Christians have a lot of questions and rightly so. We believe in a perfect God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent—that is, He knows all things, has all power, and is in all places. Yet our world doesn’t always seem to exhibit what we believe about God.
Our thoughts often run counter to these omni-qualities of God. If God knows all things, why isn’t He stepping in more tangibly to help me? If He has all power, why is this happening to me? If He’s in all places, why do I struggle to find Him?
We go to church and ask these questions, but we often don’t find the answers we were looking for. What the pastor or leader has to say in response to our question feels a bit stale. Occasionally it sounds like they’re repeating something someone said to them that they themselves don’t really believe. And if we challenge their answers thoughtfully, we might just be told that it’s all a divine mystery.
But while there are certainly plenty of mysteries in the Christian faith, there are also plenty of answers. In fact, I think many of life’s big questions can be found by understanding the framework God has created more clearly. Yes, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but the world that He has created isn’t one in which He exercises the full force of those characteristics at all times. He can exercise that full force if He wants to, and sometimes does, but that’s not the norm.
Rather, God has created a framework as to how creation is to generally operate. And so the better we understand this framework, the better we can understand life’s big questions. The deeper we know the overarching story the whole Bible paints for us, the more clearly we can comprehend the disconnect between our broken world and our perfect God, as well as what our role in God’s Grand Framework is.
I don’t know about you, but as a pastor, I grow tired of cliché answers—especially the ones that are Biblically wrong but generally accepted. Both young and old Christians are looking for thoughtful responses to chew on and they can often sense when they’re not getting them. Many have left our faith for this very reason.
But the Bible has more answers than most think. And in order to understand those answers, we need to pay close attention to how God has designed existence to work. And once we understand God’s Grand Framework better, we will start to understand our place in His story.
Jamin Bradley 