Real Clear Truth

Have you ever run into somebody that voices the following objection to God?

“If God really loved us then he would show himself to us. To force us to believe in him without coming down and proving he’s real is just not ‘fair’”.

Well, here’s my reply to a colleague friend who raised this very objection…

First, I must say that I really don’t know how this all works. I don’t know why God shows himself to some and not to others. I don’t know why it’s easy for some to believe and hard for others. I don’t know why God is obvious to some and not to others. All I can do is offer my insights and hope it will gradually make some sense to you.

You know you exist. That is a pretty sure thing. But then it’s also pretty obvious that we didn’t create ourselves either. Something else has to exist out there beyond us mere humans. Perhaps it’s all just physics, but science really has no hope of answering how everything came into existence — let alone answering what it all means.

Moreover, if we merely exist due to a fluke of physics, then it seems highly improbably that we are the only “flukes” in this huge universe. Which begs the question — where are the others? Now maybe the “others” view us as just bugs that don’t deserve their attention, but this is where I think we know deep down inside of us that that just isn’t true.

Have you ever noticed that a major theme that runs through a lot of science fiction stories is that there is something inherently “special” about humans. We may not have very advanced technology. We may have primitive emotions. But something inside us tells us we are special. Do you sense that?

To me, this feeling is directly related to the fact that God made us and that he loves us. I honestly think we can’t help but pick that up in our spirits. And to me, this is the crucible where “faith” is birthed. Something inside us just knows what is really true. Something inside knows there’s something more out there. Something inside makes us feel special.

Now to me, these feelings can either lead us to discovering God or they can be rejected by us deep down because something else inside us says this can’t possibly be God because — well because it’s just not fair for him to work this way — or something.

To me, faith becomes easy when we are open to God being real, and faith becomes hard when we can’t accept him being real — or fair — or what have you.

To me, your question of why doesn’t God just make himself known is a bit silly. It’s silly because he’s right here right now. He’s right in front of us. He’s all around us, we just can’t see him very easily. The question becomes, why do we have a problem seeing him easily and whose fault is it? Is it our fault that we can’t see him, or God’s fault — and therefore his responsibility to fix the problem?

Well, I see it as our fault.

To me, God made himself very well known — at first — but we rejected him. To me, we deliberately turned our backs on him, and then we forgot he existed and our parents never passed down to us the truth. I’ve also seen that God is quite merciful and that when people seek him out that he quite often reveals himself to them.

Which of course begs the question of why he didn’t reveal himself to you when you did seek him, or why he doesn’t make it more obvious to others that just aren’t sure one way or the other. This is why I say I don’t know how it ultimately works. I don’t know how God decides these things. I don’t know why he reveals himself to one and not to another. I don’t know how he will treat someone who honestly never rejected him and just didn’t know he existed.

But I do know that faith really works. It is like a rag that wipes away the dirt that obscures our view of the real world — dirt that is all around us but we normally can’t see. I know faith works because I’ve seen how it works for me, and for so many others that I know.

I’ve seen it over and over again. People, all people, Christian and non-Christian alike all have a really hard time believing anything that they haven’t already experienced themselves. But after they have, it is so much easier to believe. Once they’ve seen it, once they know it’s real, once they know that’s the truth, then they are open to it again. But until then, they often are quite closed to it and that literally blocks it from happening. To me, it’s like they have an “anti-faith”. People that are simply clueless seem to have a much greater chance of seeing a glimpse of God in some way. It’s the ones that deliberately close themselves in some manner that have a very hard time seeing him.

For Christians who already believe in God, this still happens to them in the area of miracles and healings. Even though they “believe” in God, they just can’t believe they will be healed and so often they aren’t. To me, they don’t have to have the faith for a healing to be healed, but neither can they be “blocking” it.

To me, this is where free-will is. God doesn’t push healings on people that just can’t accept it. To me, it really was their choice to reject it even though they may have been begging God for a healing. One side of them may have been quite desperate, but on another side, they just couldn’t accept that it would happen or that God really would do it for them.

In short, what I see is that people aren’t really “open” to God or to things about God. In truth they are closed to him unless he proves himself. I simply see God as saying if that’s what you want, then I won’t interfere with you.

I see God as a father who has let his children be on their own to choose what they want for themselves. The choices the children have made have over time made it harder and harder for them to see their father, and then their children are harmed and see him even less. But I see God as pacing back and forth hoping someone will seek him out, and when they become open to him it’s like they begin to wipe away the dirt that obscures their view of the father. I see him often stepping across that boundary between his world and ours and revealing a part of himself. I see him do that when people in their hearts aren’t blocking him and instead call on him.

