22 | Chapter 22 How God Works for You in Time and Space
Chapter 22 | How God Works for You in Time and Space: The Engineering of Success
Section 1 | Why We Must Let God Work in His Way
In the Bible, there is a vital verse: "God’s ways of working are different from our ways." Jesus also repeatedly emphasized: "Thy will be done, not my will, but Thine." This is not just religious language; it reveals a profound reality:
Between our everyday cognitive world and God’s vision, there exists a massive structural difference.
The problems God sees are different from the problems we see;
The way God measures size, weight, and priority is completely different from how humans do.
With Him, "the humble are exalted, and the exalted are brought low," and "the least shall be the greatest." This difference in perspective naturally means that His way of working will not be the same as ours.
Because the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the Trinity, our "God" here refers to Jesus Christ—the image of the God of Grace described earlier, who is the only one willing to intervene in our human destiny. This book is not a professional theological text, so I will not make further specific distinctions.
1. Why Must Success Be Done by God, Rather than Relying on Our Own Ways?
If we view "success" as "getting what we want," then we must first answer:
Is what we want truly what is appropriate for us?
This will be expanded in other chapters of this book. But here, let’s first acknowledge a reality:
Humans often see what they truly do not need only after they have obtained what they thought they wanted. In other words—
Man must first get the "thing I thought I wanted" before he can see "what I truly need."
Therefore, we will still pursue goals according to our own desires and judgments.
The problem is:
When a person tries to use their own mind to calculate the path to success, they are essentially performing a calculation that is impossible to succeed.
2. Human Computing Power Cannot Handle "Creative Success"
There are two types of success:
- Repetitive Success (others have done it, and we can replicate it).
- Creative Success (from nothing to something, from zero to one).
Most truly breakthrough successes in human society, and most decisive successes in personal experience, belong to "Creative Success."
And Creative Success has one decisive characteristic:
It has no experts. As Jack Ma said:
"All experts are experts of the past; there are no experts of the future." Because experts summarize "past patterns," but what we have to face is the "unknown of the future."
3. In the World of the Future, Humans Cannot Calculate Success
Let’s try to imagine a simple goal:
"I hope to enter a certain ideal company within a period of time." This goal alone, a seemingly simple wish, contains dozens of variables that cannot be calculated in advance:
- Does that company happen to have a job opening at that exact time?
- Does the skill they need happen to match yours?
- What is the level of your competitors?
- Will the interviewer happen to send your materials to the right person?
- Does the CEO’s state, preference, and mood on that day align with yours?
- Are you personally in good health and mentally stable on that specific day?
This list can go on indefinitely, and more importantly:
The variables you actually encounter are things you cannot even think of now! Much less know how to deal with.
Every variable could change the result, and the number of variables far exceeds human calculating capacity.
This is why many people, looking back after succeeding, say:
"It was so simple after all." But before it happened, it wasn't a "deterministic path" at all; it was a cloud of probability.
4. The World Is Not a Linear System, but a Quantum-Style Probability System
Here, we can use the quantum physics understood by modern people to make an analogy and explanation. Of course, it does not mean God’s way of working is identical to quantum physics. Quantum physics is simply an explanatory method currently accepted and recognized by humans to understand God’s work. So, we will use quantum physics as an illustrative metaphor:
Quantum physics tells us: Before observation, particles exist in a state of superposition of all possibilities.
The essence of observation requires an Observer. Thus, the human Ego is this observer. Human desire is a type of "probability confirmation." There must be this clear "probability confirmation," this thought, this goal, to collapse the probability cloud into a definite physical form.
This is why, in Jesus's teaching, the first thing we need to do is "Ask."
Human life is the same:
Before success happens, everything is in a "cloud of multiple superimposed probabilities."
But the human brain still uses:
- Mechanical models;
- Causal models;
- Linear prediction models;
Using extremely limited knowledge and individual experience to try and understand a world that is essentially a "Quantum Leap." This is why:
We cannot rely on our own calculations to obtain true breakthrough success. We can only let God work.
Because—
He can see all probabilities simultaneously and handle all variables. Modern cognitive psychology points out that the human brain is born with "Bounded Rationality." We can only process a very small amount of information; the rest relies entirely on:
- Intuition;
- Bias;
- Past experience;
- Emotional state.
But Creative Success, in its essence, requires a system to process hundreds or thousands of variables simultaneously, which far exceeds the capacity of the human brain.
Therefore, "succeeding by relying on oneself" is, in the sense of cognitive science, an Impossible Mission.
Steve Jobs said in his Stanford speech:
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." The essential part of this logic is:
Man cannot calculate the path to success from the future; he can only see after the experience that God has connected all the dots into a line.
And this "Dot-and-Line Relationship" is precisely God’s way of working.
