Rubber Bands and Sticks

So I’m working through this analogy right now, maybe you can help me out.

We each have our views of God – how He acts, what He’s like, what He does, what He isn’t, etc. And there seems to be this part of us that holds all these views together – let’s call that part of us “faith.” Some of these views fit together quite nicely, like the pieces to a 16-piece Sesame Street puzzle. Other views have to be twisted and crammed and forced together (like the pieces to most of the 300+ piece puzzles I’ve attempted).

So, in this light, I’m beginning to see faith much like a rubber band. If all of these views or beliefs about God were like a small pile of sticks, faith would be the rubber band holding them all together. There are a lot of great things about a rubber band. If it turns out one of my sticks isn’t quite right I can just take it out and put in the right one. If I find out I have too many sticks, I can take some out. You see a rubber bands is it’s flexible, it bends, it holds everything in.

But do you know what is holding the sticks together in this picture? Yes, it’s the rubber band but deeper than that it’s the TENSION in the rubber band. I find that this is exactly how faith must work out when it comes to God. God has a certain tension about him which must be embraced else we swing too far one way or another. For a long time now, people have fled from this tension, but I think that our generation has the ability to once again embrace it.

For example, a common question from skeptics (as well as many honest Christians) is, “If God is all powerful and all loving, then how can evil exist? Either he is powerless to end it or he doesn’t want to, either way he’s nothing to be admired.” Now many Christians have wrestled with this and worked it out on their own theologically, that’s not my point. My point is that there is a tension there – God is both all-powerful AND all loving, and yet He also allows evil.

Similarly, God is all merciful, and completely just.

I’ve been in a conversation with someone for about a month now about how baptism relates to salvation. After speaking via email virtually every day for a month now he simply can’t come to terms with the fact that I can believe we are absolutely positively saved by grace through faith in Jesus’ sacrifice AND that we are saved at baptism. The two seem irreconcilable, incompatible, contradictory, incongruent – that’s the tension. And the tension is, so often, where we find God.

And what happens when you release all the tension on the rubber band – when you cut it? It falls apart in a mess. We must embrace the tension, not try to release it.

But let me share my fear here as well. I’m afraid that there are many people out there that don’t have a rubber band faith. Their faith may be more like a string. A string can be great. It still does the job of holding the sticks together just fine. The problem is that there’s no flexibility. I found my own faith to be like this shortly after I began studying the Bible. I learned exactly how and who God was within a few months of studying the Bible, took all of my beliefs and tied a nice tight string around them.

That would have been fine, except I had effectively put God in a nice little box. You can’t box God in when your faith is a rubber band. The problem came when I began to learn that God was bigger than my old sticks. I needed to change out a few sticks here and there and add some sticks, but you can’t do that with a string. If you take one or two sticks out the whole thing is liable to collapse. We can’t take the stick of inerrancy out and inspect it a bit further or the whole thing may come apart. We can’t remove that old stick of hell to replace it with something a bit more precise because we don’t know what may happen.

That’s my fear – that as we question things and try to grow and understand God more completely that some won’t have a faith flexible enough to hold those beliefs in – that the whole thing will collapse.