How does God see this world?

 

 

In recent reading about various ways of thinking, the notion of WORLDVIEW can be summarized by how anyone would answer these three questions:

1. How are things supposed to be?

2. What is the main problem with things as they are?

3. What is the solution and how can it be realized?

In looking at God’s worldview, the first question is fairly simple; when Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He said, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, the world is supposed to be in submission to the will of God.

However, that “S” word is exceedingly unpopular. Resistance begins with the attitude of a child: “I want what I want when I want it” and mom or dad jump to meet that cry knowing that the child will suffer otherwise. Yet we know the importance of children (and adults) learning “delayed gratification” because totally selfish demands easily slide into become tyranny and anarchy.

The root of the world’s problems is tied to this attitude. God’s Word says in Isaiah 53:6, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way . . . .” and with that, the second question is answered: when each person wants what they want, there is conflict between the ‘I wants.’

This does not mean all human desires smack of evil and selfishly grabbing, or totally ignoring the needs of others, yet behind our efforts to be good and do good is that “I will do it my way” motivation. This shows up in varying degrees from what seems okay to pure evil, however God calls all of it sin.

Various human solutions are offered for the problem of sin and selfishness from variations of, “Be nice to others because it feels good” to “Make and enforce laws to prevent it” and “Lock up all those who break those laws.” Yet none of these solutions and the worldview that sits behind them get to the heart of the problem — which is the human heart. We want things like ‘peace at any price’ and personal comfort and many other changes that seem to be answers, yet at the root of them is that “I want what I want” and failure to recognize what God intended when He created His world and what it means when He tells us to submit to His will.

It takes submission to the will of God to realize that God’s ways are not our ways. All that He says and does makes His worldview inaccessible to my mind unless I’m yielded to Him, just as Jesus said in Gethsemane, “Not my will but thine be done.” Did the will of God make sense then? Jesus, innocent of all sin, was going to die a horrible death and it made no sense — to His disciples, to us who read about it, and maybe even to the human side of this man who is God. Yet to make a solution to the problem of the way things are, the sin of wanting my own way could only be satisfied by the death and resurrection of God the Son.

John 3:16–18. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

God’s worldview requires sin forgiven, but even more, sinners transformed. We need the very mind and life of Christ in us to think like He thought — not my will but thine be done — so we can stop being selfish, die to our old ways and live a new way, loving God and loving others with a submissive heart and will.

GAZE INTO HIS GLORY. Quickly I must say that selfishness still hounds me. I know the worldview of God and His answer to our dilemma, yet sin is so ingrained and powerful that choice-making can feel like a war, even in the simple things. Yesterday my hubby wanted to walk along the beach in the wind, and I wanted to sit in our rented Jeep and keep warm. Jesus poked me to choose to walk with him rather than do what I wanted. It is His “not my will” attitude that I’m to gaze at, to submit to, to be like — not always that simple, seldom that easy, but if the will of God is going to be done in this world, the only thing I can do to make that happen is to focus on Jesus and start with me.