Faith and Fandom
To Boldly Go Into All the World, Preaching the Good News...Where No One Has Gone Before

Does God Have a Prime Directive, Part 2

Last time, several questions were raised concerning God’s Prime Directive (PD). After establishing the existence of a divine PD, the first query was, “Does God violate His own Prime Directive?” Of course He does. Miracles, angels disguised as humans and other heavenly interventions have occurred at various times and in sundry places throughout human history.

But is it really necessary for us to see these signs and wonders in order to believe? As the apostle Paul was fond of saying, “Certainly not!” The Bible attests that creation itself is an adequate testimony of God’s existence and magnificence (Romans 1:20).

God’s purpose in creating a PD was to challenge His people to live by faith, not by sight (II Corinthians 5:7). To believe in a God we can’t see is faith in its purest form. But would we even need faith if He appeared to us every day? Our free will could be influenced by such epiphanies, right?

In
Star Trek, when Kirk, Picard, etc. violate the PD, it’s usually to assist beings embroiled in a bitter conflict or to rectify some injustice. In the same way, even though it might be hard for us to see at times, God is continually orchestrating events and circumstances for our benefit (Romans 8:28). This side of Glory, we may never know why God breaks His own mandate of non-interference, but we can rest assured that it’s for our own good—His ways are higher than ours, after all (Isaiah 55:9).

Another question was, “If God violates His own Prime Directive, is that a sin?” The answer is a resounding no. As a theology professor of mine was fond of saying, “God is God, and He can do as He jolly well pleases!” Since God is the ultimate authority and judge over all creation, He knows when it’s appropriate to involve Himself in human affairs and when it isn’t. It’s logical to conclude that the One who forged the universe has a well-defined set of intervention guidelines.

The final question posed was, “If God sins when He breaks His own Prime Directive, who enforces His punishment?” This is another fallacious supposition. Since the violation of the PD for righteous purposes isn’t a sin, the point is moot. God is incapable of sinning (James 1:13), and since there’s no entity greater than Him (Jeremiah 10:6&7), this line of faulty reasoning will be discarded with great haste.

The origin of God’s PD began a long time ago, in a galaxy… Oops, wrong sci-fi franchise. For eons, God had been glorified by angels, cherubim, seraphim and other heavenly creatures (aliens?). These beings had no choice but to magnify God because they were created for that specific purpose. But that kind of obligatory worship was hallow to God, who desired pure praise from a people willing to exalt Him not because they had to, but because they wanted to. God’s solution was to initiate the Human Experiment.

God created human beings and gave us the right to decide our own destiny—this is often referred to as free moral agency. Given a free choice, would we worship God or things (ourselves, money, nature, etc.)? Tragically, before our progenitors had even settled into their new, paradise home, they sinned and were evicted from the Garden of Eden. In an astoundingly short period of time, the created had turned their backs on the Creator. The day we exchanged eternal contentment in God’s presence for an empty promise of divinity, presented as a delicious piece of fruit by the father of lies (John 8:44), forever altered our destiny as a species.

Knowing that our fallen, sinful nature (Romans 3:23) would always prevent us from attaining His righteous standards, God decided to change the conditions of the test (a la Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru simulation in
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.) But the price for entering a new variable into the Human Experiment would run high: in order to redeem humanity, God would have to sacrifice…Himself.

When the fullness of time had come (Galatians 4:4), Jesus, God’s only Son, entered the world in order to cure the human race of its terminal sin condition. And at that very moment, God made first contact with the very people He created.

April 1997