Genesis 15.1-6 Romans 10.1-17
A sermon preached in Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 14th February 2021
We came back from Africa at the end of 2012. In the 20 years we had been away a lot of things had changed. In 1993 it seemed like most people believed in God. Not many went to church, but if your scratched, you would usually find some sort of belief. And society paid lip service to faith. It is no longer so. Atheism has become a popular movement. I joined a reading group, half of whose members were atheists, the other half Christians, with one swinging voter. One chap jumped to his feet at something I said, and exclaimed, “I don’t just think Christianity isn’t true, I think it is evil.” An increasing number of people are “coming out” as atheists, especially since the revelations of the Royal Commission into Child Abuse. One of the books we read in our reading group was an instruction book for atheists on how to confront Christians and convince them that they were believing in a lie. Saturday’s West Australian has a savage attack on a church in Perth whose minister I know to be one of the best. Whether we like it or not we are forced to ask the question, “Is God real?” The first line of the Apostles’ Creed reads, “I believe in God.” It is that assertion I wish to discuss this morning.
I start by giving 5 reasons why I believe in God. None of them prove God is real, and none of them is the reason I believe. I grew up having God as a fixture in my mental universe. I just believed—I don’t know why. I didn’t become a Christian until I was at university and nearing the end of my teens. Again, that wasn’t because of arguments for the existence of God.
Many believe in God because of our upbringing; it’s simply something they accept. God has always been there for them. It wasn’t that way for me. I was catapaulted into faith in Christ by an experience. Many believe in God because of some private experience, but its nothing that will convince anyone else. In my case I needed assurance that what I had come into was real. I had a physics tutor who told me my experience was “all psychological”; there was no God. It got me anxious: could God be a fantasy? Happily, there were other physicists in the department who were strong Christians, who helped me along the way. Anyway, here goes with some reasons why I believe in God.
Reason number 1: I could not account for the beauty and order of the natural world apart from an incredibly intelligent Creator. I still can’t. As I think back to the days of my youth I remember sitting on a surfboard at the back of the waves on a crystal clear morning, the swells coming in in orderly lines. The sparkling water! The ripples of light! What is light? No one knows, but it works. A world of colour. It could have been black and white. Or music: just vibrations of the air, they say—vibrations that conform to mathematical patterns. But what they do to my head! And the difference between music and random sounds! These and a million other things whisper to me: intelligence, beauty, order, wisdom, God.
Reason 2: The living world doesn’t whisper, it shouts. I have read quite a bit on evolution and can see the evidence for development in living things, but I cannot see that evolution goes anywhere near explaining the intricacy and design of the simplest living cell, let alone an organ, or an insect, or the human brain. I was fascinated by the mechanism of the eye. One thing that got me was the little muscles that pull your eyes in different directions. There is one that has to go round a pulley to apply force in the right direction. Since I lost the use of my facial nerve I think a lot about the blinking mechanism. If we didn’t have it, our eyes would dry out and we would be blind in no time. I will say more next week about evolution and God. For now, I am just saying some things that make me sure God is real.
Reason 3: The fact that anything exists at all is a miracle, and the only explanation that makes sense to me is God. Of course, a child will ask, “If God made the world, who made God.” But that is just the point. The world is changing. The sun is running down. It had a beginning and will one day have an end. Something must have been there at the beginning that did not have a beginning. Something outside it all, must have been there—must still be there—to give it existence and set it in motion and keep it in motion. That we exist demands that something is eternal. God makes sense to me because of this.
Reason 4: There is another miracle. We have the physical world, which is governed by physical laws. Then we have the world of living things which is supposed to have developed by chance mutations and natural selection. Then you have humans and their brains, again, supposedly, the product of chance. But these brains can somehow understand how things work. Why should everything work according to mathematical patterns, and why should we be able to understand the patterns? It is bigger than this. We have a number of windows on the world: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. Each of these is a wonder of engineering. Each has a sensor or sensors. But then there is the cabling that takes what the sensor picks up to the brain, and then there is the brain itself which turns these signals into what we see of hear or taste. And then there is our capacity to think about these things and come up with scientific laws, as well as create music and paint and love and dream. It is all quite bewildering, and far beyond the power of chance, even if the world were thirty billion years old.
Reason 5: I cannot account for right and wrong apart from God. My atheist friends are passionate about some things being wrong, and some right. If there is no God, I cannot see why I cannot make my own right and wrong, and do whatever I like, if I can get away with it. But then it would be something different to right and wrong; it would be what I like and what I don’t like. But everyone knows there are things that are right and things that are wrong. This only makes sense to me if God is real and will give a final judgement.
