Who Wants a Sweaty God? (Part 2)

"Family Group" by Leo Mol, Assiniboine Park, Winnipeg, 2026

In "Sweaty God Part 1" we heard the parable of two banquet planners. God is not like George, dashing about, sweaty and eager to solve our problems. God runs His banquet more like Jane, a servant leader from the back of the kitchen, anticipating, in, and behind everything happening on the banquet floor. So what happens when sweaty George prays to a God he thinks should be as eager to please as he is?

After years of catering his banquets, George is diagnosed with a dreadful, dreadful, disease. He's reeling and desperate for some sign of God, some divine Help in the Crisis. He believes in God and so he cries, “Lord! I’ve exhausted my life helping people. Can you help me now, please!”

He waits. Nothing happens. So, with shaken faith and some resentment, he books a specialist. George is miffed now and struggling with “the problem of evil”. Why won't a good and capable God get to work solving this problem, like any banquet planner worth his salt? If God doesn't appear here, in this Crisis of Crises, is God even a thing?

Let's leave George there to stew in the heat of his spirit, while we will step behind the scenes. I want to offer you a view of reality C.S. Lewis showed me that George does not see. It has helped me to pray again.

Here's the starting framework: God is beyond all time (2 Pet. 3:8 etc.) living one infinite, divine Now that encompasses all our days. God is continuously present to all moments across the ages. His attention is always fixed on every moment that ever existed or will exist.

Imagine God being intensely present to George's cry for eternity in the Great Eternal Now of God's Life. We only experience time in the one little crumb we call the present. From this crumb of the present we retain a few scraps of memory from the past, and we make a few sketchy predictions of the future. But God experiences more than this crumb. For God there is no past, present and future as there is for us. All of time is present. He exists hyper-alive and immediately "present" to every moment of history.

Imagine that eternally, God has been intimately listening to George’s prayer. There has never been a "moment" in God’s Life when His entire Being was not immediately focused on George and his cry. God has been eternally muttering to himself, “Yes, George! I hear you, I hear you, and the world must be ready when your Crisis moment arrives and you say that prayer”.

And so, at creation God said to Himself, “Given George’s prayer in my ears, I will make human bodies with the power to fight disease. That’s my first answer to George. He will need skin as a shield about him, mucous hairs to move bacteria out of his lungs, neutrophils in his blood to attack invaders, a urinary system to flush toxins from his body, and kidneys to filter his blood.”

But God does not stop there. Ever listening to George’s prayer, God tinkers in His Jane-like way in one Divine Act across centuries empowering helpers to research the human body, develop medicines, build hospitals and learn surgery.

God asks Himself, “When George gets that disease how will I support him emotionally? I must have something ready”. Over centuries God slowly crafts family, marriage, friendship, and society, anticipating the moment George cries. God spends millennia slowly assembling a spiritual community, the Church, as a place for George to pray, a place for Him to hear the Word of God’s love.

God asks Himself, “How can I move this fellow named Harry to be in place so that George has a pastor to bring his questions?” In the great Eternal Act of Being God gently forms priesthood, pastoral ministry, vocation, seminary, and ordination, as the ages roll so that when he gets the diagnosis, Pastor Harry is ready at hand.

"But will George receive my Voice in his trial?" God wonders for eternity. God spends millennia jerry-rigging the language needed to write a living Book for George. He blends tinctures of phonology, morphology, alphabets, grammar, vocabulary in a thousand languages, so that the Bible is ready for George in God's voice. The history of poetry, myth, history, biography, letters, angle this way and that, all need to be developed and deployed at just the right times, so that George will have the Word of God in hand in his trial.

God knows that George being George, he may be oblivious to God’s hand working across eons in answer to his prayer. George may never even notice, simply because God so humbly, quietly, is working through His helpers from the back of the kitchen. So, God stages short vignettes from time to time—signs and wonders—and inspires a certain Luke the physician to write them out. George can read these vignettes where God does in minutes what He normally does over decades or millennia. A blind man sees, a deaf man hears and Mary Magdalene is free. Of course, God is always restoring His helpers, otherwise we’d all be blind, deaf and enslaved to demons. These signs by Jesus are not an interruption in an otherwise God-forsaken world. They are God-sent time-lapse videos to show George what God has been doing for him since the dawn of creation. And God might play such a vignette in George's own life, should He be so pleased.

But the path can become dark. With the contagion of sin and death spreading, God's attention has been eternally fixed on the moment George would die, whether of this disease or the next. Can God answer George’s prayer in that world?

With George’s prayer ringing in His ears, God enters human life as Jesus of Nazareth. God lives in Jesus as George’s representative. He stands in for George which draws into His veins George's Sin and disease. Jesus dies a bloody death from the poison that is George and all his fatal toxins of body and soul. As his representative, Jesus rises from the dead and ascends to the Father. Now in Christ, its as if George is already in Heaven, seated at God's right hand. In Christ (God as God's helper), George himself has conquered disease, sin, and death. George will now follow where his Head has gone before.

Can you see how George’s prayer has been answered to excess? God heard his prayer for eternity and all of cosmic and salvation history has been God answering George's prayer in this Jane-like way. God has anticipated George's need and used His helpers to spread a banquet George can only dimly perceive. And God may also have other answers to prayer arranged for the days and months following his diagnosis. It was George's prayer exactly that moved the humble hand of God for eternity and eons and in the days to come.

God is a bloody God, but He will not be a sweaty God.

God has done this with such servant leadership, allowing helpers to have their glory, that chances are George will never see it. He can’t grasp that all of this was done because he prayed! George is demanding a “God moment”, he wants to see God reaching a sweaty, naked, Hand down to yank him from his misery. Maybe the atheists are right, George wonders, and life, family, medicine, culture, Jesus, church, Bible, pastors, even miracles, are merely secular matters. They can be explained as stuff that just happens.

“Then Elisha prayed: ‘O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.’ So the Lord opened the eyes of the servant and he saw; the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.” 2 Kings 6:17

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