Article 8: Playing the Long Game

Authors note: Due to the sheer volume of articles this series has resulted in I want to take a moment to tell you they are intended to be read sequentially, the ideas building on each other as they progress. While they can also be read individually, a fuller understanding can only be reached by starting at the beginning, found here: https://www.pjbenjamin.net/a-long-overdue-elucidation/

Rule Three of the Firmament:

All intelligent races in existence likely stand within one or more of these states

*Primordial
–Made New and Blameless
-Corrupted and Afflicted:
- Recipients of Passive Wrath
- Promised and Waiting
- Justified or Judged
- Made Blameless Anew
-Maturing and Blameless
-Authoritative and Blameless
-Mutually Interactive

Promised and Waiting

How do you best know if you can trust someone? Is it a charming smile? The types of hobbies or ideologies that have? Their associates? Some trust everyone they meet, and some no one at all. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. Although we all have ways of deciding for ourselves, the unfortunate truth is that most people’s ability to assess trustworthiness is vastly underdeveloped. Most default to trusting people who have been kind to them and been kind the longest. Following naturally behind that are often those who claim to believe what we believe, and are from the same place or even race. In short, those with whom they can relate to. Without question, the strength of trust is one of the surest metrics for determining the strength of a relationship. Whether that is between a parent and child, friends, a marriage, or something as mundane as a business contact. As we close in on the next sub-category, trust will be at its heart. How does a being of infinite time and scope earn the trust of a childlike race that dies as quickly as it forgets, and rebels so easily? What is the best approach to proving trustworthiness?

As I planned this article, I struggled to settle on examples of what I wanted to explain. not because I was lacking any, but because there are simply too many. The scope involves the entire Old Testament just to start. As a result, I had to scale back and start by looking at what God intends to do, and what he must achieve to communicate it. We must consider the problems God faces when looking down at humanity. He is an infinite being, who wants to teach humanity, yet we have distorted our ability to be in his presence and hear his voice. Further, we have set our hearts against him and turned toward our desires. Desires, many of which have become so perverted from their intention that they harm ourselves and often everyone around us, continually. We have broken relationships. We have earned any kind of judgment we receive. Yet God, in his nature (a heart of mercy within justice) has the plan to save us from ourselves. First, to develop trust between us and him. Second, to use that trust so that when he teaches us the truth, we believe it. Third, to enact his plan to re-established the kind of loving relationship we were created to have and to do so in such a way as to understand the heart of our infinite Father.

Imagine a situation where a loving single father in a safe neighborhood leaves his doors unlocked. In the night an intruder breaks in and kidnaps his four-year-old daughter. The father is devastated, but the police investigation turns up nothing. Despite the father’s every effort, he is unable to find his little girl. In the next eleven years, the girl is abandoned and spends her young life in a variety of abusive foster homes. Broken by life and lack of love, she turns into a runaway. Within that first year on the streets, she gets caught breaking into a home and is brought before a judge. Yet when she gets to court it comes out that the house in question belonged to her father. The very moment he sees her he knows her. At the revelation of who she is, the father is overjoyed and hugs her. As you can imagine she lashes out with a hiss and a slap. Every person she has ever tried to trust has abused or abandoned her. And even if this man is her father, it only makes him the first to fail to keep her safe. Each and every hardship can be laid, to her thinking, at his feet. So how does the father create a relationship out of broken pieces with a now broken person? First, he must prove who he is, who they are, and the trouble she finds herself in.

This is where God starts with Noah. God points to the world and expresses the truth, that it is in a terrible state and worthy of judgment. As I have covered before, justice had to be demonstrated to Noah and by him his witness to the world. We know this is successful because we have all heard a recounting of the flood at some point or another. The fully justified judgment had to be enacted so that we might know forever after that God has the right, the power, and the will for judging transgressors. Know it, and know specifically that the reason we do not face it at this moment is because of his design. He is establishing who he is with Noah, and thus humanity, like the aforementioned father might with birth certificates, police reports, and family photos. Yet even if the father convinces his daughter who he is, and saves her from a just punishment of juvenile detention, that doesn’t mean they are a parent and child yet, at least not in the eyes of the child. And so it was with humanity.

