Why the Book Was Better

“Oh, books, what books they used to know,

Those children living long ago!

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)

 

Well-stocked libraries are the BEST. I accept no dissent.

The thing about film adaptations of books or series of books – a category which I think it’s fair to say constitutes a phenomenally high proportion of mainstream cinematic releases at the present time – is that they’re pretty much doomed before they’re even produced. When I say ‘doomed’ here, I don’t, of course, mean doomed to box office failure; in fact, quite the opposite would appear to be true, since adapting a beloved book series is a tried-and-tested way of pretty much guaranteeing an audience regardless of the film’s other ingredients. Nor do I mean doomed to cinematic mediocrity; adaptations of books can and regularly do make good films. What I mean is that they are pretty much doomed to be worse as films than the books upon which they are based are as books.

Maybe it’s just the circles I move in, but I hardly ever come across anyone singing the praises of a film adaptation while harbouring dislike for its book counterpart, and yet the opposite situation is rife. People are always telling me how much better the original book form of such-and-such a story is than its equivalent film version. I frequently say the same myself. Off the top of my head, some comparatively worse film adaptations of comparatively better books (I won’t waste your time by going into how good I would consider each book or film to be on a broader scale) include Coraline, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, The Lorax, I Am Number Four, A Series of Unfortunate Events,¹ both Percy Jackson films, all the Narnia series, all the Harry Potter series, and The Sword in the Stone (which I’m reading at the moment and would recommend). As for film adaptations which improve on their book equivalents, the only one I can think of that I’ve seen is The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.² There’s more behind this state of affairs, I think, than a lack of capability on the part of filmmakers compared to authors: a film adaptation is by its very nature almost insurmountably destined to be worse than the book whence it draws its story. I present five reasons why.

1)       The book came first.

Inherently, it was the book that actually broke the ground here. The book was the pioneer and is credited as such: it planted its flag in the previously unexplored zones of human imagination that it was the first to unlock, and that flag cannot be uprooted. There is no credit left to claim for conquering that ground. Then the film adaptation rocks up: bound to the book by its very nature, it nevertheless thereby clamps huge restrictions over its own capacity for originality. Either it must stick as closely as possible to the book in order to benefit vicariously from as large a proportion of the book’s credit as possible, meaning, inevitably, that it can be no better than the book even if it does what it does absolutely perfectly; or it must attempt to break new ground worthy of its own credit by making alterations to the substance of the book, which is a risky business (since it was the fact that the book was as good as it was that warranted a film adaptation in the first place, and similarity to the book is likely to be what the core, guaranteed audience of the film is looking for) and a very difficult balance to strike. Simply by virtue of having come first, the book version is immediately at an advantage.

And because it came first, the book was created in the most fitting medium for it, namely…

2)      The book was conceived of as a book.

The trouble with the first adaptation strategy outlined above – sticking as closely as possible to the book – is that film is a totally different medium to words on a page. A book can convey precisely the information the author wishes to convey: it can explicitly describe smells and textures and sensations that film can only indicate through character reactions; it can get right inside characters’ heads and explain nuances of their thought processes that can’t be communicated by even the cleverest actor; or likewise, it can be economical with detail for effect, whereas a film is generally obliged to have some level of completeness in what it conveys: the whole scene has to be set, even if we’re only really interested in a bit of it. Now, that’s not to say film as a medium doesn’t have its own advantages, but the point is that it has a different set of them. A film is certainly more than capable of telling a good story, but it cannot tell a story in the same way a book can. It has, if you’ll permit a metaphor, a different vocabulary and syntax; as with any translation, the translation of a story from one medium to another is bound to cause something to be lost.

As a bit of a side note, I think the best way to approach this issue is to flaunt the genre change, to make the very most of everything the medium of film offers. Catching Fire made a particularly good job of this. To be fair, it had some advantage in that the book was essentially about a televised event, so that that aspect of the story was in one way only coming home to its proper medium; but on top of that, the regular depictions of events Katniss, as the books’ present-tense, first-person narrator, couldn’t possibly have witnessed, really worked to build an atmosphere of brink-of-revolution tension that I didn’t feel came across nearly as well in the book. That said, the book versions of both Hunger Games sequels were rather disappointing: they felt somewhat unplanned and forced, their storylines pushing the edges of the sphere of plausibility laid out in the first of the trilogy. Presumably, Suzanne Collins hadn’t anticipated being asked to write sequels when she submitted her quite excellent debut novel for publication; the filmmakers, by contrast, were aware of the whole story from the start, and made the most of the fact.

