Today I want to address what I think is maybe the best atheist argument against the existence of God. It's also a question that we Believers have been grappling with for centuries: Where is God? Why does He remain invisible to us? Why doesn't He reveal Himself unmistakably to all of us? I don't claim to have THE answer to that question. Nobody does. But here are my thoughts on the subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Why is God hidden? | |
| Why does it appear that God is invisible? | |
| Why is he hidden from us? | |
| That's a question that believers have been grappling with for millennia. | |
| It's also a question that among atheists, I think, is probably considered the number one, for many atheists, it would seem, it is considered the number one argument against the existence of God. | |
| Because they say that, look, an all-powerful being, a being who is responsible for creating all things, who rules over all things, he would not remain invisible to us. | |
| He would reveal himself unmistakably, especially if he looks upon it and you think, well, if I were God and I created this world, And I looked and I saw this world and I saw especially that people were falling away and falling away from belief. | |
| And there was so much suffering and misery and pain and so forth. | |
| Well, then I would appear. | |
| I would make myself clear. | |
| I would say, hey, everybody, listen up. | |
| Look, here I am. | |
| Here's God. Here's what I want you to do. | |
| Here's how I want you to live. | |
| I wouldn't pass down these truths in a book. | |
| In an ancient book, I wouldn't trust other humans to impart the knowledge. | |
| I would just appear and I would make it clear. | |
| I think that's kind of the atheist argument. | |
| And I think even non-atheists, even believers, have had moments of wondering this. | |
| I think we all probably have. | |
| We've all grappled with this question. | |
| I'll admit that I've had moments in prayer sometimes where I say to God, I say, God, if you would just reveal yourself to me. | |
| I mean, can you just reveal yourself? | |
| Can you come out of the shadows just for one second and just show me your glory in all of its fullness, just for one second? | |
| That's all I'm asking for, just one second. | |
| Just one second. | |
| If I had just one second, just a blink of an eye, if I had a one-second vision of heaven, of the supernatural realm, of the world that lies beyond this one, if I had just that one second, that would be enough to sustain me for the rest of my life. | |
| I could live for a hundred years, for a thousand years, on just that one second. | |
| But the vision never comes. | |
| It's never come to me. | |
| It's never come to most of us, and I think for most of us, it never will come, at least not in this life. | |
| Why? Well, I think that there are... | |
| I'm going to offer three answers to that question, and I'm not claiming that these are the three answers. | |
| I'm just saying that these are three answers. | |
| They may not even be the best answers. | |
| But as I've thought about this problem, this is what I've concluded. | |
| Why is God hidden? | |
| First answer, and the most obvious answer, is that he isn't hidden. | |
| At least not in the way and not to the extent that atheists would claim. | |
| God has revealed himself to mankind countless times through the ages. | |
| And as a Christian, I would say, of course, that the greatest and most definitive revelation came in the person of Jesus Christ. | |
| Jesus was born, he ministered on earth, he performed miracles, he was crucified, he was resurrected, and then he ascended. | |
| And he was not hidden during that time. | |
| And these events themselves were not hidden. | |
| And since then, and before that, God has revealed himself in other ways to other people. | |
| And there, again, have been countless stories of visions and supernatural events and miraculous, unexplainable healings and so forth. | |
| So all of these things. | |
| And you can choose to disbelieve these signs, and you can choose to disbelieve in God, and you can choose to disbelieve in Jesus Christ and all of that. | |
| But if you do, you must admit that you are not disbelieving a hidden God. | |
| Because that is not the God that we believe in. | |
| We believe in a God who has revealed Himself repeatedly to the human race. | |
| So we do not believe in an entirely hidden God. | |
| Second answer. The hiddenness of God, the so-called invisibility of God, is somewhat of a relative thing. | |
| It's a matter of perception, you might say. | |
| Because in the Middle Ages, for instance, God was seen as this utterly self-evident truth because a man of that time would look around himself and see God revealed in pretty much everything. | |
| He would see the beauty of nature. | |
| He would look up at the sky and see the vastness of space. | |
| He would see the mountains and trees and oceans. | |
