The Perfect Mind

The wisdom of God in fulfilling His plans is all-encompassing, precise, and flawless.

The Perfect Mind #7

The Perfect Mind is so incredibly powerful that when He conceives of something, He not only knows exactly what it will or won’t do when it comes into existence, He knows exactly how the thing He creates will affect everything else in His universe. When He created the concept of a flower He also created the concept of a bee. He decided to make flowers colorful and to give human beings the ability to see in color and to appreciate physical beauty. He also decided to give man a sensitive tongue and to make the food that bees produce sweet to our taste. God is not only able to create a concept of a thing that never existed before, He effortlessly understands how everything He made would interact with everything else.

The Perfect Mind #6

At this point in human history it is important to spend a few minutes talking about the Perfect Mind and all of the little imperfect minds that He has made in His image. Some of the imperfect minds have drunk deeply from the cup of fear that is one of the favorite beverages of their infernal master, the Devil. These soulless bureaucrats and academics have learned to do some simple mathematics and have come to a dreadful conclusion. The party is over. Our children and grandchildren will have less than we have. We’ve used up all the resources. The human population is too large. Doom is just around the corner. We’ve done the math and the conclusion is as inevitable as it is unavoidable.

All of this seems to resonate with that portion of God’s people who have been flummoxed by another popular lie of the enemy: God is a cosmic grump who is looking over His creation to see who might be having a good time so He can bring that merry making to a proper, sober, grim conclusion as soon as possible.

The only solution, we are told, is to give increasing power to an increasingly atheistic state. We must surrender as much freedom as we can as fast as we can. It is the only way to safety. But not to worry, godless atheists who have a superior capacity for remembering and regurgitating information (taking tests in schools) without any real capacity to understand the facts they have memorized will be watching over the whole process to make sure that the new super-state will be fair and benevolent. We call these people intellectuals and academics, and we can call this new super-state that they want to create a false god.

To which I can only reply, “hogwash.” Need I remind you that until human beings figured out a way to make use of the stuff, that oil seeping out on to farmland was considered a curse? They are trying to tell us that there is an energy crises in a world that has so much energy that you can just about blow everything up simply by breaking the bonds that hold atomic particles together?

They are underestimating the gift that is God’s creation and the capacity for creativity that He has given to His offspring. Once, a long time ago, things were very much as they are now. Human beings were making incredible progress. The Perfect Mind assessed the situation and this was His conclusion: “And now nothing that they purpose to do will be impossible to them.” (Genesis 11:6) That party did come to an end, but it was ended by God’s judgment on human pride and evil, not because of any lack of human creativity or lack of resources.

If the party that is modern civilization comes to an end, it will be due to sin and pride, not a lack of creativity and resources. If you don’t believe me, you might take a moment to think about the fact that you are reading the words of an obscure nobody who is typing away in his modest house in a small town; but because the Perfect Mind allowed a tiny spark from the infinite fire of His mind to dwell in human beings, the potential audience for my little babbling is in the millions.

The Perfect Mind #5

For a human being with a finite mind the act of creation is only the beginning of a process of discovery. When we conceive of something in our minds and try to create it, we make three important discoveries. First, we learn if it is even possible to make the thing in the first place; then we learn if the thing will work; and then we learn how well it will work.

After a prescription drug is invented we then have to spend time and millions of dollars finding out if it will work the way it is supposed to. In the process of testing we sometimes find out that the drug won’t do what we thought it would do, but that it will do something else entirely different than what we had in mind when we created it. There is a drug that was developed to help people stop smoking that was found to have significant value as an anti-depressant. No one had any idea that they were creating a drug to treat depression; it was a happy discovery made as the drug was tested. God does not learn anything new about what He has made after He has made it.

The Perfect Mind #4

It is very important for us to remind ourselves that while we are made in God’s image that God is not some sort of a super competent, extra-extra large human being. You don’t create a picture of God by taking human abilities and making them vastly larger than any human being could ever be; but you do get something of a true picture of God by taking a human ability and conceiving of it as being infinite.

The Perfect Mind #3

The infinite, Perfect Mind, is infinitely kind. God is a kind God. His love makes Him kind. In the English language the two words have been combined together to make one of the most beautiful words of all: lovingkindness. Because God is infinite, He will never be able to show us that full extent of His creativity or His kindness. Billions of years will go by and there will still be more of Him that we haven’t seen than what we have seen.