 

The book was not, in this instance, better.

One of the commendable aspects of a book that is entirely inevitably missing from any film adaptation is that…

3)      The book was versatile in practical terms.

This point, admittedly, strays a little in the direction of a broader argument in favour of the superiority of books generally over films generally, which is not really what I’m trying to do in this post. I can’t say I agree with Roald Dahl’s rather Luddite opinions about entertainment as expressed in the poem from which my opening quotation is drawn; while I certainly adore books, I also enjoy TV as much as the next millennial with a knack for procrastination. Still, the point does, I feel, constitute a factor in why film adaptations are worse than the books on which they’re based, so I thought I’d make it in any case.

A film requires the viewer to engage with it on its terms; a book can be engaged with more on the reader’s. I mean this in quite mundane, practical ways. For instance, a book is extremely portable: it can be easily carried about and read almost anywhere, including in places where it’s impossible or inadvisable to use electricity, like the beach or the bath. If you hit a sentence that’s a tad difficult to grasp, it’s no trouble at all to reread it a couple of times until it makes sense, or similarly, if you encounter a particularly delectable chunk of prose, you can reread it for the sheer pleasure with equal ease; to do the same in a film requires some skill in the delicate art of fine rewinding (assuming the option is even available, which it isn’t in the cinema or with some Disney DVDs), and is frankly more trouble than it’s worth. Nobody mumbles in books, whereas I missed some pretty key plot points in The Dark Knight Rises just because I had no idea what Batman and Bane were saying to each other half the time.³ A book doesn’t buffer or freeze or run out of charge. It doesn’t require headphones if you want to enjoy it on a train or in a library. In short, the process of reading a book is altogether more straightforward, with less potential for things to go wrong, than the process of watching a film.

Furthermore, books are not only less problematic to read, but also less problematic to produce, because…

4)      The book had no budget.

When it comes to a book, the only limits are in the mind of the author: his or her imagination and ability to manipulate language. As regards a film, by contrast, the limits are everywhere: how far will the budget stretch in terms of actors, shooting locations, costume and makeup, special effects, and so on and so forth? Plus, even if money were unlimited, there is only so much that technology, or the human body, or the wonders of Smashbox Cosmetics, can actually achieve. Certainly the upper limits are remarkable, but a director will never have the total and utter free rein that belongs to an author quite automatically. An author might describe all sorts of things that simply cannot be adequately replicated on film.

And on top of that, she gets the reader to do a lot of the hard work for her, in that…

5)      The book let you imagine it how you liked.

I maintain that the reading of fiction holds a unique joy in that it recruits one’s imagination and calls it to work. The author gives you the raw information you need, but you’re the one who has to bring it to life. The scene is sketched out in your mind, shifted and shuffled in accordance with every additional item or action described, and as some particularly dramatic event unfolds, having to envision it for yourself is almost comparable to being the one who invented it in the first place. I won’t be so deplorably snobbish as to say that watching films does not stimulate the imagination; it does. At the same time, however, it doesn’t make the imagination work the way reading books does. There is no need to picture and re-picture the scene, because it is pictured for you: that’s the point. By contrast, nobody else saw quite the same things I did when I read about Hogwarts or Camp Half-Blood or Narnia; nobody else painted the duels and the magic and the daring escapes in quite the same shapes and colours. We understand what we read according to the mental and emotional resources we have available, which makes reading a book an incredibly personal thing. Then someone tootles along and makes a film of that book – and of course he makes it in accordance with the way he himself imagined it. One can expect nothing else. Still, his interpretation is likely to cross swords with other peoples’ in many, many ways, particularly if he follows the second adaptation strategy and makes lots of alterations to the substance of the book. If half the enjoyment I got out of reading the book came not from what was going on on the page, but what was going on in my head when I read it, then someone else’s way of picturing the same scenes just isn’t going to be as much fun. It won’t, it can’t, speak as deeply to my own ideas and experiences. And so watching a film of a book one enjoyed is almost guaranteed to be disappointing.