| He would look at his fellow man. | |
| He would look within himself and see his own self and his own mind and his moral awareness. | |
| And he could look at poetry and art and listen to music and on and on and on. | |
| And all of this to him was a clear indication of God's presence. | |
| So if you had said to him, where is God? | |
| He would have looked back at you and he would have said, what do you mean? | |
| Where is he? He's all around you. | |
| Look around. He's everywhere. | |
| And I think that that was the correct perspective. | |
| And when I have demanded in prayer at times and moments of weakness, when I have demanded that God reveal himself to me, I can imagine God making the same response to me and saying, look around you. | |
| I have revealed myself. | |
| I'm everywhere. Third answer. | |
| The last two answers were not entirely sufficient. | |
| I think they're necessary, but not sufficient. | |
| Because the atheists will respond and say, okay, so you say that God was incarnate on earth 2,000 years ago. | |
| He revealed himself to a very small smattering of people who existed back then. | |
| And okay, so God has allegedly performed miracles and All these wondrous signs for, again, a small fraction of people through the ages. | |
| And okay, so you say that the beauty of nature and all that stuff is supposed to indicate God's presence. | |
| Fine. But all of that gives rise to another question. | |
| If God exists, and if he is willing to reveal himself through miracles and through curing the blind and through raising the dead, and even through coming here and being raised himself from the dead, Then why doesn't he cut out the guesswork entirely? | |
| Why doesn't he just like appear to us in the sky as this immense, beautiful, heavenly figure and speak to us, to all of us and say, Hi, I'm God. | |
| Here's what I need you to do. | |
| Here's the meaning of life. | |
| Here are the things that you need. | |
| Here's how you need to live. | |
| Let me lay it out for you. | |
| He could make himself unmistakably, unavoidably, absolutely evident to everyone on earth. | |
| But the fact is that he hasn't. | |
| Why? Now, I think that's a reasonable objection. | |
| Because it's true that even though he's revealed himself to us as a Christian, we must admit that he has chosen to reveal himself in a way that still allows us to deny his existence. | |
| He seems to throw out these breadcrumbs, but he leaves room and probably a lot of room to ignore those crumbs and even to ignore him and his very existence. | |
| He could appear to us in the sky. | |
| He could do that. He could appear to each of us individually at the same time. | |
| He could appear right before you in your home. | |
| He could force you to believe. | |
| He absolutely could. | |
| I know there are people who would argue, well, yeah, but even if God appeared in the sky, I mean, atheists would still find some other explanation for it. | |
| And maybe a few of them would. | |
| I mean, the most deluded, the most... | |
| But I think almost everybody would come to believe in God if he were to appear in the sky and speak to us, right? | |
| And he could reveal himself in a way individually to all of us where everybody in the world would believe. | |
| He could force that upon us. | |
| So if the whole point is to believe in nothing more, then he could force that. | |
| And in fact, one day he will force the issue, one way or another. | |
| One day, we are all going to believe in God, one day. | |
| Nobody in the afterlife, no matter where they are, heaven or hell, none of them are atheists. | |
| Because when you stand before God in judgment, there's not going to be any disbelieving. | |
| There's not going to be any way around it. | |
| So why don't we get that sign now? | |
| I think it's because believing in God's existence is not the point in and of itself. | |
| The point is to love God. | |
| Love is the point. | |
| To love God and to desire Him alone. | |
| That's the point of existence. | |
| If the only point we're simply just to believe in God's existence, well, then this existence that we have now separated from God and where God is invisible seems like a cruel joke. | |
| It seems like this weird game of hide-and-seek that God is playing with us, where he sends us off to some abandoned corner of the universe and then hides off somewhere on some other corner and says, come and find me. | |
| And the whole point of life is just to, you know, Believe and nothing more. | |
| But that's not the point of life. | |
| The point is to love, is to love God and to desire Him. | |
| And I would submit that for most of us right now on earth, a miraculous revelation would hinder us. | |
| It would prevent us from loving Him. | |
| It may force us to believe But it would prevent us from loving Him. | |
| If He were to appear in the clouds before all of us right now, we would all believe, but we would not all love. | |
