Points to Ponder

  Some controversial thoughts:

If lovely sunsets and flowers are evidence of a good God, what kind of God do hurricanes and earthquakes point to?

If events in history such as the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi regime are the evidence of the rule of a just God, what kind of God is it that allows the slaughter of six million Jews before the Nazi’s were defeated?

If the miracle of a baby’s birth and the laughter of a little child suggest one kind of God, what kind of God is suggested in the suffering of a child born tragically deformed?

Evidence for the natural knowledge of God is contradictory and ambiguous. The very arguments that lead people to think about God can also lead them to doubt whether God exists at all!

How can we derive a true knowledge of God by analysing the world around us – that has been corrupted by the results of human activity?

Some people are poor and exploited; others are comfortable and secure! Is this the way that God wills it? Or is this an argument for the status quo?

God is so far above anything we can imagine – how can we possibly bridge the gap between our finite humanity and God’s incomparable deity?

The God whom we think we can discover for ourselves always turns out to be a God made in our own image! True knowledge of the true God, therefore, can only come from God’s side – through self-revelation.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord (Isa 55.8).
No one knows the Father except the Son and any to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (Matt 11.27).
I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me (John 14.6).
See also 1Cor 1.19-25; 2.9-16
Consider for example Ps 19.1 – The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament declares his handiwork. Remember that the Psalmist was a member of the community of Israel that drew its very life from the special revelation of God to God’s chosen people (he could recognise God everywhere because he already knew who God was).

In Romans 1 Paul speaks of the knowledge of God in creation not as a knowledge which men actually have and from which they can advance to further knowledge, but as a knowledge they have lost; for by their failure to act on it they have forfeited it, and . . . unable to recover it, they are driven in their blindness to fashion idols (and ideas) as substitutes for reality (v21-25).
Similarly, Paul appeals to the religiosity of the Athenians as evidence, not of a knowledge of God, but of ignorance of God, for which he calls them to repentance (Acts 17.22-31).

As a summary I would suggest that all people everywhere may have some idea of God, but what we can know by ourselves is at best uncertain and ambiguous and at worst a dangerous hindrance to real knowledge of the true God. The only trustworthy and sure knowledge we can have comes from God breaking into our lives in a special way that is not dependent upon what we can tell ourselves about God.

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For Reflection:

· ‘Whatever your sickness is, know certainly that it is God’s visitation’ (Anglican Book of Common Prayer – Seventeenth Century)

· “The lower classes should accept social inequality with humility and patience, knowing that ‘their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God’” (William Wilberforce)

· “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” (The Declaration of Independence of the U.S.A.).

· “In the long run it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes. We believe in the harmony of God’s universe. We know that it is only by working along His laws, natural and spiritual, that we can work with efficiency. Only by working along the lines of right thinking and right living can the secrets and wealth of nature be revealed . . . Godliness is in league with riches . . . Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christ-like” (Bishop Lawrence of Massachusetts).

· “We see in race, national character and nation, orders of life given and entrusted to us by God, to maintain which is a law of God for us. . . .we demand also the protection of the nation from the incapable and the inferior. . . .We want an Evangelical Church which roots in the national character, and we repudiate the spirit of Christian cosmopolitanism. (written in 1932 by a group of Christians who wanted to make the church into the religious arm of Hitler’s Nazi regime).