Or rather, watching a film of a book one enjoyed with the expectation that the film will be enjoyable in exactly the same ways and for exactly the same reasons the book was, is almost guaranteed to be disappointing. Perhaps that’s where we’re going wrong. We’re a selfish bunch, and when we say we wish that someone would make such-and-such a book into a film, what we really mean is that we wish someone would replicate in audiovisual format exactly what goes on inside our own heads when we read said book. We love the book and we want the film adaptation to perfectly replicate our experience of it, even though, as soon as we stop to think about it, we know that that’s an impossible order to fill.

So suppose we were to approach this differently. Suppose, next time a film adaptation of a beloved book hit cinemas, we were to see it not as the film version, but merely a film version. Suppose we were to recognise that a film cannot do the same things a book does and it’s unfair to expect it to, and so to assess the film as a film, according to the standards by which we assess films not based on beloved books, rather than unreasonable criteria clumsily extracted from our reasons for liking the book. Suppose we were to consider the film a piece of fiction in its own right rather than wishing it to be a reincarnation of the exact same essence as the book. I really think we might enjoy it rather more.

Or equally, we could just go and reread the book again…

Footnotes

¹ Hopefully Netflix will do a better job; it all kicks off in January and based on the latest trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHyxlzHudoU, my hopes are tentatively high.

² One of my favourite Tobuscus literal trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ueJNO3-Ink. Actually, it occurs to me that there is the odd other film adaptation that I prefer to its book counterpart, but that differs so profoundly from the latter in almost every element that it hardly seems like a fair comparison: How to Train Your Dragon would seem the most obvious example.

³ And I know that’s not just me being incompetent, because Screen Junkies point out the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQJuGeqdbn4.

Sound: Doctrine

“What an unspeakable privilege to talk about the Holy One,

His wondrous acts and might, and the sacrifice of his only Son.

Disclaimer: turn this off now if you want a worldly substitute,

But turn the volume up, hear me, if you sincerely love the truth.”

Shai Linne, ‘Table of Contents’, Lyrical Theology Part 1: Theology (2013)

 

I knew it was going to be difficult to think of a good initial picture for this post, so in the end I just didn’t try very hard. Sorry.

So it turns out that ‘lyrical theology’ is more than just the main component of the title of two albums by Shai Linne. It’s an entire subgenre of rap.¹ And I am ridiculously excited about the fact that it exists.

The subgenre does exactly what it says on the tin: theology, lyricised. Actual doctrine is expounded. Difficult questions are confronted head-on. And did I mention that actual doctrine is expounded? Like, real and marvellous truths about God are literally just, you know, said. Laid out. Detailed. It might sound simple, but this represents a significant departure from the norm amongst Christian music generally. A video by John Crist whose accuracy is hilarious and depressing in equal measure features two representatives of a Christian record company explaining standard lyric-writing strategy to a band they would like to sign:²

“Lyric-writing is even easier, you guys,” the guy on the left assures them.

“Oh yeah,” agrees the guy on the right. “You’ve always got to start with a vague struggle, all right, a hard time.”

“Geographical references,” interjects the guy on the left, pointing to a set of handy illustrations in the folder he has with him. “Storm. Valley. Desert.”

“You’ve got to throw in some vague Christian terms,” adds the guy on the right, “and just connect them randomly. Make it really predictable. Watch this.” He picks up a guitar and begins strumming: “Seek his face, mercy…”

“Grace,” finishes the guy on the left.

“Feel his love, blessed from…”

“Above.”

“We could sell that to Casting Crowns or Sanctus Real right now.”

The band counters that they’d quite like to write more honest lyrics about real issues, but the guy on the left is having none of it: “You can only mention your struggles in an abstract-type way. Drowning. Sinking.”

 

“Basically, all you need to know is: MORE WATER REFERENCES.”