I see God as a real person who wants an actual relationship with us, and because of that he’s not pushy. In fact, he’s much more like a lover who longs to see if we really love him or not, if we really are interested in him or not, if we really want to seek him out or not. I’ve seen many times that he makes it quite easy for new believers to see him and harder for long time believers. It’s like he lets us see him and then he steps back to see if we really do want to see him again or whether we really don’t care. I see him often whisper to people in a very quite way, and then he waits to see if they cared to notice him or not.

In fact, that’s one of the coolest things about God to me. He’s not just some force or power but a real person who has feelings too and he likes to get to know us. I can’t overstate how cool that is. He’s not like a king on high who hands down all these rules he expects us to follow. He’s like a lover who subtlety looks our way and waits to see if we will notice him. I sense his stirrings in my heart. I think he very much makes himself known. I think he has built deep into us a knowing that he is real, but something usually causes us to say that just can’t be true.

I also have seen where the prayers of others have been a great help, because I think God is moved by those prayers and does stuff he otherwise wouldn’t do without those prayers. Again, I don’t know why he works this way, but I’ve seen it way too often to doubt it.

I think a lot of this boils down to God wanting real people he can love and not puppets that he controls. He wants us to be free to love him or not. He wants us to freely decide whether we want him or not. He wants lovers who are stirred in their hearts by his subtle calls, more than groupies who only like him because of how important he is. He wants people who choose him, not because he’s the “in” thing, but because they noticed something really special about him that causes them not to care what other people think or what price they will pay for making that choice.

To me, as long as you say that God is being unfair, then you are blocking him. To me, by definition, God cannot be unfair. It is simply inconceivable to me and the problem can’t be with God, it has to be with my ignorance of what’s really going on. To me, the important thing is to never reject God in any way, to never turn from him or block him by accusing him of being something he is not, to say he can only work the way I think is reasonable, fair and right.

I would much rather learn why he is the way he is and accept him for who he is. The more I’ve done that, the more I’ve been very pleasantly surprised to find he is FAR better than I ever imagined. In fact, I’ve found him to be so wonderful and so loving that I long to preach a sermon on how “crazy” God is for loving us as much as he does. It’s absolutely incredible to me that he is as loving as he is.

I honestly think if we had any real clue to how loving he is towards us, we simply couldn’t take it and our bodies would cease to function from the enormity of it.

There have been times in church history where people cry out to God and he shows up. And when he shows up, everything changes. I have read so many incredible stories of what happens in various places and in various times when God shows up and it’s just incredible. One guy was showing an atheist relative of his the church he was the pastor of. They just dropped by during the week to look at the building, but God had been showing up in that same building for weeks.

When this atheist stepped across the threshold and into the building he instantly fell to the ground and ceased being an atheist. In an instant he knew God was not only real, but that God was there.

In another case, a pastor’s wife from London visited a church in Toronto where God was showing up. She said the following after returning to England:

I’ve discovered in myself a love for Jesus more than ever. I’ve discovered in myself an excitement about the kingdom I wouldn’t have believed possible. I’ve discovered that I’m living in glorious days. There’s no other time; there’s no other place where I would have chosen to be born and to live than here and now.

In her case, even though she already believed in God, she experienced him in a way that impressed her so greatly that she couldn’t imagine even being alive in the days of Jesus himself being greater. Her talk on what she had experienced was so clearly real, that tapes of it swept across England and into thousands and thousands of Anglican churches because people knew they were getting an unvarnished and real glimpse of God and that he had really shown up. I have found that people quickly know when God shows up in one form or another. There’s just no mistaking the real thing, and the only people that reject it are the ones who just can’t get over God being the way he shows up to be like. And often, those people are the most “religious” ones.

The United States itself was greatly effected by the Great Awakening of the mid-seventeen hundreds when God showed up back then. Jonathan Edwards, who many consider America’s greatest preacher ever said this during the time God showed up at his church in November of 1736:

“Several persons have had so great a sense of the glory of God, and excellency of Christ, that nature and life seemed to almost sink under it; and in all probability, if God had showed them a little more of himself, it would have dissolved their frame.”

This is exactly what I feel and have felt. This is what I wrote back in 1996 when I first experienced God at this level:

I have been ruined for God! Blown away by His presence that is sooo strong that I feel like I’m sitting through a nuclear blast. One just melts away. One is forever changed and things that used to seem important, just don’t carry the same weight anymore.

Believe me, I still feel that nuclear blast. There’s nothing like it. If anything, I now realize God’s much bigger and more loving than I thought back then.

I honestly think God shows up just as much as we want him to. Christians are just as much to blame for God not showing up as anybody else. We are nearly as blind as anyone else is. And in some ways, it’s the Christians who actually block God more than anybody else.

But if we’re willing to trust that God IS fair, then we will begin to see him more clearly and more easily. At least, that’s how I see things.

How about you?