Let’s talk about God’s nature. Every theologian has his own approach to explaining why God does things, but I have yet to see somebody share my view.
Part 4: God is Not Rational
Plato hated the concept that a god could be petty, capricious, and jealous. He believed that the noblest principles were also the most divine, and therefore gods must epitomize the highest principles, not the lowest. They must not only be good, but the highest conceivable good; they had to be rational and just. When men developed their own critical thinking and became philosophers, they ascended closer to the divine in their thinking. This idea was picked up by Enlightenment philosophers of Europe, who rediscovered Plato’s writings during the Renaissance. Ever since then, Christian thinkers have been trying to squeeze God into a Platonic mold.
But like it or not, the Bible consistently depicts God as being irrational.
Here, I will insist on a more literalistic understanding of “rational” than most dictionaries, which merely reflect popular usage. The word rational is generally meant to mean based on logical reasoning—that is, as opposed to emotion, instinct, or selfish motivation. However, the word rational is clearly derived from the root word ration, which means to carefully portion. Even more fundamentally, it derives from the word ratio, which is the mathematical term for dividing things according to a set proportion. In other words, rationality is about being consistent and proportional at all times. We can easily analyze the Bible to see if this aligns with God’s behavior.
Immediately, we should recognize that God’s covenants are pretty wild. There are some justifications given here and there, but these are only revealed in hindsight, based on a long-term strategy by God to fulfill His own vague, mysterious promises, such as the one given in the Garden of Eden about a man who would some day crush the head of the serpent. Not only does He hand-pick seemingly random people to communicate with, but He makes the most extraordinary, disproportionate deals with them. Greek philosophers ended up rejecting the idea of “chosen people” and covenants in favor of a universal metaphysics that had no bias, but just look at this teaching from Jesus and tell me that it’s proportionate and unbiased:
(Matthew 13:12) For whoever has, to him more shall be given; but whoever does not have, even what little he has shall be taken away from him.
This is practically the definition of disproportionality!
And the context doesn’t help the accusation. Here are the verses immediately before and after:
(Matthew 13:11, 13) He replied, “The knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven has been given to you, but not to them. … This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Although seeing, they do not see; although hearing, they do not hear or understand.’
Jesus purposely confused the ignorant crowds in order to mislead them. He did this so that his own students (whom we might recall seemed to be chosen very arbitrarily) could be disproportionately more knowledgeable about the Kingdom. Why did this need to happen? Not because of the logical necessity of the moment, but in order to fulfill prophecies from Isaiah. However, logically, since God is the one who created that prophecy in the first place and gave it to Isaiah, He could have scripted the whole thing another way. God could have prophesied that Israel would understand everything, and that there would be an equitable system which had no favoritism. But God deliberately planned for a division of mankind into the “haves” and “have-nots” in a spiritual realm.
Collective punishment
Another way to inspect the idea of God’s proportionality is to look at His treatment of populations in the Old Testament. Those who have read it will know that God destroyed many civilizations without sparing those we would think of as “innocent,” such as women and children. On the contrary, He specifically instructed Israel to slaughter the women and children of these cultures.
Deuteronomy 20:16-18 – Instructions for the Canaanites:
"When you approach a city to fight against it, you are to make an offer of peace. If they accept your offer of peace and open their gates, all the people there will become forced laborers to serve you.
“But if they refuse to make peace with you and wage war against you, lay siege to that city. When the LORD your God has delivered it into your hand, you must put every male to the sword. But the women, children, livestock, and whatever else is in the city—all its spoil—you may take as plunder, and you shall use the spoil of your enemies that the LORD your God gives you. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are far away from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
“However, in the cities of the nations that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not leave alive anything that breathes. For you must devote them to complete destruction —the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that they cannot teach you to do all the detestable things they do for their gods, and so cause you to sin against the LORD your God."
Joshua 6:21 – Destruction of Jericho:
Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.
1 Samuel 15:2-3 – Amalekite annihilation:
"Thus says the Lord of hosts, 'I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"
Numbers 31:17-18 – Midianite women and children:
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves."
Exodus 23:23-24 – Sending terror and confusion:
"My angel goes before you and shall bring you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I shall annihilate them. You shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them. … I will send My terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn and run."
What we see here is a flagrant disregard for the lives of women and children. They were not considered innocent or precious in God’s eyes, but were either killed or enslaved according to God’s instructions. This was not rational and proportionate. The logic that they would grow up to seduce and mislead the Hebrews is illogical and bizarre, because it suggests that the Hebrews, who are the clear victors in this scenario, are helpless to resist indoctrination from their own captured servants, despite being handed total victory by God, who communicates with them directly and does miracles for them. Not only that, but it suggests that Israel has no capacity to persuade others to believe in their God, even if they were taken in and raised as infants in their camp.
