From God’s point of view

Nowadays, we are seeing a lot of people depending solely on their senses, judgments and reasoning in tackling all their temporal affairs with hardly any reference to God’s will and plans.

Obviously, for Christian believers, all these senses and human intelligence and will are God-given and, as such, can help us tremendously in understanding things. They indeed have to be used to the full.

But they are not meant to be our ultimate recourse. If not inspired by God, if there is no deliberate effort to relate them to God’s will and plans, they can come out with fantastic insights and ideas, but still miss the most important point.

We need to be strongly reminded that God is our Creator. As such, he is the author, foundation, law and standard of all reality. Everything has to be referred to him. He ought to be the inspiration and goal of everything, because nothing is true, good and beautiful unless it is related to him.

Our current problem is that we seem to be steadily making ourselves our own God, our own creator, author, foundation, law and standard of practically everything. God has become irrelevant in our life.

With our increasing capability to master and dominate things, what with all our technological advances, etc., we are slowly shifting from simply being stewards of creation, acting in the name of God our Creator, to being God himself.

We seem to be replaying the story of the tower of Babel, complete with its devastating effects. One wonders why, for example, in spite of our tremendous communication technologies and other political and social maneuvers aimed at unity, we seem to have not only legitimate diversity, but rather more misunderstanding, conflicts, intolerance and hatred.

We seem to have only an appearance of unity and civility, but deep inside many people’s heart reign anger and envy and all the other things that contribute to build up a towering and sometimes exploding tension.

We have to learn to assume the mind of God, as shown to us in Christ and handed down to us through the different instrumentalities of the Church. This may sound presumptuous at the beginning, but a closer look at this claim will reveal a solid basis for it.

We have been made in the image and likeness of God, children of his through his grace that he gives to us in abundance. Even if we sinned and continue to sin, God is ever ready to forgive us.

In short, he is giving us everything that we need to be what we ought to be, that is, children of his, who think and act with freedom in complete consonance to his mind and will.

It’s a pity that many people, especially the young, seem now to be alienated from God. They think and act as if they are strangers to God, and end up left to their own devices. They see, understand and react to things based more on their own ideas, feelings, moods and other worldly conditionings. And so they miss a lot of things.

If their antics click with the world, then they can be happy with an ephemeral joy that is prone to vanity, pride, arrogance and greed. And if their antics don’t click, then they have no other recourse but to fall into a web of sadness, depression, etc.

We have to understand that with God, we have everything that we need to tackle all the situations of our life, whether they be good or bad. With God, all our earthly affairs, our ups and downs, have their meaning and can acquire not only their legitimate temporal value, but their ultimate eternal value. With God, even our human defeats and losses can turn into victories in the end.

We have to know more and more about the mind and will of God as revealed to us in his word in Sacred Scripture and elaborated faithfully and authoritatively by the Church Magisterium.

Let’s remember what the Letter to the Hebrews say about God’s word: It is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”(4,12)

We should make it a habit to regularly read and meditate on the word of God. More than anything else, it is the one that would give us the whole picture of things. Our common sense, our judgments and reasoning, our scientific knowledge and other worldly sources of knowledge should have God as their inspiration and end.