"5 Reasons: Why I Still Believe in God" - DAY 44

Day 44 – divine education

…the God beyond the mountain, the God beyond the sky… This God is the initiator; he encounters [human beings], they do not encounter him.  –THOMAS CAHILL

I want to add something at this point about those primitive nature religions. The atheist seems to assume that they consisted only of nature worship, that none of them had any notion of a reality beyond nature. But is this true? One look inside the pyramids of Egypt will show you that it is not. There you will find the mummies of Egyptian royalty entombed with their kingly possessions and their servants. Obviously they are anticipating life after death, a journey beyond the grave to another world, a world beyond nature, one that looks very much supernatural. This same supernatural thread can be found in Sumer and Babylon and other ancient cultures. That these people worshiped nature cannot be disputed, but woven into these nature religions was a hint of the supernatural. We have already concluded that nature could not have been the seamstress sewing this supernatural thread. The weaver was God. 

It seems, then, that even in these primitive nature religions the voice of God can be heard, telling the ancients there is more to reality than nature alone. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and in other ancient writings, occasional odd and curious references to a world outside nature can be found, references that are inexplicable unless something outside of nature is letting these early writers sense its existence.

What you see here is the beginning of man's education about God by none other than God Himself. Like a teacher showing first-graders the existence of an alphabet, God begins with man at the most rudimentary level, the level of nature worship, and inserts there the ABCs of His existence. He takes man's myths and superstitions and uses them as a medium through which truth about Him can be grasped. 

Thus we see in these nature religions the beginning of a journey that leads centuries later to the words of one considered by many to be God Himself: "You have heard that only on this mountain you should worship God. I say to you that God is a spirit and that anyone who worships Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."¹ Words cannot relate how beautiful this whole process appears to all of us who worship God today.

Daily Quotation

Thomas Cahill, The Gift of the Jews (New York: Nan Talese, 1998), 85-86.

¹A paraphrase of Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman as recorded in John’s Gospel, chapter four.