A Christmas Meditation of My Own

A few days ago, I wrote about a Christmas meditation by Frank Turk that was originally posted on the PyroManiacs blog. Today, I would like to write a short Christmas meditation of my own. My meditation may seem a bit unusual at first; but, if you persevere to the end, I think that you will find it quite traditional in several respects. I will begin with some remarks about the nature of God.

The Bible teaches that God is powerful, intelligent, wise, and morally good. It also teaches that God is perfect. And, while we may not fully comprehend the truth that God is perfect, we know that God's perfection implies the perfection of every attribute of God. In other words, we know that if God is perfect and that God is powerful, then God's power must be perfect. And the same goes for the other attributes of God that we mentioned before - if God is perfect and God is intelligent, wise, and morally good, then God's intelligence, wisdom, and moral goodness must all be perfect.

Unfortunately, we cannot fully grasp the extent of God's perfections. Still, we can grasp something of them. In particular, we can know that the following claims about God's perfections are true:

There is no limit to God's power. If God wished, He could command all disease to be healed. For example, He could command all cancer and heart disease to vanish from the face of the earth. He could raise the dead. He could command a healthy tree to wither and die. He could command a tree to be uprooted and planted in a different place. He could command the Rocky Mountains to be transported to Asia. He could command the planets to change their orbits. He could even command every galaxy to trade places with another. He could endow a rock with intelligence or prevent an ice-cube from melting even if it were tossed in a blazing furnace. He could command everyone in Sweden to start speaking Finnish, and He could command everyone in Finland to start speaking German. But that's not all. God could command the very laws of nature to change. Miracles may involve the suspension of the laws of nature, but God can alter the laws of nature as many times as He likes and in any way that He sees fit. God could alter the fundamental forces of nature (e.g., gravity) or nullify them altogether. He could cancel the law of inertia.

God created matter, He created all immaterial beings, and He created the laws that govern all matter and immaterial beings. But God did not merely create the world - He also sustains it. If God withdrew His support from the world for but a single moment, it would straightway dissolve into nothingness. There is no atom, tree, rock, planet, black hole, solar system, or galaxy that does not owe its being to God. And, of course, the same is true of us. Still, these facts do not exhaust the power of God. For God also created space and time, and He has complete power over them. God could command all space to shrink to the size of a point. Or, if He were a fan of the early Beatles, He could command the world to return to the 1960's. This is part of what it means to say that God's power is perfect.

There is no limit to God's intelligence. God knows every fact about every subject matter. If you were to pose a question to God, then He could answer it, no matter what subject the question concerned (provided, of course, that the question was meaningful and had a real answer). God knows everything that there is to know about mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, finance, computer science, and the humanities - including the fine arts, music, history, literature, and philosophy. He also knows everything that there is to know about management theory, automotive repair, sports, and cooking. And, of course, He knows all particular matters of fact. God knows what you're thinking right now, and He knows what Kublai Khan was thinking on the morning of his twenty-third birthday. He knows exactly how many atoms the universe has contained, and He knows the complete history of every one of those atoms. God knows the total mass of every piece of copper on earth. He also knows the total mass of every helium atom in the universe. God knows exactly what caused the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the fall of communism. He also knows exactly what caused the fall of the Roman Empire and the fall of the Ming Dynasty. God knows every possible reading of Finnegans Wake. God sees everything, whether it be the coffee you are drinking or some space dust that is presently in the vicinity of the Orion Nebula. God knows every moral truth. For example, God knows whether there are any scenarios in which it is morally permissible to deceive another human being; and, if there are any such scenarios, He knows what they are. God knows the future. He knows what you'll do tomorrow. He knows the name of every human being who will ever see Ghostbusters. He knows how many times Bach's music will be performed before the end of the world, and He knows how many of those performances will be good. This is part of what it means to say that God's intelligence is perfect.

There is no limit to God's wisdom. God knows what every human being - and, indeed, living thing - needs to flourish. He understands the nature of emotional health and growth. He knows what human beings need to do in order to achieve emotional maturity - and how to maintain it. He knows which habits will lead to success and which to failure, and He knows how to cultivate the former habits and avoid the latter. He knows what to do in every possible social situation. He knows what to say to someone who is considering a career change, someone who lacks confidence and needs motivation, someone who has suffered a tragic loss. He knows everything about relationships. He knows when and how to apologize, when and how to express gratitude, when and how to give advice. He knows whether every plan can succeed; and, if so, what courses of action would lead to its success. He knows what players the Chicago Bears should recruit in the off-season and how they should practice if they want to have the best possible season next year. He knows what Singapore could do to attract more foreign investment. He understands everything that there is to understand about the nature of rationality. In particular, He understands every possible philosophical account of the nature of rationality, and He can critique every one of these accounts with perfect accuracy. This is part of what it means to say that God's wisdom is perfect.