It’s so accurate it’s painful. And I don’t get it. Surely there is far greater joy and wonder and comfort to be had in describing who God is and what he does with uncompromising specificity, exploring every aspect of his character in depth and detail, than in veiling these truths with vagueness that robs them of concrete meaning. Plus, the focus on vague struggles frequently ends up amounting to a focus on self: though God is usually mentioned in some degree, he tends to pop up as praiseworthy by virtue of being the solution to the vague struggle at hand, rather than because of his inherent qualities; he loses ground to the self and its issues, and that’s always dangerous. And on top of that, because so many songs are so similar in their content, the listener becomes numb to the little real truth that is being conveyed; there are myriads upon myriads of ways to express realities pertaining to God and the Christian life, yet so few of them are exploited in mainstream Christian music.

Enter lyrical theology: all of a sudden, the gospel is let off the lead. I apologise for the lengthiness of the following extracts; believe me, it was difficult enough even to cut them down as far as I have.³

“God spoke and the formless earth was sculpted,

His poetry producing populations,

Making constellations

With his conversations,

Gazing at his own creation,

Proclaiming it was good –

And there we stood,

Fashioned from the dust.

With authority he orchestrated organisms

And every single cell in every ecosystem …

Infinite wisdom

Intrinsic within him,

Self-sufficient.

Intricate systems

Begin and end with his decisions.

Out of reach

How he procreated with speech,

So it’s appropriate for us to be completely in awe.” Propaganda, ‘Lofty’, Excellent (2012)

And that’s the brilliance of the subgenre: it employs doctrine how it’s supposed to be employed, not to be studied for its own sake, but to prompt awe at the greatness of the God to whom it pertains.

“The Son of Man, one hundred per cent humanity:

The mind stretches to understand how can it be?

You’ve got to see what he does,

Becoming what he wasn’t while never ceasing to be what he was.

Is your mind flipping?

That got you tripping?

Me too.

But the Scripture is true:

Peep Philippians 2.

By faith we believe this amazing Jesus

Who made Uranus and Venus

Became a foetus.

It’s such a secret that few, if anybody, knew it.

Months later, he’s covered in amniotic fluid.

The subject of the gospels,

Praise of apostles,

Armed with eye-sockets, armpits, and nostrils?” – Shai Linne, ‘The Hypostatic Union’, Lyrical Theology Part 1: Theology (2013)

No encroaching of the self on territory that belongs firmly to God here: he is absolutely central, and remains so even if the song is more about a secondary issue pertaining to the Christian life than a specific aspect of God himself.

“Are you the kind

That’s completely consumed by symbols and signs? …

I’ll give you a sign that’s obvious:

One of the most supernatural acts

Is that God through his word has actually

Revealed everything pertaining to life and godliness.

There’s this idea that an individual

Is somehow more spiritual

If he sees these signs and symbols,

And takes what’s normally invisible

And makes it simple,

But I say the mark of a mature man

Is the one who reads God’s word and understands,

And allows that to govern his decisions and his prospective plans.” – Beautiful Eulogy, ‘Symbols and Signs’, Instruments of Mercy (2013)

So lyrical theologists (as we might call them – somehow it doesn’t seem quite suitable to use the term ‘theologians’, though I’m not certain exactly why) aren’t shy about stating doctrine firmly even if it might rather rub some listeners up the wrong way. Equally, nevertheless, they don’t present this as all easy and straightforward, as if anyone who hasn’t already reached the same conclusion is an idiot.

“See religious people on their worst behaviour.

Some non-believers are the nicest people.

Is it all a matter of interpretation?

I’ve seen them do charity.

Maybe they’re not as evil as the church has made them.

Ain’t nobody perfect, ain’t we all just being human beings?

We gon’ make mistakes, nobody said that we wouldn’t …

Folks just ask me how I’m doing; I tell them that I’m good,

But never good enough that I won’t be in need of his blood.

We’re doing good now, pull ourselves up out of the mud,

But no matter how good we do, know it still won’t be enough.