People wonder what in the world we are going to do with all that everlasting time in the life to come. They needn’t worry, God already has a plan in place. Paul tells us what is going to happen in Ephesians 2:7, one of the most staggering statements in all of holy writ. In the “ages to come” God will “show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness to us.”

The Perfect Mind is going to spend the rest of forever finding new ways to be kind to us, to bless us, and to love us. This staggering display of divine benevolence will be so awesome that the current universe will be too small a stage for God to work on. He is going to create a new heavens and a new earth and you and I are going to watch Him do it. And after it is made, as we wander through the newly made earth, marveling at all He has made, keep this in mind, dear brethren. He is getting warmed up.

The Perfect Mind #2

Our God is a creative God and because we are made in His image, we are creative people. That being said, the difference between His creative actions and ours is profound. When a human being creates, he takes things that already exist and combines then in ways that are new to him. I can sit down and create a simple melody, and it is possible that I will have chosen a combination of sounds that has never been combined before by another human being. God doesn’t create like that. God invented sound waves. Then He invented the human ear so that we could hear the sounds. Then He created within us a capacity to appreciate certain combinations of sounds and call them music.

In this we see not only the creativity of the perfect mind, but also the kindness of God. He didn’t have to make us with ears to hear. There is no particular reason why we should be able to smell bread as it bakes. It is conceivable that human beings could have been constructed in such a way so that babies could be conceived by the man giving a woman one single tap of his forefinger on her forehead.

As you walk through the world, may your eyes be open to see in God’s world, not only the breathtaking creativity of the Perfect Mind, but also the infinite kindness of God.

The Perfect Mind #1

God doesn’t learn. God knows. God does not acquire data or receive new information. Even though we are made in His image, this is one area where there is a stark contrast between His mind and ours. We come into the world knowing virtually nothing and spend the rest of our lives learning and acquiring new data. God doesn’t acquire new data because there simply is no new data for Him to acquire. God can never be surprised by anything or caught off guard. He knows all that was, all that is, and all that will be. He is the Perfect Mind.

Why me, Lord? Why do I have to have seasonal affective disorder? Why have I had a lifelong battle with depression? Why me, Lord?

Why couldn’t I have been like Abraham Lincoln, who faced a harder struggle with depression than any I have known and who had a wife who was bi-polar – decades before any of our modern anti-depressant drugs were developed.

Why me, Lord?

­­Why me, Lord? Why can’t I afford to buy more and better toys? Why can’t I afford a state of the art laptop and a huge, hi def TV?

Why do I get to live in a house with three TV’s? Why do each of my three TV’s get over 70 channels? Why am I able to afford a desktop computer with high speed internet access? How come I can afford to buy more computer games than I have time to play? Why am I able to sit at my desk and look across the room to an entire wall of books that I own, filling the wall from the floor to the ceiling, with most of the shelves having not one, but two rows of books? Why do I get to live in a country with public libraries, where I can order virtually any book in print (over my home computer) and read virtually anything I want?

Why me, Lord?

Why me, Lord? Why do I get sick?

Why couldn’t I have lived at a time before the invention of antibiotics? Why couldn’t I have lived in the 19^th century, where one of my heroes, Hudson Taylor, had had as many bacteriological infections as I do? Why don’t I get to be like Hudson Taylor and have to go to bed for weeks, or even months, waiting to see if my body will fight off the infection or it I will die from it? Why haven’t I had the experience of shaking so badly from a fever that my bed was rattling on the wooden floor?

Why, when my daughter had ear infection after ear infection when she was a toddler, did she get to take antibiotics? Why isn’t she deaf? How is it that she is still alive? Why couldn't I be like Hudson Taylor, who buried two small children and a wife on Chinese soil?

Why me, Lord? Why does my family have access to antibiotics?

Why me, Lord? Why can’t I get a promotion?

Why did I get to grow up in a family where we went to the library every week? Why was it the expectation in my family that kids would go to college? Why did I get to live in a stable, two parent family that was able to help me finance my college education? Why can’t I be trapped in a near minimum wage job with no higher education?

Why me, Lord?