God’s Overarching Design: Human Rescue and Redemptive History

Given that the universe appeared in an instant fourteen billion years ago out of nothing, it is natural to wonder if there was a creator behind its appearance, and if so what that creator’s original intentions were.

Human history is filled with examples of what has been called “man’s inhumanity to man.” The German philosopher Hegel regarded it as a slaughter bench on which the well-being of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals have been sacrificed.

Why has God allowed this? Might it have been part of the divine design from the beginning? How does all this horrific brutality square with the claim that God is loving?

As suggested elsewhere on this site, no one has come up with a fully satisfactory response to the problem of evil that everyone finds satisfactory. God seems to have created us in a way that doing so is impossible. In the face of the slaughter, how can a God who presumably can do anything also be loving?

Christian theologians sometimes speak of redemptive history, by which they mean God’s involvement in human affairs that reflects an overarching purpose. This purpose is to transform people into creatures fit to spend eternity in God’s domain. The Bible refers to this domain as heaven.

Biblical scholars continue to debate exactly what heaven is. Few suggest it’s a physical place, although some scholars believe, using words from the last book in the New Testament, there will eventually be a new heaven and a new earth. Most agree that when they die Christians will continue to be conscious of themselves and others.

The human brain is the organ of expression for the mind, and as the brain changes over time, so do its modes of expression. For our purposes, we will set aside whether life after death reflects the mind we had as a child, a young adult, or if we last that long, of a senile ninety-year-old.

Some theologians believe everyone, including the worse among us, will ultimately be transformed into beings suitable for God’s domain. Others believe those who are unfit for heaven will, when they die, simply cease to exist. Still others think of those ill-suited for heaven as eternally separated from God, that they will forever long for a joy and blessedness they have irreparably lost. They may find it difficult to get around the many references to hell in the Bible and therefore believe that unhappiness, in some form or other, may be the never-ending lot of some. It may be that “lost souls” throughout their lives have decided against God and therefore have lost the ability to respond to God’s love.

Regardless of what happens to people who reject God, the central theme of the New Testament, its centerpiece, is that Jesus came to repair and restore our relationship with God. It has been said that in doing so Jesus lived the life we should have lived. He also died the death we should died because of our failure to live as God intends.

Even in the face of evil, many people who never attend church are willing to accept that God is loving. But they may also be uncomfortable with the suggestion that to be with God—be around God—we have to live a certain way, and that if we don’t there are consequences. But there are.

Jesus came to release us from these consequences. Some believe that believing that he has done this takes care of the matter. Others believe that along with this belief a person must become and remain open to the leading of God’s Spirit and that, therefore, his or her behavior will visibly change. Still others believe that, because of our egocentric natures, God is not finished transforming us and that this refining process will continue after death.

God’s overarching design, whether we know it or not, is to change us from caricatures, cutout figures, into full citizens of the divine realm, a change that begins now, not in the future. It is also part of God’s purpose that Christians help transform society into what God intends.

The Grand Architect wants to redeem us from the pawn shop of life and its decadence by what the God-Man, Jesus, accomplished. Only someone who was both divine and human could provide this redemption.

Nearly all of us have lived our lives under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Several countries, some friendly and others hostile, have atomic weapons and the necessary delivery systems that could guarantee mutually assured global destruction. And the number of these countries is growing, with no end in sight.

As unthinkable as it may seem, this is not fantasy but reality. Earthquakes seem like remote events, off in the future, until they happen.

Given the nature of human beings, out of moral perversity, mental instability, or sheer pride and the refusal to accept limitations, certain perverse rules may be willing to destroy everything. So far, God seems to have prevented this. But even if God were eventually to allow it to happen, Christians look forward to a future as part of a redeemed humanity.

It can be difficult to grasp where we are, as humans, in the overall scheme of things. We resemble both angels and animals, angels as being spiritual beings and animals as creatures intent on survival. What can be even harder to understand is how we are immensely important to God, who made us to enjoy relationships with each other and more significantly with our creator through Christ. God intends to form a new humanity capable of pure love, and Jesus was its prototype.

The arc of the story, from the creation of human beings to never-ending life with God, is what theologians mean by redemptive history. It is reason for profound optimism.