We need a Messiah.” – Da’T.R.U.T.H., ‘The Greatest Need’, It’s Complicated (2016)

There’s so much going on in these kinds of lyrics, and sometimes they are quite phenomenally clever. ‘Curse Reversed’ by Result, for instance, spends its first half describing the hopelessly wrongdoing-riddled situation in which humanity finds itself, and then in the second half uses the exact same words in reverse order to explain how Jesus’ sacrifice dealt with the problem.⁴ Brilliant, right?

This, then, is my question: how come only rappers are doing this kind of thing? I appreciate that rap as a genre more easily lends itself to large volumes of words than other musical styles, but I can’t really think of any other hindrances – and yet I’ve never come across a non-rap musical artist who is anything close to as superbly explicit about doctrine as any of the examples mentioned above. (If you have, please do let me know right away; I would be enthralled.) I mean, I personally like rap a lot, but it’s certainly harder work to listen to a lot of in one go than most genres, and some people just can’t stand it at all. How come, if those people want to listen to Christian music, the industry offers them barely anything but repetitive songs about vague struggles?

I’m thrilled that the subgenre of lyrical theology exists – but I would be even more thrilled if it were not a rather niche slice of one musical style. I would be even more thrilled if it were normal for Christian music to actually expound doctrine, and confront difficult issues head-on, and, you know, actually expound doctrine. The character and deeds of God are definitively the most inspiring subject matter out there. Our own vague struggles? Not so much.

Who’s with me?

Footnotes

¹ I discovered this by stumbling across the following interview with lyrical theologist Result: http://rapzilla.com/rz/features/interviews/13070-result-on-future-of-lyrical-theology-album-the-elementology.

² Do watch the whole thing; it’s really rather well done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwwhkKPEieE.

³ If you’d like a few more suggestions of lyrical theologists worth checking out, Wrath and Grace have emblazoned a good number on one of their rather stylish T-shirts: http://www.wrathandgrace.com/product-page/3109836241.

⁴ The lyric video is pretty magnificent, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY6UhnVcOQk, though I have to say a little more punctuation wouldn’t hurt.

Freedestination Revisited

Ben:     If our personality is made up from our genes and our environment, then are we really to blame for what we do?

Kelly:   That’s a brilliant question, actually, Ben: quite a few neuroscientists are starting to question whether there is such thing as free will and, if that’s true, people can’t really be blamed for their actions.

Ben:     Right. Could you write that down for my dad?

Outnumbered S3 E6, ‘The Hospital’ (2010)

 

How’s this for a visual metaphor? It’s kind of tricky to come up with ideas for pictures when I’m dealing with such abstract ideas.

At almost exactly this time last year, I wrote a post called ‘Freedestination’,¹ which basically consisted of me sticking my oar into the predestination-versus-free-will argument by asserting the existence of a paradox whereby both are true: it is both the case that God determines and guarantees in advance who will come to obtain eternal life through following Jesus, and that each of us who obtains eternal life through following Jesus makes the personal decision to do so. I still believe, based on what the Bible says, that such a paradox exists, but since my understanding of exactly what that paradox looks like has shifted somewhat over the past year,² this seemed like an opportune moment to revisit the issue. (You might want to open that earlier post in another tab round about now, because I will be referring to it quite heavily for the rest of this one.)

The thing is, the Bible puts a lot more emphasis on predestination than it does on free will. When, in ‘Freedestination’, I offered three snippets of scripture in support of each argument, I was utterly spoilt for choice when it came to predestination – aside from my settled-on choices of John 6:44, Romans 8:29-30, and Ephesians 1:3-6, I could have made mention of any of the following:³

“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” – John 15:16

“And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.” – Acts 13:48

“But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone.” – Galatians 1:15-16

