Day 9: Living Daily in Reality: Does our Maker know everything?
We're talking about living each day in reality rather than the dream-world of the media or the transitory world of each day's activities. Obviously this forces us to face the question 'what is reality'. We've answered on the basis of the only human life that seems to have been directly related to the Maker of the world. We've been saying that this (the actions and words of Jesus of Nazareth whose historicity we've discussed in the first six videos) indicates that there is no life outside him and his father. This is part of the reason we were created actually inside him -- so that we would share his existence and could continue to exist even after initially choosing to reject his life. In this way our creator made us with the same free will as he has, allowed us to reject his life, see the consequences of our choice in this world, and then choose finally life or nothingness.
Most parents know what an agony they've often had to bear to give their children this privilege of free will; this is obviously multiplied and intensified billions of times when one thinks of a good, loving father bearing within himself the tortures of world-wars and domestic strife. Did the maker of the universe know this would happen ? Even we humans with our finite minds are capable of foreseeing and foreknowing what certain children and adults will probably do. But an infinite mind that originates everything certainly knows what we humans will do: his love is not in his ignorance but in his willingness to bear the consequences in his own heart so that we will see plainly the effects of our choices. Indeed, he foreknew because he foreordained, and he foreordained because his love has to bear and transform its opposite. So our maker has to conceive not only what he is but also what he is not - and he has to endure that.
This endurance or patience is intensified by the reality of the eternity that Einstein clarified in scientific terms when he posited the relativity of time. Through illustrations with one clock at sea-level and the other at the top of a mountain, he pointed out not only that time is relative to space but that eternity includes and transcends time. So God himself foresaw the long, agonizing history of the universe in a millisecond, saw his son come to earth in his own physical body, then in our billions of personal bodies, and bore the pain of it all instantaneously. In so far as he shares all our moments in his son, he bears the pain continuously in time until it ends "for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which he has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them". Although his love requires that he never force our wills yet it also requires that he work with our waywardness to enable us to make a true choice between life and death, his son within us and our empty selves.
If you imagine yourself as the absolute and ultimate maker and sustainer of the universe, you know that your ensuring free will in your creatures must stem from your own inner integrity and respect for free will. It cannot come from your handing them over to some abstract force called chance: otherwise that force would be the ultimate ruler. Thus you have to know all that will happen in the universe that you have made !