One can’t help but be stunned by the wonders of nature and its varieties and laws. How many times does one have to catch sight of the wide range of human hearts, faces, and realities, to say nothing of the even wider range of animal, vegetable, and mineral realities on earth, in the vast seas, and in the wide skies, before he steps back and is overtaken by the sheer magic of it all? And how stunning are the laws of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and more that seem to serve as the universe’s very keystones!
Yet, it could all have been otherwise. Not only could everything have looked, sounded, smelled, interacted, etc., differently than it does now; and not only could the “keystones” have functioned utterly unlike the way they do now; but, reality could have been formed to behave in astoundingly unknowable ways. Rather than needing to breathe to exist, as one trite example, we might have needed to irradiate one color one moment, and then to irradiate another color at another moment. And what if we were all somehow colorblind, and could thus never understand our situation?
So as people of faith we’re to believe that God created things just as it is and purposefully; and that He had everything follow certain rules and to interact in ways we can grasp just so we can grasp them and know what to expect (for the most part). After all, God is under no imperative to do anything whatsoever, given that His rule is sovereign, and that He’s omnipotent and omniscient.
So Ramchal makes the point that “The very first thing to know about (God’s) governance is that it’s dependent upon sequence, which is the first principle God wanted” to exist in the universe (comments to Petach 30), rather than the universe be “formless and empty” (Genesis 1: 2). In other words, God deliberately created sequence and order so that we might understand His ways herein. “No one could say that God was forced to act that way” or within such a system “… given that He’s utterly omnipotent” as Ramchal put it there and as we’d suggested ourselves above.
One clear implication of God’s having chosen to allow things to function in sequence and predictably (for the most part) is the fact that He chose to forgo or to delimit His omnipotence as a consequence, as Ramchal points out there, too. And He allowed things to work themselves out in time, bit by bit, otherwise we simply would never understand His ways whatsoever [1].
But there’s more to it than that, as one would expect.
Note:
[1] See Ramchal’s Klallim Mitoch Milchemet Moshe, Da’at Tevunot 40, as well as his comments to Petach 10.
(c) 2011 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman
Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org
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