Photo by Nikolas Noonan on Unsplash
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
(HT: Terry H.)
Explanation
If you have any experience at all, you know exactly what this means.
You can gain experience by getting what you want, but there is simply no teacher like the school of hard knocks.
On a deeper, theological level, this is the very reason for the Fall itself. God, being God, could have created any plan he wanted for the reconciliation of man. He could have struck Adam and Eve dead on the spot and started over. He could have immediately provided salvation through redemption. He could have devised any plan He wanted. Those who say God had to have done it the way He did need to reconsider who God is. God is God. He could have chosen any path forward from the Fall of Adam and Eve even preventing it from happening at all to not creating Adam and Eve in the first place to an infinite variety of other paths we might or might not be able to imagine.
But the world as it is, is the plan God chose. The world is a messy disaster filled with accidents, crime, disaster, atrocity, famine, genocide, and sin, much worse than it was when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the forbidden tree. God chose this pathway for history for a reason. He did so for His own reasons. Some theologians imagine He did it this way because it was the best possible path forward, but this, again, is foolishness. God is God. He follows the path that is best suited for His own purposes, not man’s. Some theologians imagine man to be an outsized part of God’s overall plan when, for all we know, man is himself just a minute piece of a program that spans worlds.
Anyway, in this world, God has arranged things so that we gain experience and learn both by doing well and by failing. The fact that we learn better through failure tells us something about ourselves. So part of the reason God has bent the world in the way that it is bent is because a fallen people need to make mistakes to learn the important lessons. And so history is one long learning lesson where we gained experience doing something to get what we want and failing to get it. Again and again. Maybe, if we gain experience this way for long enough, and we remember our mistakes well enough for our children, we will learn that God’s way is the only way that really works.
Or maybe we won’t… but that’s going to get into eschatology, and I will save that discussion for a future STFL.
By the way, this one is also very closely related to STFL #138.