Emotional God
Apologists go to great pains to portray God’s genocides as being somehow rational and necessary, but this is embarrassing. Why do we lie about God’s motivations in order to glorify Him? Shouldn’t we glorify the reality, and not some theoretical version of God that doesn’t exist? Isn’t it a form of sacrilege to praise God for things that aren’t true, because we are ashamed of His real judgments? Look closely. God even made sure they killed the livestock just to send a message. There is no possibility that the cattle and goats of foreign nations would persuade Israel to worship false gods. It was excessive. We have an excessive God. Praise Him for that! He is jealous, wrathful, loving, protective, and highly emotional, which causes Him to be spiteful, overreact, and extreme.
(Exodus 20:5) “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”
(Exodus 34:14) for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God,
(Deuteronomy 7:7-8) The Lord did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath He swore to your ancestors.
(Deuteronomy 4:24) For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
(Nahum 1:2) The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The Lord takes vengeance on his foes and vents his wrath against his enemies.
(Exodus 32:10) "Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation."
(Genesis 6:6) The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.
We could go on and on. Christians are mystified by the apparent change of God’s personality from the Old to the New Testament, but they don’t realize that God is just as vindictive as He always was, but now He is simply bottling it up and saving it for the Apocalypse.1 The Gnostics even tried to argue that the God of the Old Testament was a completely different being than the “Father” referred to by Jesus, because they were obsessed with Plato’s philosophy of God being docile and benevolent, and couldn’t understand that the God of the Gospels was just as irrational, zealous, and emotional as the God of Moses, only with a longer term strategy.
If God was rational, wouldn’t He have given a more measured response to the foreign tribes Israel encountered? Even if they were evil and beholden to false gods, isn’t it obvious that Israel ends up falling into idolatry anyway, rendering these extreme measures meaningless in the big picture? I wonder how many thousands of relatively innocent people were slaughtered by Israel just to go through the futile exercise of keeping the Chosen People pure for a few centuries.
God scripts the future and intervenes in order to make sure His plans manifest, which means He knew that Israel would fail in their covenant, but yet He inflicted deep suffering on that region of the world in order to show off His own power, humbling the lesser gods and their arrogant worshipers. God’s prophets are known to mock the magicians and prophets of other nations, demonstrating God’s superiority with a sense of grandiosity and spite. We see very little rational dialogue in Israel, because logic and persuasion are not what God prioritized.
In fact, God deliberately designed Christ’s ministry to be contrary to both the Jews and the “Greeks” (by which Jews meant all Hellenized cultures, including Romans):
(1 Corinthians 1:21-24) In the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom could not know God; and so it pleased God that by the foolishness of preaching He would save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after reason. But we preach Christ crucified, which is to the Jews a stumblingblock, and to the Greeks foolishness! But to them which are called, among both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
This was not a rational plan based on merit and proportionality. It was a plan to blind the eyes of the wise, confound the elite, and turn upside down the logic of the world. It was power play to show that God could defy human expectations and succeed despite the whole world being against Him.
(1 Corinthians 1:19) For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
So tell me, dear reader, does God cherish rationality, which is known as wisdom and reason, or does He cherish His own schemes, arbitrary favorites, and glorification? God mocks rationality. There is no rational way to be saved. To be “born again” is not to become wise, but to become like a child, starting over from square one and learning to trust in God irrationally, even to the point of torture and death. God’s plan can only be described as “wise” in a retroactive justification for all of the crazy twists and turns He created, just as Christ teaches that “wisdom is justified by all her children” (Luke 7:35). On the other hand, rationality is never supposed to be retrospective, but rather calculated and forward-looking, prescribing how things ought to be and then creating a consistent rule that makes sense to everyone who asks. That’s the whole point of a rational system. A rational system allows itself to be scrutinized at every step, persuading people based on evidence. It is the opposite of sudden twists, radical reinterpretations, miraculous scandals, divine appointments, and inevitably justifying everything by the outcome.
Favoritism and prejudice
In a previous entry we debunked the doctrine of God having universal love:
Looking at the genocides of the Old Testament, we cannot say that God loved these people much. At least, He didn’t love them equally to Israel. He didn’t love them enough to engineer their redemption, which we know He is able to do with even the worst sinners! Rather, God chose a certain people to prize above all others, and then treated all of their enemies as condemned villains because they dared to challenge this chosen group, or simply represented an obstacle to them. God’s love for Israel meant the condemnation of the nations, which were ruled by other gods.