Maybe none of these things proves God is real, but if he is there, then each of them makes sense. And if there is no God, nothing makes sense. I couldn’t be an atheist, even if I wanted.
But now let me approach the question from a different angle. The Bible says “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It just says it—no argument, no reasoning. The Israelites never speculated about the existence of God—the Bible just states it as a fact, and calls the unbeliever a fool. One reason for that is that God had spoken to them. He spoke first to Abraham, and called him away from his native land, away from his idol gods, and launched a movement which is still with us 4000 years later. When God speaks to someone, they hardly need proofs for his existence. The problem is that not everyone gets spoken to like this; most believe because of what happened to him. And, of course, you can refuse to believe—like Esau, who regarded the whole thing as an old man’s fantasy. But think what has happened! The human race has been divided in two by Abraham’s experience. God promised to bless those who blessed Abraham and curse those who cursed him. If that is true, it means the world has been divided into those who are blessed—that means they are on the way up, they have a future, an eternal future—and those who are going down. They may look good at the moment, but they have no place in the world that is coming, they are doomed. As was Esau and the Edomites who are no more.
Abraham was the beginning of something big. Nor was he a flash in the pan. God doesn’t speak to everyone directly. But he spoke to Isaac and Jacob and Moses and Samuel and David and Isaiah and others. For 1500 years after Abraham God spoke through Israel’s prophets, and then he paused, and then he spoke again through Jesus and his forerunner and successors. And all this testimony has come down to us, testimony to the reality and power and activities of the living God. We have to make up our minds what to do with it. We can ignore it—most people do. Or we can study it and test it, and in the end believe it or disbelieve. Whatever our decision, it will carry us into one of two families that make up the peoples of the earth, the one destined for life, the other for death. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek—that’s the little people—for they shall inherit the earth.” Ask yourself, which family is your family?
Now I come to part three of what I want to say.
God is real, he was real even before there was a universe, which means he is totally different to everything else we know. Everything else is made; he is not.
And this is where I get into trouble as I think about these things. Next week I will speak about creation, but today I just wanted to talk about God—God as he is in himself. But I found I kept talking about the world, because we only know things by comparing them with things we know, and everything else we know has been made. The only thing we can say about God in comparison with other things is that he must be different. The Bible has a word for that: “holy”: God is totally other—“transcendent” is the philosopher’s work. The other thing we can say is that God is at the centre: he is more real than anything we know, because everything else exists or lives because he gave it existence or life. He is in everything, he is everywhere, he is more alive than anything: “In him we live and move and have our being,” says the Bible. So, God is not far away: closer than the nose on your face, which is perhaps why it is difficult to see him. And yet, from another angle, he is far away. We have become estranged. Which is why what should be the most obvious thing in the universe is so often hidden from us. We doubt, we struggle to understand, we grope in the darkness.
All this means we can never know God unless he reveals himself to us. Proofs and arguments are not enough; we will always doubt. God needs to reveal himself, and this he has done through Abraham, and the prophets, and in Jesus Christ becoming a man and living in our world. That is what I believe.
So, suppose I am convinced. I have decided the arguments for God outweigh the arguments against. I have read Abraham’s story and it rings true. I am drawn to Jesus. Also, I realize that God has nothing to gain from me, and that I have everything to gain from him … What then? What does God want from me?
The Bible’s answer is simple. It is summed up in the word “faith”. But faith does not mean believing God is real. You can’t have faith unless you believe, but believing in God is not faith. Faith is about trusting God, who you know is there—trusting him when he says he is for you and not against you— trusting his promise of eternal life—trusting when he says “Come to me”—trusting that if you put your life in his hands he will do something good with it. Faith is believing that God is real, but it goes a step further: it listens to God’s word and trusts it. Especially, it trusts the good promises that God has made for those who believe, promises of forgiveness and acceptance and eternal life. We will have more to say of this in the weeks ahead. Can I ask you to pray, if you have doubts. Ask God to reveal himself to you—not perhaps in the way you think, but enough to get you across the line and into the arms of Jesus, and into membership of Abraham’s family, the family that will inherit the world that is coming, and who knows what else. If you are serious about wanting to know, can I also suggest that you read§ an account of Jesus—Matthew or Mark or Luke or John—any one will do. If you are hesitating over which one, I suggest Luke. See what you think of Jesus! After all, it’s him you need to come to, if you would say with real faith, “I believe in God.”