until after the genius dies). My point is that God has utterly unrestricted latitude in His behavior toward His creatures as He works out His deep purposes according to His unsearchable desires. How terrible and terrific it is that we belong to God in this way. Perhaps it is this sense of belonging that comes to the fore when the mere creature is visited by God’s manifest presence (like the encounters of Daniel and John the Apostle); perhaps this is part of what compels the creature to fall down strengthless and near dying. May God give us the grace to accept and praise His use (or non-use) of us, whatever that may be; may we be soft clay in His molding hands.