The Mystery of Creation: Chapter 6: Limited Wills: The Ultimate Author

The Ultimate Author

                The truth is that both are actually correct, believe it or not.  This is what God revealed to me.  In order to understand this, God enlightened me by using my book.  When I first wrote, “Carneian Saga: Sparks of Rebellion” I had developed a very basic story that was rather…well… unimpressive.  I created very vague characters with no backgrounds and no real personalities.  They did things in the story that I wanted them to do because I wanted them to do it. 

                Then, as I started thinking about my story, I started asking questions.  Why did Kalidan go to this place and why did he fight this person?  Why did he have this weapon and why was he travelling with Kana?  Where did the brownies come from? 

                The more I answered these questions the more I had to rewrite the story.  As my characters became more real and more detailed I started having to develop the story around the characters.  I had a general idea where I wanted the story to go, but I could not hold true to the original manuscript.

                The reason was that the original manuscript didn’t fit with the characters.  I found myself saying, “That’s not what Kalidan would do.  After everything he’s been through, Kalidan would do or say this.  He would not say that.”  I was able to do this because I created Kalidan and I knew Kalidan better than anyone else knew Kalidan.  Since I made him I knew him so well that I knew what he would choose to do in whatever situation I put him in.

                And more and more the characters developed the story for me.  I hardly had to really think about what I was going to have them do next.  With each scene, the characters started interacting with one another.  The story took on a life of its own. 

                The next thing I knew, the story was so big that it wouldn’t just fit in one book.  I had to write two…then three…then six…then nine…then eighteen.  (Well…I’d developed story for eighteen books.  I have never actually written them.)  All of the stories were written while keeping the characters in mind.  If I wanted something to happen in the story, I had to come up with a VERY good reason why it would happen.  Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense.  At one point, I even remember that I had to create a new villain, an evil witch, that didn’t ever exist in the story beforehand, in order to make certain characters go to a place I wanted them to go.  I had to develop an entirely new backstory for that witch.  I even changed another character’s entire personality and background in order to fit it all together.

                This all happened because the characters dictated to me, the author, how the story should go.  I couldn’t bring myself to force them to do things that I knew they wouldn’t do.  I had to let the story develop around them.  I knew the ending.  I knew major events that would take place.  I orchestrated the whole thing and brought it all together.  If I had to, I created new characters that I developed for the express purpose of making sure something would happen as I wanted it to happen, but ultimately even the villains of my stories wouldn’t let me make them do things without a reason.  They had to have their own backstories and their own personalities that fit together with the overall story.

                You see, when we read stories where the author makes a character do something that is totally uncharacteristic of them, it leaves a bad taste in our mouths.  We think, “That isn’t a very good author.  That came out of left field.  I don’t think that the character would really have done that.”  And we criticize the author for making something happen that went against the character.

                God is the ultimate author.  Every story of everything that exists is like an intricate web.  Each tiny thing influences everything else.  And yet, His mind is so superior and He knows every minor detail about every little thing so well that He knows exactly how all things will end up before they even begin.  Like the number line, as I stated before, God knows that if He adds a 100 to 10 He will get 110.  He is so certain of this that He banks all things on it.  He has no doubt that when He adds 100 to 10 it will result in 110 because He can see the pattern and everything that influences it.  He knows the end before the beginning.  He sees how it all fits together and how it all makes sense.

                But although He has written and knows the end of all things…although He knows your future even before you were created…even though everything is all intricately designed and planned out and set in stone…YOU don’t know your future.  This is WHY you don’t know your future.  YOU get to choose your own destiny.  If you knew your future then you could destroy everything that God has ever developed.  Therefore, the future is kept secret from everyone, AND I MEAN EVERYONE, because we all help to develop the future.  Jesus, Himself, one of the Holy Trinity of God, even said in Matthew 24:36, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

                That’s right!  Jesus doesn’t even know what the Father has already seen in every person’s future.  Jesus, part of God, is kept in the dark.  Only the Father, the ALU of the universe, is able to see the intricate web of destiny.  Only He is able to look at the entire weave and know what lies ahead for each and every person.  Our personalities, the choices we make, everything that we experience that helps make us who we are, they all work together to write God’s massive story.

                For example, let’s say that tomorrow you will walk out into the street and remember you forgot something.  You will turn around to go back when a car will come out of nowhere and run you over.  Three weeks later you die.  Because of your death, your best friend turns to Jesus and is able to go to Heaven for all eternity.

                But now, let’s say, you know that this future is going to happen.  Do you go out into that street and get hit anyway?  No.  You would prevent it from happening because you have this innate desire to live.  Even if you did choose to go out into that street because you knew your friend was going to be saved because of it, the thought would torment you for however long you knew that it was coming.  You would live in constant grief and sorrow knowing that the day of your death was approaching.

