Is God Too Involved in Our Lives, Or Not Enough?

Isn’t it a sign of arrogance to think that the Creator of this vast universe would be concerned about our petty everyday problems?

That’s one reaction I get from people during my Gospel outreach conversations. Another is the opposite – How could a good God make us and NOT get involved when he sees the pain and suffering we go through?

So is God overly concerned about our everyday lives, or not enough?

I believe both lines of thinking can be traced back to the same problem – the human tendency to underestimate God’s divine attributes – such as his wisdom or knowledge – and to think that God has the same sort of limitations we have.

For example, The Problem of Evil - a good God allowing pain and suffering – misjudges God’s infinite wisdom, saying that since we can’t explain the pain and suffering of a situation, then God must not care to help though He is able to. But the mistake here is that God’s thoughts are so much higher than ours.

In Isaiah 46, God declares “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’” We don’t see the big picture, and wrongly conclude that God doesn’t either.

But a young lady at the grocery store named Alisha had the opposite view – that God wouldn’t be concerned about the details of our petty lives.

At first, this view seems rather humble – after all, who are we in the context of history and the vastness of the universe to think that the Creator of it all would be concerned about us?

Others carry this to another extreme – who are we among the animal kingdom to think that we might deserve special treatment among other living things? I actually see this playing out to its logical conclusion among those in the environmental movement – that the world would simply be better without us.

So what can give us dignity, worth, and value as human beings, other than God, in whose image we are made? What gives our lives purpose and meaning, if not God who tells us so?

But Alisha had a different reason for doubting God’s involvement with our daily lives. She and others like her believe that either God isn’t able to keep track of such an enormous amount of details, or that it would be a lot of work for Him to do so, and such an effort would be demeaning and pathetic for God to get involved in.

But this presupposes a limit to God’s knowledge and power, as if God were a limited, created being like ourselves. The truth is that when God sees us as we are now, he remembers every detail in our past, and he knows every detail of our future with absolutely no effort whatsoever.

Every single one of us. All 7+ billion of us. Every detail. No effort.

To think that the God who made us is incapable of such knowledge is to vastly underestimate God and in so doing vastly overestimate ourselves by comparison.

That’s not humble at all. It’s actually very arrogant, as if we could have actually made it this far without God’s intimate and sustaining help.

Rather than depending on our own limited imaginations, let’s rely on God’s word to appreciate His active involvement in our fallen world, and his wisdom in seeming to keep his distance at times.