Warning: a spoiler follows.
I think maybe I figured it out last today. Last night I finished watching Stranger Than Fiction, which was a fine movie about an author (Emma Thompson) who finds out her latest character, Will Farrell, (and perhaps all her characters) are real people. The problem: the author always kills her main characters. It’s her schtick.
Further complicating matters is the fact that a professor of literature, Dustin Hoffman, reads the author’s manuscript with it’s proposed fatal ending and proclaims it the greatest work of English literature in the last 70 years and the crowning jewel in the author’s fine body of work.
After reading it for himself, Farrell’s character tells the author to go ahead and kill him because his death will glorify the author and perhaps his death would have some meaning. However, in the end, acting against her nature, the author decides to keep Farrell’s character alive and show him mercy.
The parrallels between the movie and God are numerous, but basically I understand a little more about why there is pain, suffering, and general malady in the world. If you replace Emma Thompson with God and let Will Farrell be the Christian everyman, the pieces fall into place. Thompson’s character created basically the perfect work of fiction. Had things gone according to her plan, something beautiful would have resulted. However, she showed her creation, who had used his free will to put his fate in her hands, mercy.
The result is, as Hoffman’s character put it, “Ok. Just ok.”
So perhaps therein lies the answer. God had a plan. We were to live in the eternal paradise of Eden. However, He also gave us free will so that our faith in Him would mean something. When we exercised free will and sinned, though, He showed us mercy. Not because He had to, but because He saw something in us worth saving. So this reality, this now… this is because of free will (interestingly the only decision we weren’t allowed to make. We got free will and that was that.) After choosing not to follow His plan, God showed us mercy and therefore made His plan somewhat less than what it could be. All because there is something in us worth saving.
It’s not a bad answer.
