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God Is Not Simple

by James Barringer  
11/10/2009 / Christian Apologetics

Have you ever wondered why God does some of the things he does? Earlier today I was driving around town and happened to pass by a building that my old church used to meet in. For a variety of reasons, the church closed down and folded into another church, which kept meeting in the building. Now the building is deserted; I don't know what happened to the other church or where they are. That's a pretty strange turn of events, especially for a pair of churches. You would think that, as the people on earth who actually care about God and are doing their best to honor him, he would cut us Christians a little slack, maybe make life a smidgen easier for us, but it seems it rarely works that way.

It's perplexing how God's path is rarely straight. If you look at your own life and where your spiritual walk is today, you would probably have to admit that it was the crookedest, most unpredictable line you could possibly have taken, but that the one constant is that it has continually (for the most part; everyone has ups and downs) led you closer to God. On your own, though, you'd probably be hard-pressed to find any discernible constant or pattern. Maybe you went to college for something that you never ended up doing. Maybe the job you're doing now is something you never imagined yourself doing. I would bet that none of us reading this had predicted, five or ten years ago, that they would be where they are doing what they're doing. God's unpredictability tends to drive us bonkers.

Humans on the whole tolerate simplicity very well, and we get antsy when faced with complication. This, it would seem, is one thing that makes us different from God. For example, did you know that the earth has twenty-two thousand different varieties of orchids? There are over twelve thousand species of ants. Ants! There are seven different types of stars and four different kinds of galaxies. And we purport to worship the God who created them all. Clearly simplicity is not something that he values very highly.

Indeed, he created the universe for the purpose of showing us what he is like. Romans 1 explains that "his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, can be clearly seen, being understood from what has been made." When we look at creation, we understand that only a great and powerful God could have made it, so we worship him. However, when we look at creation, we also see that it is massively complicated, and that only a very complex and creative God could have made it. This is not only true of creation as well, but of life. Both of these are outworkings of a complicated God. If the universe is the way he expresses himself to us, and life is the way he expresses himself in relationship with us, shouldn't it stand to reason that both life, and our faith, should be complicated things?

And I think this is one of the major things that separates Christianity from the other religions in the world. We say quite often that our faith is "a relationship, not a religion," in spite of how frequently some people persist in trying to boil it down to the rules and formulas that would make it a religion. Basically, we believe that we just have to grab God's coattails and hang on for dear life, while he goes wherever he goes, because we believe that following him will make us into the kind of person he wants us to be. When he prevents me from finding a job or a place to live in Fort Worth where all my friends are, and shunts me over to Florida instead for very few reasons that I can figure out, I shrug and follow, because that's what my faith is all about. I could hardly say that such a thing was simple.

Contrast this with other religions, which are so simplistic that they are laughable. Islam is filled to bursting with restrictive rules. One could almost imagine Allah grunting, Tarzan-style, "Murder bad. Booze bad. Alms good. Uh." That's basically all you have to do to be a good Muslim; it's very unimaginative, and paints God as quite the simpleton. Life is much more complicated than that, is it not? Hinduism is even worse; their basic tenet is "Be a good person and you will get rewarded." You don't even have to believe in any kind of God to follow that kind of philosophy. (Sadly, many people believe that Christianity teaches the same thing, which of course is not true.)

By contrast, Christianity is complex almost to the point of confusion. In order to be saved, we don't have to do anything - we merely have to have faith, whatever that is, that God became a person, died on a cross, and came back from the dead, and that somehow (we might not even be able to explain how) this serves to make us right with God. What a convoluted religion! Then, once we have been made right with God, we're supposedly made into a new creation, receiving a kind of cosmic heart transplant so that our old sinful heart goes away and is replaced by one that wants to do the right thing - and we're instructed merely to "take up our cross" and follow Jesus. The Bible contains a lot of advice about what this looks like; I don't mean to make it sound like there are no rules in the Bible, but Jesus is pretty open about the fact that the rules that matter most are "Love the Lord your God" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." I don't know if you've ever tried loving someone, especially someone who's hard to love, but it's a lot more difficult than just following a few rules. Sometimes I think I would rather have the rules.

In a way, this is good evidence that our faith is not made up by people, because people tend to make up very simplistic things. Islam and Hinduism are good examples. If you asked a child why he failed to turn in his homework, he would say, "My dog ate it," because this is plausible. He would not tell some lengthy story about beings of pure energy from the X dimension incarnating themselves in the form of the words he had written on his homework page, destroying his work in the process. If a child told you that story, and really appeared to believe it, you would have to conclude that either it really did happen or he was completely insane.

Yet I say that Christianity - and the difficult, unpredictable path that our lives often take - is as satisfyingly complicated as life itself, and as the God we worship. We readily admit that there is a great deal of mystery in this thing called faith. We don't know how God could be three and also be one. We can't even look at any given person and say for sure whether they're a Christian or not, because only God can judge their heart. What kind of man-made religion would say that you can never know who is and who isn't a true member?

If you go through life expecting God to be simple and predictable, to move you from where you are to where you want to be in a direct straight line, you're going to get flattened by reality. Reality - life, creation, the stars and galaxies, the plants and animals - reality is complicated, because it emanates from an intimate, boundless God whose creativity is unrivaled. Much as it chafes at us, much as it can be unspeakably frustrating to see God do unexpected things, and much as we wish sometimes that he would just calm down and be easier to understand, we know that his infinite nature and boundless creativity - the things that make him seem, to us, complicated - are worthy of our worship anyway.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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