Written Stuff

           I was raised to believe that God knows everything all the time. The Clever Plan story developed from the book of Jeremiah in the Bible where I read that God admits not knowing something. If God knows everything, how was that possible?

           Honest questions about paradoxes like that have entered my mind since I was a boy, and the answer to “How could an all-knowing God not know something?” finally arrived in 2018, decades after I first asked for it. When it came, I started to put it into a story which grew as I thought about who would narrate. The most relevant verses in the Tanakh (Christians call it the Old Testament) are Jeremiah 7:31 and 19:5.

           But the story also needed the “hang something on nothing” paradox we read about in Job 26:7, and I figured that answer out without asking questions, so let’s tackle it first.

• Job 26:7 (OJB) He stretcheth out the Tzafon over the tohu, and hangeth eretz upon nothing.

There is a problem here which authorities in my youth handled in the usual human way. The Hebrew text says, “He [God] hangs the Earth upon nothing.” This is like hanging a picture on a wall that isn’t there. Hebrew has far fewer words than English and each one can have several meanings that are driven by context. But it is natural for translators to choose a translation which fits their (limited) understanding. This is because we humans don’t know what we don’t know. Hence, one translator, who does not understand Isaac Newton’s discoveries as they apply to Job 26:7, gives us, “He hangs the Earth over nothing.” This seems correct as far as it goes, but is incomplete and can be misleading, given the physics we now know. The truth is that every object in our cosmos hangs on nothing. Or, to put it another way, everything hangs on everything.

• Jeremiah 7:31 (NIV) “They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind.”
• Jeremiah 19:5 (NIV) “They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.”

These paradoxical verses in Jeremiah are plain enough although when I was a boy, the religious authorities explained God’s stated lack of awareness as a poetical device. But after a few years I got dissatisfied with that and took my question directly to God since both He and my mother said I could. Mom had led me to Jesus when I was going on eight years old, and she also gave me the powerful advice that anytime God talked to His people in the Bible, I could now put my name there. Well! James 1:5 says, “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God,” so whenever this boy had a tough question, he asked it. And if anyone objected, he would declare (with apologies to Sojourner Truth): Ain’t I a man?

          “…enter my mind.”

          How do we think of things? In his superb memoir, On Writing, Stephen King says that rather than deciding what he wants in a  story and then writing to make it turn out that way, he puts characters in interesting and difficult situations, then writes to find out what happens. He says stories are “found things, like fossils in the ground”, and says he plots his as infrequently as possible because life is largely plotless despite all our precautions and  planning: “Plotting and the spontaneity of creation aren’t compatible. … [M]y basic belief about the making  of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of a writer is to give them a place to grow.”

           I have come to agree with him. I wrote my flash-fiction piece, A Clever Plan, in 2018. But it didn't strike me until 2021 after re-reading King’s memoir (yet again), that God anticipated King’s approach by about 14 billion years. Human history is a sort of myriad-dimensional stage play (farce?) that God did not plot. Instead, he decided to imagine a stage and a set of initial conditions. Then, in his mind, he put interesting beings on it and watched them after he decided to give them free will but before the curtain rose with a Bang. 

          Having said all of that and agreed with Mr. King, please be aware that I don't necessarily trust the muses. I tell any who start feeding me stuff that "isn’t me”  to shut up. This has a parallel with God because sacrificing innocent children “isn’t Him.” And this brings us to the reason why God didn’t know early-on about human sacrifice. The short answer is: Because God is holy. Unfortunately, “holy” has a vague meaning of “insufferably good” to modern ears. But that’s like saying Mount Everest is disgustingly tall.

           There are lots of things that I would rather not have entering my mind. But because God is holy, He never has that problem.

           We know this because if it were possible for Him to come up with child sacrifice on His own (i.e., without seeing us do it first), then —knowing everything— He would have thought of it first. But if He had thought of it first, then it had “entered His mind”. And if it had entered His mind, then the verses in Jeremiah are lies. But they are not lies. God is holy. By the definition of “holy”, it is impossible for Him to lie. It is not “too hard” for God to lie, it is impossible. Ah, but doesn’t the Bible say that with God, all things are possible? Does that mean it is possible to lie with God’s help? Certainly not. We are not with God when we lie; we are against Him. It’s not that He chooses to not lie; it is that by His holy nature, He does recognize lies but cannot lie or originate them. Satan is the father of lies, remember; and heavenly beings have free will, too.

          God saw His play in rehearsal (so to speak). He loved all the players as little children, and still loves them all despite the surprising nasty things He saw them do. But the cosmos isn’t a clockworks machine where God wound it up and let it play. The Author stays true to His own character as He allows the players to make their own stories. And now, during show time, He watches as they reveal again what they truly are inside. In both the rehearsal and the live show, God makes and keeps promises, answers prayers, warns of danger, and so on. All players should expect to get Author notes from time to time: happenings, words, and conversations. These will come from various sources; they usually aren’t flashy, and may be difficult to explain because God isn’t trying to show off or prove He exists. He’s trying to show us who we really are and what we've actually done. But isn't that what most good authors try to do?