This is the key to understanding passages in the New Testament about how God wants to save “all people” and how He is merciful to “everyone.” Wherever these verses are found, they always emphasize that God is no longer prejudiced according to ethnicity, but by individual destinies. He no longer prefers Israelites over Gentiles, and is willing to save both the poorest prostitutes and the highest governors if they are written in the Book of Life. This was shocking to the Jewish audience, because their entire history was about being the exclusive recipients of God’s covenant. The authors of the New Testament therefore felt a need to repeatedly emphasize the diversity of the Kingdom, which is why they spoke about “all people,” meaning “all types of people,” not every individual in the world. They knew that only few people would end up being saved, but the call was sent out to everyone because it was revealed that God would choose a handful of elect from many different nations, not just Israel.
This is important, because it shows that God is consistently inconsistent. Even in the church age, there is still not a universal love for mankind, nor a universal chance to be saved. God still chooses His people from among the many, and He gives them preferential treatment.
Isn’t it true that God unfairly favored Abel above Cain? He predictably triggered the jealous rage that drove Cain to kill Abel. The whole idea of making an offering seems to have been Cain’s, not Abel’s, and there is no rational reason given for why Cain’s was rejected. Seemingly arbitrary favoritism led to resentment and retaliation. And even when Cain killed Abel and was punished for his crime, he pleaded for mercy and was allowed to escape. This is also unfair and irrational, since we know Cain goes on to create more problems. God could easily have accepted Cain’s offering and prevented his rage; He could have divinely protected Abel from being killed; He could have prevented Cain from becoming a further villain; but our analysis shows that God likely prepared this script in advance and did His part to make sure that the first brothers in the world would become the archetype for what He intended to happen on a global scale by the end of the age. You can say what you want about it, but it doesn’t feel very reasonable for those who are doomed to get the short end of the stick.
The scandal of destiny
(Romans 9:10-13) Not only that, but Rebecca’s children were conceived by one man, our father Isaac. Yet before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad, in order that God’s plan of election might stand, not by works but by Him who calls, she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” So it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
Paul tackles this controversy directly in Romans, with the clearest example of God’s favoritism and bias. Look closely at what is being emphasized. The twins had not done anything good or bad—meaning God’s decision to favor one over the other was not rational, but a sovereign coin flip—and this was “in order that God’s plan of election might stand,” meaning to show that God does choose favorites. And to top it off, Paul even interprets the saying from Malachi 1 to mean that God hated Esau before he was even born. There was no rational cause to hate Esau or love Jacob, but God assigned them the destinies in advance.
(cont.) What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Certainly not! For He says to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then, it does not depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Therefore God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy, and He hardens whom He wants to harden.
Of course, I could have cited this one passage from the beginning to prove what I have been saying. But I wanted to prepare the reader first, so that you would be ready to digest it when you encountered it here. Very few Christians are able to comprehend (or rather, accept) the teachings of Romans 9 when they first read it. Even when they see it with their own eyes, their mind revolts and tries to deny the doctrine that God can be totally arbitrary in His choice of elect and still be considered “just.” Since we have debunked the Humanist concept that every human has inherent value and rights, as well as the church doctrine that God loves everyone, and that we can make a free will choice of salvation, then perhaps we will no longer be offended by this teaching. God’s decision to script good and bad fates for people is just, but not because of rational reasons. It is just because humanity was created from the beginning to play out the cosmic drama that glorifies God via scandals and controversy.
(cont.) One of you will say to me, “Then why does God still find fault? For who can resist His will?” But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, “Why did You make me like this?” Does not the potter have the right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special occasions and another for common use?
Ultimately, Paul falls back on God’s sovereign right to do whatever He wants. Then he doubles down on the notion that God is merely putting up with the NPCs who are doomed for destruction, and manipulating events to patiently help those destined for eternal life:
(cont.) What if God, intending to show His wrath and make His power known, bore with great patience the vessels of His wrath, prepared for destruction? What if He did this to make the riches of His glory known to the vessels of His mercy, whom He prepared in advance for glory—including us, whom He has called not only from the Jews, but also from the Gentiles?2
Prepared in advance for destruction, or glory. Nothing here supports the idea that God is reactive to mankind in the sense of respecting their will. As he said above, it does not depend on man’s efforts or will, but on God’s mercy (or lack thereof). So God can simultaneously plan everything in advance, and yet be highly emotional about the specific events that unfold.
Does that sound rational to you?
Application
I not only fear God because He is a terrifying, jealous, consuming fire, but I love Him for it. I love that God is storing up His wrath in bottles for the end time, and that He is preparing to fulfill His prophecies despite the best efforts of the global satanic conspiracy. I love that I receive no credit for my own salvation, but am purely a work of His mercy on an unworthy lump of clay. History is indeed a story worth reading, and it happened in order to show the elect how lucky they are.
