God Doesn't Understand

            People, especially young people it seems, are fond of claiming that God doesn’t understand what they’re going through. Struggling Christians seem convinced that their situation is somehow unique and He can’t get it. Atheists and agnostics have trouble believing in a higher power that is that intimately connected to everything. If we start with the assumption that God is the creator of everything though, it’s a pretty ridiculous thing to say.

            Why? Well the easy and commonly quoted answer is that He is God and all knowing and whatnot. The problem with that answer is that much like a father telling his kids that he makes the rules simply because he’s dad, it’s true but unsatisfying to people who are seeking an emotional and intellectual relationship with God. You could reduce a lot of reasoning for the rules in the Bible to “God says so,” but that answer gets annoying pretty fast. I accept that some things come down to that because they are beyond my understanding, but this is not one of them.

            Another reason one could give for how God can understand the human experience while not being human is that He actually did live a human life as Jesus. There’s a joke that points out the fallacy of saying God can’t understand because He never had to endure hunger, thirst, poverty, death of friends and family, rejection, persecution, pain, and death himself, because Jesus experienced all those things. Still, this answer has weak points in my eyes. Jesus didn’t go through genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, nor did He witness the terror of an atomic bomb, nor many varied and specific kinds of pain. If this is our only answer for God’s understanding our struggles then some people can claim it’s not enough and He truly doesn’t understand.

            The thing is, by His nature as creator, He has to be able to understand everything, and far better than any of us can. Think of it in terms of art. How ridiculous would it be for a painting to say its artist doesn’t understand it, or a pot to say its maker doesn’t get how it works, or for a character I create in a story to claim I don’t understand her? For us to say God doesn’t get what we’re going through is even more ridiculous a claim than that.

Artists are still dependent on materials and ideas that they did not create to form their art, but God created everything from nothing by the sheer power of his will. For that to be true, he has to understand every aspect of every piece of creation. Think about the implications of that. He gets everything. All those systems of nature with all of their intricacies? He came up with those. While we’re still struggling to really understand everything from gravity to the atom to black holes to the act of creation itself, he came up with all that. On a much more personal level, God created us too. That means He created our minds, which means He came up with how they work. We’re still fumbling with and debating psychological theories, but He knows exactly how we tick. Not only did He make the system, He made the emotions themselves. Those same emotions that so many people claim He can’t possibly understand, He understands better than we could possibly hope to. And if He understands things like hurt and grief and the like so well, I can’t help but think He feels them in the most profound empathy possible as well.