Recently I was reminded that God is a god who reveals himself to people through the events of their lives.
Whereas Islam believes that God downloaded a holy book to Mohammed through a strict process of copy and paste, Christians believe that God worked with the stuff of people's lives. The Bible may have been 'breathed out' by God but it has been written down by multiple human autoros, each of them with their own personalities and pasts.
We learn most about God not from a microscope but from a biography.
Applying this God's existence
I have often wondered about the existence of God. I've heard convincing arguments on both sides of the fence (and from those sitting uncomfortably on the fence!).
I agree with people who say that the existence of so much evil and suffering in the world makes it hard to believe in a loving God, it does. I agree that life appears to be random and chaotic. I agree as well that trying to explain something so unexplainable as the inner workings of a transcendent Creator seems an impossible thing to do. If there is a supreme being out there who created everything we see, hear and feel how could we ever expect to understand it/him? Perhaps we shouldn’t waste our time trying. After all how could a fish describe what life is like outside of the fish tank? Isn’t that what it’s like when we try to explain who and what God is like?
But then I don’t believe that scientific answers to questions with such practical implications could ever fully satisfy us. As human beings we’re after more than fridge magnets and bumper stickers. We’re after fulfilment, experience, happiness and love. We're after personal relationship.
I don’t live my life as a Christian because of the mathematical probability of their being a God. I don’t try to follow Jesus’ life and example out of a conviction that his teaching was better than any other teaching ever delivered before or since, and I’m not willing to deny myself worldly gain for the sake of a simpler life because of the case for Jesus’ resurrection. All of these things are important contributing factors for why I continue on in faith but they’re not the real reason I believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
I trust Jesus and I love him and I live for him, because I know him. I’ve met him, I’ve experienced him, and I’ve seen him at work in my life and in the lives of those around me. Isn't part of this what 1 Peter 1:8-9 is trying to explain? Jesus' love and Jesus' presence fulfil me more than anyone and anything else in the world. I’m a Christian because of the pleasure I derive from knowing him as much as I am because I think it’s true.
Ultimately I don’t believe that any of us live out our lives the way we do because of carefully thought through convictions and a commitment to being intellectually honest. Rather I think that the majority of people live the way they do because of what they’ve experienced. We've learnt that coffee gives us energy because we drank it and got a buzz. We learnt that life is painful because we lost someone we cared for or we saw someone else do so.
We all live the way we do because of what we think ‘works’ best.. ‘Does this work?’ is the question we ask more than ‘is this true?’ I’m not promoting experience over truth it's just that I don’t think ‘truth’ is most people’s starting place, experience is - neither however do I think the two are mutually exclusive! My point is that truth isn’t purely academic or intellectual, it’s experiential as well.
If someone tells me that God is there and that he loves me I remain unchanged until I’ve experienced for myself something of his life changing presence, or until I’m given reason to believe that he does in fact love me. In fact not only am I unchanged and unconvinced I’m also prone to disagree depending on what I’ve experienced in my life.
I believe that it is for these reasons that God has chosen to reveal himself through biography more than anything else.
God has revealed himself in story
God could have inspired the Bible writers to write anything he wanted them to. He could have had them write carefully thought out and watertight cases for his existence. He could have answered every question that people had and he could have given a comprehensive defence as to why he permits evil to reign on the Earth. He could have done all sorts of things, but he didn’t.
What he did was to have people write a record of how individuals responded to him when they lived in relationship with him. Abraham heard from him and trusted him enough to leave his father’s country, all of his security and protection for the future, and head off in search of the place that God had promised him that he’d possess one day. Jacob wrestled with him all night and resurfaced as a changed man, free from the guilt and shame of his past. Joseph understood God’s sovereign purposes and declared to his treacherous brothers ‘what you intended for evil, God allowed for good.’ Moses spoke to God face to face and Samuel heard him whisper his name in the night. David, the king of a great nation, knew what rejection, bereavement and family breakdown really felt like and yet still he declared to all the world that ‘the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want’. Solomon learnt that God never quits on people even when they quit on him, Elijah didn’t understand him but learnt to trust him nonetheless even when his life was under threat, Daniel knew that God was with him even in the midst of a lions’ den and Peter was forever changed by the forgiveness and mercy of his saviour God.
Real people met with the real God. They didn’t meet a theory, they weren’t won over by reason and logic, they met a person. They met the relational creator God and that’s how it was that they could say ‘our God reigns and is king over the whole Earth.’ This is the defence of scripture, this is how God chose to reveal himself to us, through the lives and testimonies of others.
When I’m sitting in church and listening to people I know giving testimony to all that God has rescued them from and comforted them through I’m more convinced about the existence of God than I am at any other time in my life, and people have been giving voice to his goodness and faithfulness for several thousand years.
The hard questions of life are still there, God doesn’t give me a comprehensive answer that satisfies all of my deepest aches and longings. What he does do time and again however is introduce me to people, real people, who are walking with him and who are knowing his comfort and strength even through severe trials and difficulties.
God has chosen to reveal himself through the lives and experiences of others and not through the experimenting and discovering of professionals. The theories, the reasoning and the mathematics, may be helpful and indeed for those professing belief they are an important justification of our belief to a watching world - but they do not provide the satisfaction our souls seek after. At best those explanations give us confidence to knock on heaven's door hopeful that someone will answer, but they will not lead us into the kind of friendship with God that our hearts crave.
God is a relational God and has chosen to reveal himself through relationship and testimony.
This satisfies me because I know that it is this that I’m really after. I want something, someone, who will make a difference to my life everyday and every minute of everyday. What I’m after, and what I believe we’re all after is a relationship with a personal God who meets us where we are, isn’t angry with us, doesn’t guilt us or cause us to retreat into ourselves but who invites us out, out of our shells and insecurities, out into life, happy, contented, joyful and resilient life.
This is exactly what Jesus promised to give to his followers: life as you’ve always wanted it.
Want to know God? Invite him in and start walking with him, there really is no other way.