| And there are even some of us who maybe could have come to love Him, but now would not, because He has appeared. | |
| Let me explain what I mean by that. | |
| And I will use again, as I've used many times, the analogy of marriage. | |
| And I do think this is the best analogy that we have available to us to explain our relationship with God. | |
| And it is the analogy that God the Father and God the Son both make repeatedly in Scripture. | |
| So I'm pretty confident in the analogy because it's the one that God himself relies upon. | |
| So think about it. | |
| If you're a man, think about when you first met the woman who would be your wife. | |
| Think about that moment when you first met your wife, and you saw her, and she was beautiful, and she was full of life and energy, and you were captivated, you were enchanted, you were infatuated, right? | |
| Now, oftentimes, we'll call this falling in love. | |
| And there are people who will say, I fell in love with my wife. | |
| It was love at first sight. | |
| I fell in love instantly. | |
| But really, when you get married and you've been married a while, And you have a little bit of maturity and you start to understand. | |
| You realize that that wasn't love at all. | |
| You didn't love your wife the moment that you saw her. | |
| It was not love at first sight. | |
| You didn't fall in love with her a second after laying your eyes on her. | |
| You couldn't. You didn't know her. | |
| You had almost nothing to go on besides her looks. | |
| Which was really, if we're being honest, the main thing. | |
| I mean, in the first few seconds of meeting her, in the first few moments, in the first few days, probably in the first few months, one of the primary things attracting you to her was that she was beautiful. | |
| And you had a pretty surface-level understanding of her personality as well, but that's it. | |
| That's all you had. You had her looks, and you had what you knew of her personality, which was not much, because you didn't know her that well. | |
| So no, this wasn't love. | |
| This couldn't be love. | |
| It was captivation. | |
| It was infatuation. It was preoccupation. | |
| Maybe it was even obsession. | |
| But it was an entirely emotional experience. | |
| In order for true love to develop and for a lasting marriage to be formed, these initial fireworks, this emotional experience, these emotional hysterics have to cool down. | |
| And we'll often call this, we'll say, well, the in-love phase is ending. | |
| But actually, the opposite is true. | |
| That's such a stupid way of looking at it. | |
| When that infatuation starts to cool in a marriage, we say, oh, well, the in-love phase is... | |
| No, the exact opposite is true. | |
| Now, here's the part where it is actually possible to be in love. | |
| The state of being really in love begins when that initial phase ends. | |
| So it's precisely when infatuation, emotion, and sexual attraction are no longer the number one driving forces in your relationship. | |
| Not to say that they're gone, but when they are the driving forces, well then you cannot really be in love. | |
| Because that's not love. | |
| It's when those things kind of take a backseat to something else, when something deeper, something calmer, something more real becomes the bond that ties you together at that moment, that's when you can really love. | |
| In other words, there is really love. | |
| There is really a marriage. | |
| When you get to the point where you're choosing the other, you're choosing your wife willfully, and not because you're almost forced to choose her, because your emotional attraction to her is so strong. | |
| Think about the ridiculously intense, quote, relationships between, like, 15-year-olds in high school. | |
| Think about a 15-year-old boy and girl. | |
| They're dating, and they're absolutely obsessed with each other for five months, and then in the sixth month, they hate each other. | |
| But during that five-month stretch, they had almost no choice but to be with each other because their attraction was so intense and so primal and so physical that they had almost no choice. | |
| They were obsessed with each other. | |
| There was no love there whatsoever. | |
| No matter how much they said, oh, I love you. | |
| They didn't love each other. They didn't even know each other. | |
| This was just nothing but pure attraction. | |
| And then when it started to wane just a little bit, everything fell apart because there was no love there whatsoever. | |
| How does this relate to God? | |
| I'd say it relates in this way. | |
| If God were to reveal Himself to all of us right now in His glory, if He were to appear in the sky before all of us, if He were to appear right now before you in your home, if He were to do that for all of us, we would all certainly fall at His feet and we would worship. | |
| I think there's no question about that. | |