Equally, I could have picked up on any of the many references to the ‘elect’ that occur throughout the New Testament (try Titus 1:1, Romans 11:7, and Luke 18:7, for instance). On the other hand, I had a pretty hard time scraping together even three verses that seemed to express the free-will argument with any kind of explicitness. 2 Corinthians 9:7 does show that humans have some kind of capacity to make their own decisions, but it certainly isn’t asserting that in the context of salvation. Deuteronomy 30:19 makes it clear that the choice at hand is between life and death, but it’s part of the Law that the Israelites failed to keep; flip a few hundred pages forward and it’s stated that nobody was ever actually capable of choosing life: the Law could never actually save anyone, but was intended to reveal people’s sin to them and point to the coming Saviour.⁴ And as for 1 Timothy 2:3-4, it comes at the argument from a bit of a different angle, the logic being that if God desires all people to be saved, it can’t be that he predestines some of them not to be – but that line of thought is stopped in its tracks by a bunch of other predestination-y verses:⁵

“The Lord has made everything for its purposes, even the wicked for the day of trouble.”⁶ – Proverbs 16:4

“For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” – Jude 1:4

“While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” – John 17:12

I apologise for the wanton proof-texting; I do encourage you to have a peer at the context of these verses to check that I’m not horribly mishandling them. But I do think that we have to conclude from Scripture that yes, some people are predestined for condemnation. That’s a horribly hard notion to swallow, it really is, and it’s easy to start questioning God’s justness off the back of it – but that’s exactly what objection to it amounts to, a questioning of God’s justness. In ‘Freedestination’, I laid out some of the issues people have with predestination, and they do basically centre on doubting that a good God could create people only to doom them to destruction. It’s an argument made from a human point of view, using human logic and human ideas of right and wrong, instead of in humble submission to what God reveals about the nature of justice, of which he is the definitive measure and distributer.

So the most frequently cited arguments against predestination basically exhibit a problem in our understanding, rather than an actual inconsistency in who God is and what he does. The arguments against free will expose, I think, far greater problems in the object of their criticism. To suggest that human decisions can disrupt God’s purposes is, straightforwardly enough, an attack on his sovereignty; and to suggest that any one of us contributed anything, even mere active acceptance, to the achievement of her or his own salvation, is to steal some, however little, of the credit for it – back-door salvation by works.

 

Yeah, that’s not going to work.

At this point it might look as if I’ve tipped over into thinking there’s no paradox at all. God predestines everyone as he wishes, none of us has the smallest smidgen of autonomy in determining our eternity-defining response to him, and to suggest otherwise is to impugn his character: surely I’ve pushed free will out of the picture altogether? Not so. The paradox has actually just got deeper and stranger and more impossible-seeming – which I think testifies even more abundantly to the unfathomable mystery and ungraspable majesty of the God who devised it.

We’ve established that it’s not a slight against God’s character to say that he predestines some people for condemnation, but it is a slight against God’s character to say that he is responsible for evil. Plus, the exhortation to trust and follow him because he is good that forms the backbone of Scripture kind of falls apart if we claim that he’s capable of evil. Nevertheless, evil, quite clearly, exists. So evil must be blameable on human initiative – even though nothing is truly blameable on human initiative, because God is sovereign over all. This, O Suitably Perplexed Reader, is the new location of the paradox. It’s still the case that we have to hold together two seemingly incompatible ideas, but the exact substance of those ideas isn’t quite the same as my previous post implied. (I don’t think I’d say I was downright wrong before, but I also definitely don’t think I was portraying the issues at hand as fully or accurately as I hope I am now.)

                                                                

A helpful way someone explained these concepts to me earlier this year was that every human decision has a primary and a secondary will behind it. God’s will is the first reason behind every event, but every time any of us makes a decision, her or his will is also behind the consequent event as its second reason. I still made the decision according to my own initiative, so I can still be blamed for it. And this is our everyday experience of the world: we don’t sense cosmic forces compelling us to behave in particular ways; rather, as far as I am concerned, as far as I am able to perceive it, my will is my own. But at the same time, none of us makes any decision that God hadn’t already preordained, because his sovereignty over everything is absolute and irreducible.

