But I’m not sure there is a God!
Jim’s life was in a mess. He was very bright but since teenage years he had got in with the wrong crowd. He had started drinking, and then moved onto drugs. He had got his then girl-friend pregnant but had difficulty committing himself to anyone or anything. Keeping a regular job was a problem. He was outwardly confident but inwardly was hurting. He called himself an atheist, not from a detailed logical investigation, but largely because he reckoned this gave him license to live as he pleased. The problem he had was that living as he’d pleased had resulted in many of his problems. He knew his life was a mess but didn’t know what could be done. One day he met a friend he had known at school and shared his life’s problems.
“Do you think there is anything that can be done for me?” he asked.
“Of course there is. Have you thought of asking Jesus for his help,” came the reply.
This was a bombshell. He hadn’t been told that his friend had become religious.
“I’m not into church and that sort of thing.”
“Nor was I,” came the reply. “I used to think that church was for those ’nice’ people who have been brought up to live ‘the proper’ way. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I learnt that Jesus came for people who have made a mess of things. In fact Jesus was much more welcoming to people in need than to the posh religious people of his day. The Bible keeps calling him the ‘Son of God’ and ‘the Saviour’ and he can clearly only save people with a need. So why don’t you ask God to save you. It simply means asking him to help you start again and he’ll do that if you enter on his terms – he is God after all. He can forgive the past and enable you to live the sort of life we all know deep down is right.”
It was as a result of this conversation that Jim started to investigate who Jesus was. His friend invited him to a Christianity Explored supper where the claims of Jesus were discussed. Jim longed to be able to make a break with the past and start again but he still had some nagging doubts.
“Could this really be true, I mean really true?” he kept asking himself. “I’ve never seen God or had any experience that proves he exists. How can I be sure?”
Jim discussed this with the Christian minister his friend had introduced him too. He was told that there were both internal emotional reasons (subjective) as well as external (objective) reasons that point positively to Jesus as the answer to our needs.
We have innate needs.
Our desires point to what we are. Most people feel satisfied when enjoying the company of one or more friends. Sex is not the only reason that marriage is so popular. At heart there is a need for a stable companion. We are corporate beings. Yet the strange feature of us all is that at times we do things that damage these relationships, even to those who are closest to us. We repeatedly do and say unkind things to them or about them. It is stupid and destructive, yet we all do it. How we all love to be appreciated by others. We know what is right and good to do, yet for some reason we fail to act on this knowledge. We know we have needs, yet too often we cannot solve them. Our weaknesses are so strong that we cannot solve our own problems. It doesn’t matter whether we are sophisticated and educated or not, the deepest problems we all face require external help; we need a Saviour. The greatest problem is our inherent self-centredness; none of us naturally wants to live as God wants us to. We leave him out of our lives; most of us live as practical atheists even if we have a nominal religion.
Such evidence shouts out that we have all been created for a higher and more satisfying level of living than we achieve. The Bible teaches that God put an appreciation for these high values in each of us.
It has been suggested that those who turn to Christ have greater innate needs than the more independent tough people who really don’t need God. Of course we all have different motivations for our decisions; those who opt to reject God have their own psychological reasons for doing so. The rejection of God is just as much a matter of faith as his acceptance.
When the writer Aldous Huxley was an old man he was asked whether he had ever considered the Christian faith. He replied in a manner that only an older person could reply, honestly acknowledging that he had inner motives for rejecting God.
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had not; and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning for this world is not concerned exclusively with the problem of pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to...For myself...the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political. ”
A prominent American philosopher, Thomas Nagle, wrote a book called ‘The Last Word’. He had a deep dislike towards certain aspects of established religion – for what they believe and do. However he goes on,
“I want atheism to be true, and I am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition . . . I am curious, . . . whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God.”i
Not only do people have emotional needs for God but we all have personal reasons why we want to reject him. If there is a God, he has the right to control how I should live! In a court of law a judge is not permitted to become involved in any case in which he has an interest because it is inevitable that there would be some bias in his judgment. Yet there is clearly much bias in the decisions people make about the place given to God and Jesus in peoples’ lives. As Timothy Keller says,
“We must be sceptical of our scepticism.”
We have innate values
How we hate it when someone hurts us by stealing our belongings or reputation by malicious gossip. We all feel they are wrong to do this – it is obnoxious behaviour. Yet we have all do what we know is wrong. We know that God has put in us the difference between ‘Good and Evil’ and that these values cannot be arbitrarily redefined however much some leaders may want to do so. Communist and Nazi leaders have tried to alter such values artificially - and have invariably come to a downfall.
Jean-Paul Sartre was an existentialist who rejected the idea of God and any real meaning in life. However he did have an innate moral sense. When he spoke out against the atrocities occurring in Algeria in their fight for independence, that he considered to be immoral, his inner conflict came to the fore. His philosophy denied the presence of meaning, morality and purpose but his heart shouted out that there really is a right and wrong. He never wrote anything of substance after this.
The famous English poet, W. H. Auden moved to live in New York in 1939, when the second world war began. The war and the Nazi atrocities led him to think through the greater issues in life. The Nazis had rejected orthodox morality. They made no pretence to uphold values such as honesty and justice in spite of the occasional religious comments by Hitler and other leaders to give the appearance of normality. The Nazis ridiculed love, a basic principle of Christianity, as being a sign of weakness.
“ . . . to love ones neighbour as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings.”ii
Yet the Bible teaches us that Leo is not only a major characteristic of God but what he wants to see in us.
“Jesus replied: ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Matthew 22:37-39
Surely statements such as these resonate with truth - God’s truth.
BVP
i Thomas Nagel, ‘The Last Word’ cited by Timothy Keller in ‘Encounters with Jesus’ Hodder and Stoughton 2013 p. 86
ii W.H.Auden ‘Modern Canterbury Pilgrims’ ed. James A Pike (New York: A.R.Mowbray, 1956 p. 41 cited by Tim Keller in ‘Encounters with Jesus’ Hodder and Stoughton 2013 p. 13-14
