This week’s post is the second half of a 2 part series. If you haven’t read “plan a”, go back and read last week’s post.
Have you ever had this conversation?
Turn right in 100 yards
Uh huh
Turn right in 50 yards
Uh huh
Turn right now
Nah
Make a u-turn at 48th street
Yeah
Make a u-turn at 46th street
I don’t think so
Make a u-turn at 44th street
Where’s the volume control?
Make a u-turn at 42nd street
Can somebody shut her up!
Make a u-turn at 40th street
#@!%&^*
Recalculating
I don’t claim to know whether God knew that we were going to mess things up from the start or whether he was surprised by our behavior. But, if you compare the old testament with the new testament, it is pretty clear that God has done some “recalculating” in order to deal with the reality of our situation.
I call this plan b.
The reality of our current situation is that God had a plan for us that was ideal (the garden of Eden……or ….. plan a). Unfortunately, we had other ideas that have resulted in the messed up world that we live in today. We try hard to fix things…… but they just keep getting worse. I try to extrapolate our current path into the future and I have to say that I’m not optimistic. I generally avoid this topic with my kids……. but they tell me that my generation has wrecked things for them. They will have to clean up our (that is the baby boomer’s) mess……or at least try to. The reality is that they probably won’t do any better at it than we did.
How has God handled our behavior? What is God to do with rebellious children? He has a problem strangely familiar to any parent of teens. From my limited perspective, he has a few options.
1. Burn it down and start all over.
2. Compromise himself….. that is……lower himself to our level.
3. Find a “workaround”…….sort of a detour that leaves the mess in place but allows us to ultimately get to where he…… and we want to be.
Christianity teaches that God chose option 3…… and I’m glad he did. Option 1, the cosmic “redo”, and option 2, a God who behaves as badly as we do, are not very appealing.
So what does option 3…….. “plan b” …….look like?
God clarifies and simplifies the rules:
He sent a mentor, Christ, who teaches “love God and love your fellow man”. Hard to argue with that.
Christ takes possession of all of the wrong that we have done, that we are doing, and that we will do. A pretty sweet deal.
I don’t know how this works. It seems to be a deal between Christ and his Father. But, the result is that…… from God’s point of view……. we are made clean. It almost feels like a trick……….. but if it’s good enough for God………it’s good enough for me.
There is a condition.
We have to humble ourselves, recognize Christ’s gift, and ask for it.
Plan b is amazingly simple………. and yet hard. We are not by nature humble creatures. We believe that we are the center of it all…… and we don’t want to give that up…. even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we have messed it all up. Our inability to step away from the center of the universe and to humble ourselves before the creator……. that is to say……..our arrogance ……….is all that stands between us and the destiny that we were created for.