Yes, the satanic conspiracy is doomed. God has been empowering them for centuries, just as He empowered Pharaoh and hardened his heart in order to magnify His name in the cataclysm that followed. God creates villains for His cosmic drama. There’s no point in denying it. This is seen most clearly in the figure of Satan, who is an immortal spirit of deception and malice against God’s Creation, but somehow allowed to persist and increase in power as time goes on. We know that he will ultimately be thrown into the lake of fire and tortured for eternity, but until then God is content to give him authority. This dark being has a privileged role of acting against God’s plan. We must remember that “satan” is not a proper name, but simply a Hebrew noun that means “opposition.” God knew very well that this being’s existence would result in suffering for mankind, but He created him anyway. Does this mean God endorses all of Satan’s evil? No. Does it mean that God is responsible? On a meta level, yes. God is the Author of the cosmic drama, and one only needs to have written a fictional story with a villain to know that the heinous acts they commit are thought up by the author in advance. Yet that doesn’t stop the author from hating their own character. That’s why the villain is scripted to fail in the end, to make the victory of the protagonists that much more enjoyable.
Conclusion
Reader, the older I get, the more I enjoy the way God operates and agree with His assessment of the world. I’m bored of the cycles of nature and the drama of humanity, and I only really feel amused when Christians blow up the satanic conspiracy and prophecy advances another step forward. Whether the events are happy or sad, I’m just waiting for something interesting to happen. And it turns out, God is much the same. Look at the following verses again:
God compares us to a refreshing drink: (Revelation 3:15-16)
“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth.”
God compares us to salt that make food taste better: (Matthew 5:13)
"You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled on by people”
God considers everything to be vain and repetitive: (Ecclesiastes 1:10-11)
Is there anything of which it may be said, “See, this is new”? It has already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after.
God undoes a curse because of delicious barbecue aroma: (Genesis 8:20-22)
Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
Reader, I think we should love that God is not boring and rational. He does not do things proportionately. He gives us infinite love and mercy, when we clearly do not deserve it. He offends the whole world in order to prove a point. He creates villains and heroes and shows the elect what is good and bad in His eyes, by allowing us to see it unfold from generation to generation. We should love that Creation is not stuck in a perpetual cycle forever. God decreed that the cycles would continue for as long as the earth remained, but after the Millennial Kingdom even the earth will be destroyed and God will show us a marvelous New Creation, where anything is possible.
What to expect: In the next part, I will put forward what I consider to be an elegant answer to how both God and other spirits manipulate humans. As far as I know, there is no evidence that God invents the individual acts committed by Satan or evil people, as if they would not have conceived of it otherwise. Please continue to post comments and let me know your thoughts on this series.
God bless you for supporting this publication and leaving comments.
I mean this quite literally. God’s wrath is depicted in Revelation as seven bottles that He has been storing up for the final judgments. They are said to be concentrated and pure. God is simply withholding the wrath from the earth for now, but it will be let out when the time is right, destroying millions of humans in the process as collective punishment. The prayers and supplications of the elect, together with the necessity of waiting until 100% of the elect are saved, is what delays this event.
Again we see an emphasis on the diversity of the elect, while still rejecting the idea of a universal opportunity. God literally prepares the world in advance for the benefit of those who are chosen, and the shocking part is that they are not exclusively Jews.
Terry W. - I have to confess, that was extremely uncomfortable but, certainly interesting. I comfort myself with the idea that it's God's "universe," He certainly knows how to run it. And how He runs it is really none of my business. I knew a man named H. K. MacGreggor Wright, who must have died some time ago now, who told me, "God does what He jolly well likes." I never forgot those words. I find myself becoming irritated and uncomfortable when I hear over and over from people that we have free will. I've suspected for quite some time that we really don't. I have also felt uncomfortable with the idea that God loves everybody. And then there's the "limited atonement" question. And, frankly, I'm not sure what to make of it, and not certain I ever will. I've heard fine sounding arguments on both sides.
I'm not a theologian, but even if I were, why would I need an approach to explaining why God does things? Instead, I am curious, I ask God, and at least occasionally I receive answers, sometimes from scripture and sometimes in other ways.
That is sufficient, and I continue with what I understand I ought to be doing. Learning all of the "whys" is not part of that. What is so terrible about having to say "I don't know"? Does making something up make it better?
One thing those people that Jesus spoke to in parables appeared to lack was openness to discovery and change. As far as we know, only the disciples asked about the meanings and received answers.