Our Finitude.

In considering some of my thoughts from the last post about time, I read this this morning and felt my soul land in the truth of it.  Too often, I find myself resenting the lack of 'space' in life instead of embracing it with faith.  You can read the whole post here.

God does not fault us for our finitude — indeed, we are to glory in it. It was chafing under finitude that actually helped precipitate the fall (Genesis 3:5). When we, as Adam’s descendants repent of this aspect of our fall into sin — which we can only do in the second Adam — we have to do it by embracing that finitude, and not resenting it. There will always be more work to do. Under the sun, this reality is vanity and shepherding wind. But when we’ve been there ten thousand years, we’ve no less days to work God’s praise than when we’d first begun. The very first lesson that a bright eternity in front of us will teach us is how to exult in finitude.

Sinfulness is the other thing. Sin doesn’t want to learn to work by imitating God. Sin is turning away to reflect another source of light — wanting to be moon to another sun, or worse, to be a sun on its own. All we manage to do by this process is become burnt out asteroids. We want to be masters of the grand system, and we want it all done now. The sin here is impatience. We reach, we grasp, we insist, we stomp our little feet.

But God pronounced his work good at every stage of it. He was looking at his partially completed labor of creating the world, and calling it good, when there was only light. Then he had light and dark, dirt and water, and he thought that was good. And so on, throughout his glorious creation on the installment plan. Augustine once wondered about six-day-creation — his problem was why it took so long. Why was God dawdling?

Among many other glories, he was teaching us how to make things.