What an incredible God we have. He has so designed His creation and the creatures that inhabit it that the sentient beings who bear His image can devise whatever reality they choose. In other words, creation—or reality, if you will—is malleable.
There are two definitions of malleable that work within the context to which I’m applying it:
capable of being altered or controlled by outside forces or influences
having a capacity for adaptive change
Christians, particularly conservative Protestant Evangelicals, don’t like to hear that. In their eyes, reality is fixed, set in stone, established by God before the foundation of the world. Unchangeable. Unalterable. Immutable.
That can’t be true.
There is a popular philosophy in today’s “craft your own reality” world called the Law of Attraction. It’s popular because there is a large bit of truth embedded in it. The problem is proponents of the Law of Attraction use it for selfish purposes. They do not honor God, even if they say they do.
In a world where individuals can choose their gender identities and undergo surgery to appear as the gender of their preference, how can anyone deny that reality has a subjective component?
Just as the conservative Protestant Evangelical brand of Christianity is stuck on the objective nature of God, reality, and existence, many progressives have embraced the “do as you please” mantra of the world around us. In that circle, pursuing your own path to financial, spiritual, emotional, and psychological happiness is the primary goal. Honoring God, if it’s thought of at all, is thought to be in congruence with individual expressions of self-glorifying pursuit of happiness.
Scripture challenges both of these views. In fact, Proverbs 11:27 seems to imply that both views are correct. However, one doesn’t craft a theology on one Bible verse alone. So, what is this proverb getting at?
He Who Searches Finds It
He who searches out good finds favor, but evil will come to him who seeks it.
God wants to be searched for. He has hidden Himself in His creation, but He isn’t hidden so deeply that He cannot be found. And He is good.
He who searches for God—the only really true and pure good there is—will find His favor. His favor is in Christ, and that’s what it means in Ephesians when it says the mystery of God is the unsearchable riches of Christ. Only those who search those riches have a scintilla of hope in finding them. Everyone else will find evil.
It’s not that we search for good and find it but find evil by default by not searching for good. It’s that our hearts, in their natural conditions, are so fraught with evil that we will only seek evil (and have no problem finding it) until we have been made alive with Christ. Only then can we search for good and find it. But we must make the choice to do so.
What an incredible God to have designed His creation that way. Whatever you seek, that you will find. Are you searching for God?