Does God Hide? Or is it we who hide?

"I often wonder if we won’t eventually come full circle as a species to realize that the proof of this Mind [God] was hiding in plain sight" 


From: Absolute Proof God Exists

  http://8411c.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/absolute-proof-god-exists/#comment-52

You know, in the past I have often pondered about the "hiddenness" of God. Now, I realize that if you "can't see the wood for the trees", then it's time to hide the trees! I believe this goes some way to explain things. The scriptures say-

"...the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Psalm 19:1. 

The word "declare" in Hebrew comes from a root word meaning: to score with a mark as a tally or record. So you might say the heavens bear the stamp- the brand-name of God. The heavens are all around us.

The problem is not, as mathematician, philosopher, author and noted atheist Bertrand Russell put it (apparently on his deathbed)- "a lack of evidence for God",so much as a suppression of the evidence.

As some wit once said- "An atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman". 

I could add to that: sometimes a thief does find a policeman, a bent policeman that a thief can use for his own ends. We would rather invent a god that we can domesticate, one that makes little or no moral demand of us.

The fact is, any admission of God will suddenly thrust us into the dilemma of dealing with too many questions of morality, like- why do you lie? What are you watching on the internet? Whose husband are you involved with? Why do you pay so little tax? How is it you drove/walked past that toddler injured on the street? Why do you look the other way at so much suffering, deprivation and violence?

In short it is our unwillingness to face accountability to a higher power. Many intellectual questions about the evidence for God (or lack thereof) that appear so honestly to be a barrier to belief, are just so much smokescreen to the real barrier. I'm not saying these questions don't need answering- they do, and I'm not saying that most of the questions people have, (or the people that have them) aren't sincere, they are. What I am saying is what Pascal alluded to in the "Pensees"-

"The heart has reasons, that reason never knows" 

At a sub-conscious level we don't want to know God exists, because if he does, the implications for us are too serious to contemplate. Like for instance, our claim and desire for complete and absolute autonomy.  At a conscious level we find all these questions and barriers to belief because, at another level we really don't want to know. That is precisely why being "born again" is (like natural birth) a miracle. It is an intervention, an impregnation of the spirit of grace and truth in the heart of a person who, while on the exterior may appear morally good- is systemically evil.. The scriptures point to this:

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"(Jeremiah 17:9) 

Sometimes it happens, in such a flash of real soul-searching honesty (that leaves no doubt in my mind as to its origin) that we catch ourselves being angry at something for no apparent reason, or we may get a glimpse of our selves as if from some distant, detached vantage point, as if we were someone else, and we may not like what we see. But this passes from us so quickly we are almost unaware of it, we regain our composure just as quickly as that window to our soul had appeared...and the mask is back up.

There is an objective reality, all things are not relative and when that glimpse into the "twilight zone" comes, take a good look. It's not there to scare you, so much as to inform you. If you will take the time to find out who Jesus is, you will also find out who you are!

No one in the history of philosophy or religion made such audacious claims as Jesus the Christ. Neither Gautama Buddha, nor Muhammad, Kant or Socrates made the claim to be divine. Many, many have come and pointed out a way to God, heralded a great truth to know or how to live a right life. But Jesus stands alone and unique claiming-

 "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me"(John 14:6) 

As C.S. Lewis has said: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said, or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.