Monday, October 31, 2011

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.

'Peter Kreeft, a modern day Christian philosopher and apologist, says that Pascal is a man for our day. 
"Pascal," he says, "is three centuries ahead of his time. He addresses his apologetic to modern pagans, sophisticated skeptics, comfortable members of the new secular intelligentsia. He is the first to realize the new dechristianized, desacramentalized world and to address it. He belongs to us. . . . Pascal is our prophet. No one after this seventeenth-century man has so accurately described our twentieth-century mind." 

Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensees Edited, Outlined and Explained (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 13, 189.'-

  -from a blog post written by Rick Wade- Blaise Pascal: An Apologist for Our Times.


Blaise Pascal:
"If God had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence. It was therefore not right that he should appear in a manner manifestly divine and absolutely capable of convincing all men- but neither was it right that his coming should be so hidden- that he could not be recognized by those who sincerely sought him. Thus wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs. Which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition." 
Blaise Pascal in "Pensees" quoted by Dr. C Stephen Evans  during his Hayward 2012 Lecture at Acadia Divinity College.

This is very much in line with what Ravi Zacharias has said, (perhaps even with Pascal in mind): "God has put enough into the world to make faith in Him a most reasonable thing, and He has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone"


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 moral 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 its reasons, that reason knows nothing of" 
At a sub-conscious level we don't want to know God exists, even while a basic belief in Him is present but driven from our consciousness, because if one does become cognizant of God, 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.
 The scriptures point to this:
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"(Jeremiah 17:9) 
That is precisely why being "born again" is 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.. Faith, as Pascal admits (in line with the Bible), is the gift of God to the heart, even while the mind may continue to have its objections, this injection of faith overcomes the disbelief in and enmity of the heart. Augustine alluded to this when he said:
"Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand."

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.

The question "Why does Christ not continue to reveal himself physically as he did to his disciples in his advent?" requires a multi-faceted answer. First human nature in its depraved and fallen state has no real interest in knowing God, but rather in the secret recesses of the heart as sinners we have a vested interest in assuring that we remain ignorant of God, the moral accountability that follows is just too unsavoury to contemplate! Both in our search for God and/or our continued ignorance of God we are not neutral. I say this guardedly because of course multitudes of Christians recall adamantly their testimony of how they found God, in the face of Jesus Christ,  after much searching. But does human experience have the last say on spiritual realities or will the Word of God be our final authority? God says

 "There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God." Romans 3:11 
"Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whosoever the Son will reveal him." Matthew 11:27

So how do we explain this sense of individuals searching for God in the light of the above scriptures? How do we explain the coming to faith of people as a result of their search? Again scripture is clear:


"Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you."  15:16 John

The reality is then, our search for God is actually the Holy Spirit at work within us bringing us to God. It is not native to fallen human nature but a work of grace. It is rather God finding us through our own agency.

" Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." John 6:29
Given the depravity of humankind then, and that left to himself no one seeks God we begin to appreciate the reality of that "Grace that taught our heart to fear, and that Grace our fears relieved". It also make much more sense of the scripture:
"And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."  Romans 5:6-8

Without strength and while we were yet sinners meaning that just as a dead person cannot give themselves life neither can someone dead in tresspasses and sins even contemplate seeking after God. Just as Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb so Christ called us out of our deadness to God. This is not mere metaphor but  a real death in which we are oblivious to God and unable to initiate anything any movement towards God. He is truly then the author of our faith the alpha that is the beginning of it and the omega the end of faith.

 And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Ephesians 2:1

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; Colossians 2:13
I will continue to reiterate what C.S. Lewis said of his own conversion:

"The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation"