128 – God the Demolisher & Rebuilder

As Creator and Inventor of Everything, God is the Grand Architect and He never stops developing His Creation. God Almighty is also God the Developer.

God raises up and tears down however He wants, all according to His grand planning.

As an urban area sprawls, it needs different types of streets and passages for different population densities and to fit different levels of progress in technology. Before a people are able to generate electricity, they need the proper roads to move their materials, even in the construction process of building the wiring for electricity. Before underground piping can be made—still having only primitive tools—some form of sewer is needed to keep the city clean. Once pipes are in place, those old sewer trenches can serve other purposes.

Even an embryo starts as a cluster of cells which will eventually divide into specialized organs, tissues, and limbs. Scaffolding and molding go up early, but are taken down once the building is finished. In a sense, the building itself is mere scaffolding for project yet to come. Eventually, everything gets torn down; what doesn’t gets celebrated in a museum to remind us how young we are compared to the ongoing project of humanity.

Watching over and above all of this is God, who builds and plans components of human society that only He can engineer.

God shapes the courses of friendships and social habits. He raises up practices among His people, then he changes those practices to prepare for the newer, better things He has for us. In time, He will tear down those new practices as well.

As God constantly moves and shapes different organizations, kingdoms, cultures, and liturgies, He remains outside of them.

God will eventually tear down formerly useful structures, but nostalgia leads some people to cling to the past and its empty halls. We can become addicted and otherwise fixated on those temporary customs and practices themselves—often defending rigid institutions long after their usefulness has fulfilled its purposes. If we do not leave the condemned structure, it can be demolished with us still inside.

Never revere temporary infrastructure above the Eternal God who never stops tearing down and rebuilding upward.