In the end, the young woman agrees to go home with her father. After all, it is that or ends up back in the system or juvenile hall. But no matter what the father claims, or even proves, it does not in itself create a relationship. The two sit down and the father tells her that even though she does not remember him, he never once stopped loving her. He promises to never leave or abandon her. That he will be for her the father she always wanted. That there is nothing she can do to drive him away from her life. He will always be there for her. She is ready to dismiss his words, but once said she finds she cannot disbelieve them. Yet just because he means it does not undo a lifetime of trauma. Over the next few years, she slips back into old habits. She gets in trouble with the police, gets drunk at parties, and even runs away. Yet he always finds her and welcomes her home. And while he provides specific rules to guide and instruct her, he keeps his every promise faithfully regardless of her rebellion. In time he earns not only her trust, but a vibrant relationship, and she leaves her old patterns behind. Eventually, she even sees that the rules were an expression of her father’s love.

In our parable, we come here to Abraham, and to the category of Promised and Waiting. A race in this subcategory has entered into a relationship with its creator once more, but the difference now is that there remains separation caused by the brokenness of the relationship and the race in question. For humanity, God chooses one couple, Abraham and Sarah, who are in a place of life where the family has proven itself impossible. God tells them that he will change that and that they are to follow him, that he will be their God. Through their children, over the rest of Genesis and into Exodus (some 600 years) follow a pattern of promise and fulfillment. A series of grand signs and establishments of the Israelites as God’s chosen people. Just like that father, God shows up when they are faithless, he shows up when they need guidance, and he shows up when they are in captivity both physically like a jail cell, and emotionally by their old patterns. He gives rules not to control, but to create a healthy environment to thrive where he can prove his word to be good.

Let’s take a moment to look at the course of action our infinite ageless God has chosen. Knowing us to be short-lived and shortsighted, he has selected one person who without God intervening would be the end of his line, and used him to create a whole nation of people. A nation that would never have existed otherwise. He has given them rules to keep themselves as a people apart from other people. He has established his place over them as their God so that when the time comes to extend the offer of relationship to the whole world, there is (literally) an entire library of history that shows his faithfulness, and his current promises (both prophetic and explicit). Almost two thousand years of setting the stage so that when he comes to us as the Son, we can see the fulfillment of the promises and the creation of new ones.

The Jewish people are God’s chosen people. Chosen, and very clearly sustained through endless hardships that have destroyed countless people groups, and cultures over humanity’s history. They received his promise and waited. It was with the coming of God himself into humanity that all of that history came to fruition. Several thousand years to gain the trust, maintain the trust, and teach us enough so that as soon as his message could go global it could also be understood. We who follow his son are followers of a new promise and are waiting for his second coming, for the next subcategory of Justified or Judged.

In terms of the creation of fictional races the most important points for this subcategory are that God first must establish trust. For us, that meant the creation of the Jewish people in order to prove and re-prove himself. For an ageless race, it would likely mean only a single occurrence. What is important is that God is seeking to communicate his plan so that we understand it and appreciate its end game. He’s like a father explaining the travel itinerary to his five-year-old for their vacation. Without any explanation all the child will see is an unfamiliar car ride to a loud and crowded airport followed by endless uncomfortable lines. But if we can just hold on to the promise of that vacation, we can endure what it takes to get there. Love is what best creates the trust, which allows for the teaching, to understand the promise, to be able to endure the wait, to experience the fullness of the gift to be given. The Promise and Waiting category are meant to clarify that God does not simply act in a vacuum. He reaches out to us as we are, in a way we can understand, and I believe he would do so for any race he would seek to reconnect to.