God doesn’t believe in Atheists
I don’t know about you, but I can never remember a time when I didn’t believe in God. There was certainly a long period of my life when I didn’t trust in Jesus, but I always had an inkling in the back of my brain that there had to be a God.
For a long time I was a ‘deist’ – believing in a God who had created the universe and had just let it go to see what would happen. This fit in well with my scientific worldview which seemed to be able to adequately explain everything around me but when you looked further and further and further back in time you couldn’t escape the idea that even the Big Bang had to come from somewhere.
Evangelicals have always maintained that it is through Scripture alone that we can ‘know’ God, in the sense that it is through Scripture that God reveals himself to us and enables us, through the access granted to us by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, to enter into a personal relationship with him.
Yet we cannot deny that there are some things that we can know about God apart from Scripture. After all, there is a sense that almost all people have of ‘the other world’. Sometimes this sense is expressed in organised religion, sometimes through various ‘spiritualities’, sometimes through the numinous sense of awe of creation.
Ecclesiastes 3:10-11: “I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (ESV)
The ‘eternity’ that God has placed in our hearts, the sense that there is more to existence than living, dying, and rotting in the ground, this sense is what drives us to search for “the meaning of life” - a more satisfying meaning than ‘42’. We seek an explanation for love. An explanation beyond simply being the by-product of the chance assembly of molecules in our brain, as they interact with each other and with the nerve impulses from our retina caused by light reflected from our significant other.
Yet, says the writer of Ecclesiastes, this search is meaningless. We cannot find out by the worldly philosophies and meta-ethics why God has done what he has done. We can use our wonderful science to describe down to the smallest detail, but we cannot use it to explain, to bring meaning to what is being described.
Furthermore, we can know something of God from his creation. We look at the stars, we look at the sunset, we look at the beauty of a forest or the divine escarpment above the City of Wollongong, and we get some idea of the Creator from observing his creation.
What can we know? Paul tells us: Romans 1:18-23: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (ESV)
Just by looking at the world around us, the created order, we can see that God’s eternal power and divine nature. When I was in Year 8, I built a wooden pencil case. It kind of cracked a bit after I started using it, and the lid always went on a little bit crooked. Just by looking at it, everyone knew I was neither powerful nor divine. I’ve always wondered what Jesus’ woodwork was like...
But God’s creation declares his power in its sheer enormity and intricacy. If the Earth was closer to the sun, we’d boil like on Venus. If the Earth was further away, we’d freeze like on Mars. The nearly circular orbit of earth puts us right in the zone we need for water to be liquid. And the Earth rotates, so as to give us day and night, times to work and to rest. But it doesn’t just rotate, the axis of the earth is tilted by 23 degrees, so that as the year progresses we get seasons.
The sorts of ‘coincidences’ that we see regarding the Earth extend all the way through biology, chemistry and physics to the smallest scale. We look at the created order and see evidence of a designer everywhere.
So be assured, when you are talking to your non-Christian friends, that belief in God is neither unreasonable nor uncommon. In fact, throughout history and throughout the world, atheism is quite rare and typically exists as a deliberate rejection of our Christian God. All people who you talk to will have, at some level, a knowledge about God that cannot be denied.
Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.” (ESV)
However, the Romans passage tells us that we know enough from creation to be held accountable, to be ‘without excuse’ for not honouring God as God. While people universally know about God, we universally reject him and universally need the salvation offered in the gospel message. This is why ECU and Christian student groups across the country have made this year the Year of Tertiary Evangelism, with the title, “For Christ’s Sake.”
So how can we ‘know’ God? Our God is a personal God, and so we know him as we know other people, through them revealing themselves by their words. We hear from God where he speaks, in the Scriptures, and we talk to him in prayer.
God tells us in the Bible that he is trinitarian. He consists of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We never would have guessed that. We couldn’t have worked it out from the innate knowledge of God that we have, nor studied God’s creation to discover it. I don’t even think that it’s the sort of doctrine that someone would make up. It’s only that God has told us that we can know and believe it.
And it is only through Scripture that the gospel comes to us, the promise of forgiveness of sins and of the new, eternal life that comes through Christ Jesus’ death and resurrection.
So at ECU we teach the Bible. Join us in main meetings, faculty or college bible studies, at camps and conferences such as ‘RELOAD 2005’, as together we get to know God more and more deeply.
[Stephen Bell] << For Christ's Sake | Return to the Index | A Six-pack of Staffworkers >>