There is no limit to God's moral goodness. God has never done anything that is less than perfectly morally good. Thus, He has never performed an action that is less than perfectly morally good, and He has never had a thought or emotion (supposing God feels emotions) that is less than perfectly morally good. God possess all moral virtues, and those virtues are perfected in Him. God is perfectly honest, compassionate, generous, humble, gentle, magnanimous, prudent, trustworthy, just, and merciful. His mercy triumphs over His justice, but His mercy and justice each remain perfect. Not only does God always do the morally right thing and think the morally right thing - He is never conflicted about doing so. For example, God has never been in a state of conflict over whether He should tell the truth, for He has never been tempted to lie. Indeed, He has never been tempted - even in the smallest degree - to do or think anything that was anything less than perfectly morally good. This is true of God the Father, it is true of the Holy Spirit, and it is also true of Jesus of Nazareth. God's nature is so strongly (that is, perfectly) committed to moral goodness that even when His nature was joined with that of a human being, God was never tempted - not in the slightest, not for a single moment - to do anything that was even slightly imperfectly good. This is part of what it means to say that God's moral goodness is perfect.

Thinking about God's perfections can help us to appreciate the awe and wonder of the Christmas story. Not sure how? Then think about the following things. Think about the fact that even though God is perfectly powerful, intelligent, wise, and morally good, He decided to save man from sin and death. Think about what we have said about God's perfect power, intelligence, wisdom, and moral goodness. For example, think about the fact that God created matter, and that He has never even been tempted to think - let alone do - anything that is less than perfectly morally good. Now think about the fact that man has rejected God from the very beginning - that we have spurned God, denied Him, cursed Him, and hated Him. And it's not just God that we have hated and abused - we have hated one another as well as ourselves, and we have abused every good thing that God has given us. As the Bible says, we have devoured one another. We are selfish, evil, God-hating, man-hating, life-hating creatures. We are spiteful, envious, jealous, and malicious. We lie, cheat, steal, and murder. But despite all this, God decided to save us. And not only that, but He decided to save us by becoming one of us - yes, one of us hopelessly imperfect creatures, though there was nothing imperfect about God when He became man - to live among us, to teach us, to be rejected by us, to be murdered by us, and all of this to save us. Think about that. Think about the fact that the God who created matter and who has never even been tempted to think anything that is less than perfectly morally good decided to sacrifice His son to save us, and that He did this because He loves us.

The story of Christmas is incredibly powerful when one considers that God became man in order to save us from sin and death, and that He did this through allowing Himself to be wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, spat upon, beaten, tortured, mocked, and murdered. It is even more powerful when one considers that God did all this for us knowing full well that even those who believed in Him would continue to sin and doubt. However, I think that the story of Christmas is still more powerful when one considers God's nature, and in particular His perfections. God created the Pleiades and Orion, and He could alter the force of gravity. Yet He decided to take the form of a human being and thus subject Himself to hunger, thirst, pain, and suffering. God knows all things and understands all things - He knows everything that will ever transpire in the world, and He knows every nook and cranny of the universe intimately. He delights in nebulae and quasars trillions of light years away. Yet He decided to confine His mind to a human body and to navigate the world by human senses. God is morally perfect in every way, and He has been a perfect king and father to His people. Yet He decided to allow His children to deny, insult, assault, and even murder Him - He who is perfectly compassionate, gentle, merciful and kind.

I hope that I have successfully conveyed something of the awe and wonder of the fact that the God who became man to save us from sin and death is perfect in His power, intelligence, wisdom, and moral goodness. However, to appreciate this fully, one must spend time thinking about God's perfections. One must ponder - even meditate on - the fact that the God who created the universe decided to be born into poverty as a Jewish peasant; that He had to work with His hands for a living; that He had to eat and drink like the rest of us, sleep like the rest of us, and clean Himself like the rest of us; that He was subject to cold and heat as well as hunger and thirst; that He experienced childhood and puberty; that He was a son, a brother, and a nephew, as well as a friend; that He knew all the limitations - except for the moral limitations - of human existence; that He knew all the pains and joys of human life; and that He began His life among us as a baby in Roman Palestine.