Doing The Lord’s Work

If God is all powerful and all knowing and can be anywhere, what exactly does he need us for? I believe that while God can do anything, He often chooses not to intervene directly because that would deny us the space to exercise our faith. The scriptures make it clear that miracles or divine interventions do not create or grow or develop our faith. If God Himself came down to sort out every problem we encounter, we would never learn and grow on our own, never develop the faith and the hope and the patience we need to become more like Him. However, just because God does not always act directly does not mean He is not mindful of us and unwilling to send us help. But there’s a big difference between God Himself coming down to find our lost dog, and God giving our next door neighbor a little nudge to help us. God can’t always come in person to comfort us in our afflictions, but He can send someone on a mission of love and mercy to our side to comfort us and give us strength. When we are in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God - this is not metaphorical. God needs us to help each other out. When we are serving one another, we are in God’s service because He can’t come down and serve us in person without invalidating the key tenets of His plan for us. The thing is, God’s direct and constant intervention wouldn’t do as much good to us as His indirect influence through our fellow brothers and sisters. If we are grief-stricken and struggling with some great loss, and God Himself came down and said, I know what you’re going through, there is such a huge gap between our emotional and mental capacity and experience that it would potentially not be as meaningful as hearing those same words from someone who is just as lost and broken and flawed as we are, but who has nevertheless gone through a similar experience of loss and pain and has done so with a similar level of emotional and mental capacity. The beauty of God using each of us to aid and comfort the other is that the person giving service and the person receiving service get to learn and grow and exercise their faith in a way that would be impossible if God simply miracled away our problems. We may look around at the world and see all of the pain and suffering and evil and ask why God doesn’t step in and do something if He’s all powerful? But then again, we could look around at the pain and suffering and evil and ask ourselves, why don’t we step in and do something even if we’re not all powerful?