In one respect, the world and everyone in it is God's chessboard. The pieces cannot be understood to be playing the game, at least, not in the same way that God is. Whatever He is doing is categorically, at minimum, very different from what they are doing when they run along their assigned squares. The rook is free to run back and forth or side to side, but he is not free to run or strike diagonally. Compared to God all things are pawns. This isn't to say that all things are, in fact, merely pawns, but to say that the distance between what God is doing and what we are doing is such that to even call us pawns is to praise us more than we merit.
The triangle is not free to acquire a fourth line without surrendering the freedom to be a triangle. The sea horse cannot become a rocking horse without becoming wooden.
"The Old Testament hero is no more supposed to be of the same nature as God than a saw or a hammer is supposed to be of the same shape as the carpenter. This is the main key and characteristic of Hebrew scriptures as a whole. There are, indeed, in those scriptures innumerable instances of the sort of rugged humor, keen emotion, and powerful individuality which is never wanting in great primitive prose and poetry. Nevertheless the main characteristic remains: the sense not merely that God is stronger than man, not merely that God is more secret than man, but that He means more, that He knows better what He is doing, that compared with Him we have something of the vagueness, the unreason, and the vagrancy of the beasts that perish." — G.K. Chesterton, Introduction to the Book of Job
God is better at using men than they are at comprehending Him. He is a better at using us as a pen than we are at understanding what He is writing with us. God does not fill human life with meaning apart from Himself. He is all meaning and the means to make it. That is to say, God does not exist to give our lives meaning; we exist because He is full of meaning and felt like sharing.
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