God’s Unfinished Work
by NATHAN BROWN
One of the interesting—and challenging— features of being a rookie teacher in a university is marking assignments. I recently received a first assignment from a first-year student that, I’m afraid, didn’t make a good first impression.
It carried no title page, no bibliography. It consisted of one single-spaced sheet, across the top of which the student had written his name and number in scrawling biro. It was also a week past due.
Nevertheless, I approached it with a willingness to give credit for the good points it might contain.
It was difficult to find them.
Unfortunately, the conclusion only compounded my frustration. In the midst of a sentence (it wasn’t making much sense in any event), the typing simply stopped, hovering, waiting for the next keystroke which never came. I was bemused.
Another interesting feature of the world of academe is that there is little direct training qualifying one to become a teacher or professor. To teach in a high school, primary school or day-care centre, you need at least a diploma in education.
However, to teach at university, one simply needs to have done well in the study of the subject itself.
Thankfully, the lecturer-in-charge of the subject is usually happy to answer queries such as those raised by the assignment I’d just read. He cast an experienced eye across the paper, smirked and suggested some slashing red-penned response such as “Were you suddenly attacked from behind and rendered unable to continue writing?” We surmised that the student’s computer “word count” must have reached the set word limit and—to this student, anyway—that seemed the obvious place to cease. I returned to my office, pondering what I really would write—a balance between the biting sarcasm and legitimate concern at such a submission.
After some consideration—it wouldn’t have received as much if well done—I scrawled, a little too sarcastically, “Some of the arguments of this essay may have made more sense if the concluding sentence had been completed.” While the nonexistent second half of that final sentence may not have saved the assignment, it is a useful way of thinking. It’s too easy to judge something or someone without having the full story.
It’s how we sometimes judge God— before the final sentence is completed.
When we look around us and within us at the problems, the pain and the confusion, it can almost be a reflex action to blame God—or at least start questioning His goodness or His power or both. The problem with assessing God on these observations is that He is not finished yet.
The Bible admits this incompleteness: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:22). That “whole creation” includes us; disappointments might be a part of how things are at present.
It’s interesting to note the comment at the end of the Bible’s greatest discussion of faith. Having listed the faithfulness of many of the Old Testament heroes, it reads, “These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised” (Hebrews 11:39). Put simply, the last sentence had not been written yet.
At the very end of the Bible, Jesus claims for Himself the titles of “the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Revelation 22:13). While making a significant and all-encompassing claim, perhaps He is also admitting the time in between is not quite so simple. But we are given the assurance that He will have the final word.
The difficulty we have today is that our perspective is limited to the inbetween time. It can feel a long way from our present circumstances, but the Bible gives us an indication of and hope for how the final sentence will be written.
Until then, there will always be some questions that need to wait for that sentence to be completed.
Maybe, for a change, we should give God the benefit of the doubt. Maybe somewhere in the last sentence things will begin to make a little bit more sense.
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