"DEAR GOD, YOU SURE DON'T ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALIVE" - Day 23

Day 23 – relating and revealing

The first and most important thing we know about God is that we know nothing about him except what he himself makes known. 

 –EMIL BRUNNER

Humans have always tended to believe in the existence of a supernatural God. In fact, archaeologists have yet to unearth a single ancient civilization without such a belief. All cultures, even those separated by thousands of years and miles, have independently come to the same conclusion: God exists! Even though atheists have become visible and vocal over the past three centuries, their numbers are small compared to the vast multitude of believers.

Consider with me for a moment how reluctant the human psyche is to abandon belief in God. It has persisted across centuries, cultures, and continents. It has weathered persecution and has outlasted scientific trends. It has paradoxically increased in the midst of some of the most horrendous suffering and injustice known to man. Even when assailed by intellectual doubts, it has emerged from skepticism stronger than before. Such persistence staggers the mind. More than mere coincidence seems at work here.

Belief in a supernatural God is thus older than Methuselah and more regenerative than the proverbial cat. And the question which immediately surfaces, one that we addressed at length during the first leg of our journey, is this: How did we come to that belief? After exposing the fallacy of naturalistic explanations, the only answer we were left with—the only one that made sense to us—was that God must have acted to make us aware. Just as the characters Romeo and Juliet could become aware of William Shakespeare only if he wrote it into the script, we could become aware of the existence of God only if He engraved it into our being.

This Argument from Supernatural Belief has become one of my five principal reasons for believing in the existence of God. It also is a useful source of information as we ascend the slope of God’s nature, for it gives us some insights into His character not discernible from the two preceding arguments. In short, what it tells us is that any relationship that exists between God and us must be at God’s initiative. He, far greater than us in every aspect, must have revealed His existence and nature to us. We, His creations, could know of Him and about Him only if He chose to make us aware.

The theological term for this process is divine revelation, and you can see why the scholars have always instructed us that God is the Revealer. He, the Infinite, could easily have hidden His existence from us, much more easily than that Tokyo tourist could have hidden his existence from the bed of ants. But He did not do so. Instead, He chose to make us aware of Himself. He thus is truly a relational and revelatory God. He first sought us. Only then could we begin to seek Him.

Daily Quotation

Quoted in Mark Water, The New Encyclopedia of Christian Quotations, 581.