Designed

One of the ‘infinites’ that characterizes God is that He is infinitely economical. Not only does He waste absolutely nothing, but He makes absolutely the best use of everything that He has made, and this even includes time. When He does something, He does it in absolutely the shortest possible length of time.

From the mayfly whose life span is designed to last less than five minutes, to the red dwarf star whose development cycle can take ten trillion years, everything that God makes He makes in as little time as it can possibly take, and this He does by taking every possible shortcut. Evolution is what this looks like.

If this statement doesn’t seem quite correct, if it can be objected to by ‘stating the facts,’ it’s not God’s fault. We too are one of His creations, hand-crafted with magnificent economy. What the universe or any creature looks like to anyone within it, depends greatly on what they are designed to see.

The thirty thousand eyes of the dragonfly, each one containing a lens and a series of light sensitive cells, give it three hundred sixty degree vision and the ability to detect colors and polarized light. The two eyes of the human being—well, what can I say?—perhaps God compensates us by giving us a larger brain.

Using that brain—and the eyes are just the parts of it that stick out where we can see them—we can see exactly and only what we were designed to see—and that’s a lot more than a dragonfly sees. It’s designed to see, but only so it can find food to voraciously feed on for a few weeks, lay its eggs, and die.

We are designed to see, not only to eat, reproduce, and die, but to find meaning in a universe that, it sometimes seems, could continue on its own very well without us. We’re so small, so weak, so short-lived, so insignificant, really, so why should we expect to see and understand what’s really going on here?

God has told us in a language that our puny brains can understand, how He created the universe, and us. On our own we have gradually evolved the sciences, which tell us that all we can ever know is nearly nothing. That’s great, even though He gave us the Bible, which tells us almost the same thing.

It’s not so much that all we can ever know is nearly nothing, but that we are not designed to pursue that kind of knowledge as our ultimate aim. God never creates anything so that it can fail. He never makes ‘mistakes.’ Everything He does is designed to do what it actually does. Even free will, when it is truly free.

The Bible tells us that we are designed in the image of God. Doesn’t it make sense, then, that we should also feel good about ourselves when we are being economical, when we don’t waste, when we find short cuts, when we discover what it is that we were designed to do, and to be, by nature, and by nurture?

Back to the time line, and to the ‘waste not, want not’ of the Divine Nature, back to the evolution which is what ‘God creating’ looks like, back to what it is we are designed to see. That which we are designed to see is simply not everything. Things look as they do, because we’re not made to see the whole picture.

At least, not yet. The world and all that is in it, visible and invisible, was made in six days, and then ‘God rested,’ and here we are on the cosmic weekend with nothing to do—hardly! God rests not because He is tired, but because He’s making room for us. For us to do what? To be what He designed us to be.

You see, though God rests, He’s not sleeping, nor is He absent. Even His own work flow He designs in the most economical manner. We couldn’t tell, on our own, whether or not we were a finished design, so He helped us by designing Himself as One of us.

It turns out that there is a new creation, and that’s what we were designed for. That’s why at this stage in our design, we’re still on a bridge. There’s nothing wrong with that, only that we weren’t designed to stay there. We are designed to move. We are designed to change. We are designed to be designers.

The path of our evolution seems to be the longest, most wasteful, most winding path we ever could have dreamed of. We think, this is no evidence of design, just blind chance stretched out over uncountable eons of time and space, and all heading—nowhere. Finally, it will all just fizzle out.

But what we see is the shortest possible path between our creation and our—what can I call it? It’s almost unnameable—inauguration, our ‘coming into our own,’ our attaining to our maturity, our realization of what we were made for. It seems a long path, but truly, God has taken a short cut.

Now, if we are true to our nature, if we want to be happy because we’re doing what we are designed to do, then it’s time to pull ourselves together. It’s time for us to do what Christ told the paralyzed man to do, ‘Take up your mat, and walk,’ even if it’s the Sabbath. For He has designed, ‘the son of man is Master, even of the Sabbath.’