Publisher's Synopsis
God's Plan for the Ages is a book of reasoned theology of the Christian faith, written largely without theological language, exploring God's plan and purpose for the world and for the ages, including the whole reason, purpose and wisdom of the cross of Christ. The apostle Paul speaks of treasures of wisdom and knowledge that can greatly enrich our spiritual life. This explores the whole purpose of this world, written from the heart of a mature Christian who was just compelled to share his riches with those with whom he shares a common destiny. The book draws on all that this one has gathered over the years from theology, experience, life and revelation. It also fully utilises our God given faculty of reason and logic, which sometimes gets a bad press, but is an integral part of who and what we are as a man or woman, made in God's image. The book comes in three distinct parts. The first part is a reasoned and logical examination of ourselves, and the God that made us in his own image. It explores the very nature of God and his purpose in making man at all. It then addresses the very difficult question, often asked by all men, of why God should create a world with such a potential for evil, as we observe, and it offers an explanation of how such a thing can be reconciled with the nature of a loving God. God's ultimate objectives of it all are explored. These answers may not resolve the detail of every circumstance, but they are higher level answers that the author personally declares to have completely satisfied him, and have become a solid foundation of faith that in everything we see in this world, God knows exactly what he is doing, and he has done it in a way that only infinite wisdom could have devised. Central to this theme are the events of the cross of Christ. Again the apostle Paul gives the game away as he points to the cross as the central event of this age, and all the ages to come. He explicitly tells us that understanding the cross is mature spiritual wisdom, and he reveals his all-consuming desire to go deeper into the truth of it as the very central quest of his life. The book therefore seeks to get to the root of this obsession, based on the premise that if we are not equally as obsessed with it, then we are missing something important. The second part of the book explores God in another way; from revelation, rather than from logic and reason. God in himself is a manifold, manifold being, as can be seen in both the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in the seven-fold spirit of God revealed in the book of Revelation. This multi-manifold revelation of God is explored creatively to reveal something of how all that man is in his complexities of life and relationships can also be seen in God, in whose image he is made. The final part of the book is more pragmatic as it relates all of this revelation and understanding to our experience on the ground as we grow in faith towards spiritual maturity. In all of this the heavenly perspective of our experience is offered, whilst it explores the realities of life on the ground. Using many illustrations and stories of real events, the author is often open and candid about himself and the challenges life can bring on both a natural and spiritual level. The result is that the book is not milk, but strong meat, as the author intended, designed with a view to pushing on those who have already reached a certain level of maturity to yet higher levels of understanding that should profoundly enrich their spiritual life in this epic pre-age to the ages of ages to come, that God has planned for us beyond this world.