| But at that point, We would have no choice. | |
| Our emotions responding to this inconceivable event would force us to fall and cower before this immense, all-powerful being. | |
| It would be something like laying eyes on your spouse for the first time, except magnified by a billion, by a trillion. | |
| Magnified infinitely. | |
| And just as that emotional infatuation actually prevented, for a time, true love from forming, so too would love be prevented from forming as you look upon this beautiful, terrifying, awesome being. | |
| Now, you would believe in this being, certainly, and I think you would fear him, and you would, in a sense, worship him. | |
| But if you didn't go into that meeting already loving him, Then how could you possibly love him now? | |
| How could you think clearly enough to love him? | |
| If you were too overwhelmed by the sight of your spouse to truly love them on sight, would you not be a billion times, a trillion times more overwhelmed by meeting God? | |
| And thus, would it not be a billion times, a trillion times harder to begin loving him then? | |
| And if the point of life is to love God, and not merely to believe that He exists, but if the point is to love Him, then would that purpose not be hindered, even prevented, by this spectacle that we're all asking for? | |
| I would say that God's nature is such that we fallen human beings need a certain distance from Him in order to love Him. | |
| Because love is a noble thing. | |
| It is a higher thing. | |
| And it is a willful thing. | |
| And if God were, so to speak, right on top of us, revealing Himself in His glory, then the baser elements of human nature would inevitably take over. | |
| Fear, self-preservation, and so forth. | |
| Even wonder and awe, not that those things are base, but they're not as high as love. | |
| So all of that, wonder, awe, fear, all of that would take over. | |
| Take over our mind. | |
| And the nobler, calmer, willful love would have no chance to develop within us. | |
| So it makes sense then, I think, why God reveals himself in the way that he does. | |
| With these kind of crumbs. | |
| With these hints. | |
| With little glimpses into a beauty and a reality. | |
| Beyond our own. But still with that separation and with that distance. | |
| Even Jesus, when he was on earth, before the resurrection, he only revealed himself, and just for a moment, in his full divine glory, one time, to three of his disciples, and only after they'd been following him for a time, and only after Peter had already made his confession. | |
| It's important to note in the Bible that Peter makes his confession and says, you are the Son of God. | |
| And then it's a few verses after that that the transfiguration happens. | |
| And I think it had to be that way. | |
| That the apostles had to come and follow him and love him and recognize him before he could reveal himself in his glory. | |
| And we will all see, I think, reality transfigured one day. | |
| We're all going to see the truth, inescapable. | |
| But we have to go into that moment already loving God, already desiring Him. | |
| Or at least we have to go into it with a seed, with a kind of sapling of love and desire. | |
| We've got to have something. | |
| There's got to be something there, something that we have really chosen. | |
| And something that we could have not chosen. | |
| Something that we had the option to deny. | |
| If God appears before us, well, then belief really means nothing at all because we had no choice but to believe. | |
| But there's got to be love. | |
| And if we meet God having never loved Him, then in that moment, I think logically, if you understand human nature, it's clear that in that moment it will be too late. | |
| If you don't go into the meeting already loving Him, at least to some extent, at least even to the smallest extent, then it will be too late. | |
| So God keeps us here. | |
| He keeps us in this reality. | |
| And He calls us home when He knows that we're ready. | |
| When He knows that our love has grown as much as it's going to grow. | |
| And we're ready for the next stage, final stage. | |
| Or, alternatively, our life can be over when he knows that we will never be ready. | |
| When he knows that the love is never going to develop, and the sapling is never going to grow, and our cause is hopeless. | |
| In which case, we're finished. | |
| But either way, We have the chance now, because of that distance and because of that separation, we have the chance to love him. | |
| And we have to make that choice. | |
| And it seems to me that he reveals himself as much as he possibly can, while still giving us the opportunity to really love. | |
| So that's just, as I said, one possible answer. | |
| you Probably not the best one, but it's a possible one. | |
| Something at least to think about. | |
| Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening, everybody. |