Said Jesus: “My Father,
who gave them to me, is greater than all; and no one is able to pluck them out
of my Father’s hand.” As you glimpse the manifold workings and view the
staggering immensity of God’s well-nigh limitless creation, you may falter in
your concept of his primacy, but you should not fail to accept him as securely
and everlastingly enthroned at the Paradise center of all things and as the
beneficent Father of all intelligent beings. There is but “one God and Father
of all, who is above all and in all,” “and he is before all things, and in him
all things consist.”
The uncertainties of life and the
vicissitudes of existence do not in any manner contradict the concept of the
universal sovereignty of God. All evolutionary creature life is beset by
certain inevitabilities. Consider the following:
1. Is courage — strength
of character — desirable? Then must man be reared in an environment which
necessitates grappling with hardships and reacting to disappointments.
2. Is altruism — service
of one’s fellows — desirable? Then must life experience provide for
encountering situations of social inequality.
3. Is hope — the
grandeur of trust — desirable? Then human existence must constantly be
confronted with insecurities and recurrent uncertainties.
4. Is faith — the
supreme assertion of human thought — desirable? Then must the mind of man find
itself in that troublesome predicament where it ever knows less than it can
believe.
5. Is the love of truth and
the willingness to go wherever it leads, desirable? Then must man grow up in a
world where error is present and falsehood always possible.
6. Is idealism — the
approaching concept of the divine — desirable? Then must man struggle in an
environment of relative goodness and beauty, surroundings stimulative of the
irrepressible reach for better things.
7. Is loyalty — devotion
to highest duty — desirable? Then must man carry on amid the possibilities of
betrayal and desertion. The valor of devotion to duty consists in the implied
danger of default.
8. Is unselfishness — the
spirit of self-forgetfulness — desirable? Then must mortal man live face to
face with the incessant clamoring of an inescapable self for recognition and
honor. Man could not dynamically choose the divine life if there were no
self-life to forsake. Man could never lay saving hold on righteousness if there
were no potential evil to exalt and differentiate the good by contrast.
9. Is pleasure — the
satisfaction of happiness — desirable? Then must man live in a world where the
alternative of pain and the likelihood of suffering are ever-present experiential
possibilities.
Throughout the universe, every unit
is regarded as a part of the whole. Survival of the part is dependent on
co-operation with the plan and purpose of the whole, the wholehearted desire
and perfect willingness to do the Father’s divine will. The only evolutionary
world without error (the possibility of unwise judgment) would be a world
without free intelligence. In the Havona universe there are a
billion perfect worlds with their perfect inhabitants, but evolving man must be
fallible if he is to be free. Free and inexperienced intelligence cannot
possibly at first be uniformly wise. The possibility of mistaken judgment
(evil) becomes sin only when the human will consciously endorses and knowingly
embraces a deliberate immoral judgment.
Excerpt made possible by the Urantia Book
Adonai
Michael of Nebadon
Michael of Nebadon