                A good God would not want that for His creation.  An efficient God who wants peace and harmony would not desire to make His creations suffer.  Therefore, instead, He developed this idea that all of His characters in His story would not know their destinies.  They would have to make choices with their own free wills. 

                In order to do that, then, God had to arrange every person that He wanted to create in such a way that their genetics, their family upbringing, their own likes and dislikes, their own opinions and beliefs, all of these many, many factors would all line up in just such a way that what God has planned to happen WILL happen. 

                Can you imagine the immense plotting and planning that God must have had to do in order to make this happen?  Yes!  It is incredibly hard to believe that this is even possible.  I can understand why people have such a hard time with it.  However, it is not impossible if you think about who we are talking about.  He is ALL powerful and ALL knowing!  He is infinite.  He has no end.  So He is able to take as much time as He wants to plan everything out, and He is able to operate at speeds so fast our brains would melt.  We are talking about an infinitely superior mind who has had all the time He needs to create such a detailed and intricate web of stories.  For millennia, God could have been dreaming up story after story and working it all together.

                Going back to Carneian Saga, for example, I had a tough time with Grith Drakst.  He is an assassin who has done so many horrible things.  Now, because of circumstances in his life, the events of the books, Grith is finding himself changing.  What he once was is dying, and he is completely unsure of what he is becoming.  I knew where I wanted Grith to go, but getting him to go there was a challenge.

                In many of my versions of the story, Grith became what I wanted him to be way too quickly.  The change was too sudden and too drastic.  No one changes like that.  It didn’t make sense.  I had to make him go through a whole lot of things to get him to where I wanted him to be and to still make it believable.  In fact, I wound up having to change huge story elements in order to get Grith to become what I wanted him to become.  I had to rework massive timeline events and take out entire characters that used to exist and create new ones just so I could get Grith to become who I wanted him to become.

                So I had to develop new characters that would lead him there.  I also had to create new villains that would push him in the direction I needed him to go.  I then had to work backwards in the lives of these new characters so that I explained why they were doing what they were doing to Grith to make him go where he needed to go.  Before I knew it, the entire character of Taleorith was developed all the way back to his childhood.  Taleorith was conspiring with his apprentice, and I had to know why he would do this.  What upbringing would cause Taleorith to conspire like this?  What was their conspiracy?

                One thing led to another and before I knew it I had developed an entire culture and an entire people who were all around Taleorith.  From there I began to develop other characters and other backgrounds.  Before I knew it I was developing timelines and histories and driving the story backwards more and more through time.  I’d run into an issue that didn’t make sense and I’d have to think about what I would rewrite to make it all logical and make sense.  Should I rewrite Taleorith’s story a bit and then Grith’s as well?  Should I rewrite the history somewhere along the way so that this little issue makes sense?  Whose personality would need to be altered in order for these changes to make sense?  How would those personality changes affect the entire story…other characters…everything?  All these questions came to my mind.  All these things I had to work out.

                However, in the end, I’d developed stories for many, many characters and a timeline that went all the way back to creation.  I based these timelines and stories and backgrounds on the characters, fitting them all together.  Lots of times, the overall story changed because of the characters.  I had to in order for it to all make sense.  Endings changed because the characters simply wouldn’t get to that ending no matter how hard I tried because I didn’t want to change the characters or the entire story would be thrown off.  So the endings had to change to fit the characters, and so forth.  If I can do this, on a smaller scale, in my lifetime (not even working on it for my entire lifetime), then surely it is possible for a vastly superior God to do this for all humans throughout all time.

                The point is that we also determine our futures.  Because we don’t know our futures we make choices with our free wills each and every day.  Just because God knew before time began that we would make the decisions that we are about to make, just because He planned for it, just because He interwove it all together perfectly so that our very characters all fit into His perfectly designed story plot with His perfectly designed endings that all fit together perfectly, doesn’t mean that He FORCES us to make the choices that we make.  We still choose everything that we do.  He just knows what we are going to choose…what everyone is going to choose, and He plans it all out and weaves it all together.

                Hopefully you get my point, which is that God has written our futures and they are set in stone.  He does know who is going to Heaven and who is going to Hell long before He even started creating anything.  It was already all worked out.  However, because we don’t know our destinies and because we are our own characters with our own free wills, God would never write anything into His massive story of creation that He knows we would not do. 

                And He hardly has to do anything to make His story plot play out.  He has simply set events in motion and He lets everyone exist as He knows that they will exist based on when they will come into the story, who their parents are, who influences their lives, what type of personalities they have, etc.  This does not mean that God has no interaction with us.  Oh no!  He interacts with us constantly.  However, He knows exactly how His own influence, and the influence of all things, will affect our decisions.  He does not interact with us if He knows that by interacting with us in some certain way it will undo all His plans.