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Hidden God

By 06/18/2015No Comments

Some time ago, I saw a comment on the internet by someone who wondered, “If there really is a God, why does He keep Himself hidden from us?”

I have to admit I kind of chuckled when I first thought about the question.

I mean, what would be a suitably acceptable sign that shows God has not hidden Himself?

How about ten plagues, one right after another, that convince the most powerful man on earth at the time to release over a million slaves, even though it would almost certainly devastate the economy, and destroy his status as a god?

And what if all those people were lead out across the desert by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night? Would that be convincing enough?

How about parting a sea so those people could walk through it, then having it swallow up the entire army that was chasing them?

Would that be enough of a sign?

To be fair, those signs probably wouldn’t be enough for a modern atheist to come to faith, even if they did believe they actually took place, because well, atheists don’t believe in miracles. Everything just has to have a logical explanation, right?

Which begs the question that if you refuse to believe in evidence that God exists, why would an omniscient God supply you with a sign He knew you wouldn’t believe anyway?

And, it’s a valid point that the very people who experienced those miracles first-hand turned to worshiping a golden calf in short order.

And while we’re on the subject, what about simply speaking everything in the entire universe into existence?

How’s that for a sign?

Sure, some say a “big bang” caused all of it to form and it was all inevitable because gravity existed and…

…we’re right back to “logical” explanations.

There is one thing, though, that I’ve never seen a valid, “logical” explanation for.

The recognition that we are all in some way flawed is universal in all cultures, religions, and philosophies—even atheism. It is the one thing all of humanity agrees upon.

We are not as we should be and we all agree on that to some degree.

But, where did that recognition come from?

I mean, if we are just here to have a good time and when we die we are just dead, end-of-story, that is a literal dead-end that leaves any thinking person with a shallow, meaningless existence.

If we are just the random result of millions or billions of years of molecular biological accidents, with no purpose or design, why all the human effort and expenditure of time and energy on philosophy, art, poetry, music, writing, and religion?

From a purely Darwinian standpoint, none of that makes any sense. (No, I am not buying that all that great, deep, thought and effort are merely highly advanced forms of mating rituals.)

And there’s the deal— the one thing human beings need more than anything else is not something that is a matter of our physical survival. It is a matter of our spiritual survival.

It is love.

It cannot be explained by a formula on a blackboard but we know without it, babies fail to thrive, children develop violent and anti-social tendencies which leads to adults with all sorts and kinds of terrible things going on in their lives—and in the lives of others.

Yes, love is undeniably a miracle.

And while there are well over 100 miracles listed in the Bible, I don’t think any one of them is enough to save a single soul–with one notable exception:

The love of Jesus Christ.

That God Himself would love us enough to be brutally murdered at the very hands of the people He would restore to Himself by His own death is an unfathomable solution to an unresolvable problem.

There is no way anyone of this world would have come up with THAT as a solution. No one would propose we mock and torture and kill the very God who created us to make up for thumbing our noses at Him and going off to try to be gods ourselves.

Only a God-like love would come up with that as a solution–and it only works if God Himself came up with it.

Yes, love is the answer to the question of God’s existence and it is a love that cannot be killed. You can deny that it ever existed. You can write it off as merely a human thing. You can crucify it and stuff it in a cold, dark tomb with a stone sealing the entrance and guards at the door.

But love will always rise again.

Today’s Praise
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39 NIV)