It’s a paradox even crazier, more profound, and more difficult to come to terms with than my previous version. One of the toughest obstacles to coming to terms with it, actually, is the sense that we as humans get a pretty rough deal out of it. How come we can be held responsible for our sin if even that was part of what God purposed? How come we can’t take even the slightest bit of credit for our salvation if the blame for our sin is laid to our charge in its entirety? It hardly seems fair. As fortune would have it, Paul actually explicitly addresses this very concern in Romans 9:

“You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’ But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is moulded say to its moulder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’”⁷

Seriously? That’s all the answer we get? Yes, it is. If we’re dissatisfied with it, the problem is that we haven’t truly humbled ourselves before God. Brothers and sisters, we were dead in sin. Every inclination of our hearts was only evil all the time;⁹ we were incapable of anything but sin; there was nothing to claim credit for; there was only blame to be laid to our charge. And despite all that, God rescued us into an inheritance of eternal life, even at the cost of laying the punishment we deserved on his beloved Son. This is not for us a rough deal, but an unbelievably good one.

OK, sure, but why bother in the first place? Why would God purpose to set up time and space in such a way that it would be so full of misery and corruption? The same reason God does everything – for his ultimate glory. And if that sounds like a bit of an ego trip, again, it must be that we haven’t truly humbled ourselves. God is the most perfect, magnificent, glorious, praiseworthy being that could ever exist. His creations are necessarily lesser than he is. Everything else in creation, from the elders of heaven to the very stones of the earth, understands that it owes everything of itself to God in endless praise;¹⁰ humans are the only ones who seem to have missed the memo, who dare to look God in the face and say ‘no’, to set ourselves up as his rivals. The right order of things is that God is exalted to the greatest possible extent, and so God would be doing wrong not to pursue his own glory. That chunk of Romans 9 I quoted above continues:

“Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory – even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?”

 

I wonder what sort of use this vessel is going to be for.

There’s predestination again – some predestined for destruction, others for glory – and the point of it all is for God to make known the riches of his glory. Beings who have never sinned can praise God for creation, but they can’t praise him for salvation, for redemption, for mercy on the undeserving. Beings who have never sinned can’t praise Christ for taking the blame and conquering the punishment. If sin had never happened, the whole mind-blowing brilliance of the cross would be lost. The perfection of God’s attributes would never be displayed to its fullest extent. God would not be glorified as greatly as he could be. The right order of things would never be reached.

One of the reasons that I’m convinced by my new understanding of the freedestination paradox – aside from the primary one that I think Scripture affirms it – is that it leads me to think less of myself and more of God. This paradox crushes my pride to nothing and opens up whole new dimensions of God’s amazingness; it renders me a greater sinner and Christ a greater Saviour. And as we’ve seen, anything that causes God in his perfection to be glorified more greatly must belong to the right order of things.¹¹

Footnotes

¹ In the box on the right under ‘2015’, then ‘December’. Obviously.

² Yes, folks, I do change my mind about stuff, even stuff I’ve splashed all over the Internet in heartfelt fashion. Please challenge me if you think anything I post is a load of rubbish. Iron can only sharpen iron (Proverbs 27:17) if the two actually meet.

³ To save space and effort, I’ll put all the full-chapter links in this one footnote: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+15&version=ESVUK, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+13&version=ESVUK, and https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+1&version=ESVUK.

⁴ I think particularly of Romans 7, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+7&version=ESVUK, but that’s not the only place this idea is expressed.

⁵ Again, all your full-chapter links to check I’m not taking anything out of context: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+16&version=ESVUK, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=jude+1&version=ESVUK, and https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+17&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Or ‘day of disaster’, as the NIV puts it and as Shai Linne quotes it in ‘Our God Is In The Heavens’, one of my favourite of his tracks (which is saying a lot). Some kind human has uploaded a homemade lyric video to YouTube, featuring all your favourite qualities like stock-photo backgrounds and Windows Media Player visual transitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV3136cv3HU. The accuracy of the lyrics seems to be pretty spot on, though, so concentrate on that.

⁷ Last Bible link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+9&version=ESVUK.

⁹ See Genesis 6:5 for the allusion.

¹⁰ Revelation 4:9-11 for the former; Luke 19:37-40 for the latter.

¹¹ And I couldn’t very well finish the post without pointing you towards another excellent Shai Linne song called ‘Election’, that explains a lot of the same stuff I’ve been talking about, but in much cooler fashion. Here’s a similarly appealing lyric video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXdPow0lcd8.