I recently read an article about a Pastor who became an “atheist” (I put “atheist” in quotes because I’m not entirely sure that’s what he is right now) after deciding to spend a year without God and blog his experience.
The reason this article interested me was because I have spent a considerable amount of energy on the question as to whether there is a God and came to a completely different conclusion. So, I wanted to see what this individual had to say about what his year without God led him to believe.
Ultimately, he said that the reason for his atheism was because “the intellectual and emotional energy it takes to figure out how God fits into everything is far greater than dealing with reality as it presents itself to us.”
Being honest, it’s really hard to disagree with this point – this is actually one of the reasons I started this blog…to process through tough questions in a rational way that can perhaps shed some light into why the world we see is set up the way it is. Because, let’s just get this out of the way right now, God could make it a whole lot easier to believe in Him if He wanted to.
The problem, however, is that God created us to have free will – the ability to chose to accept Him or reject Him. In order to have a system like that work, He has to strike a careful balance between being obvious and invisible. Yes, He could have just put Himself up in the sky so everyone knows He’s there, but would people really have a choice to believe at that point? I mean, you could just point to the sky and go, “He’s right there.”
It’s like how if you’re a parent, your kids behave differently when they know you’re watching. We all know the true test of their character is what they do when you’re not watching. The system God set up works the same way.
I think this is an easy enough concept to grasp for many people, but there’s a deeper question in here. That is, “Why doesn’t everything all of a sudden become hunky dory once you make a decision that God is real?”
This, I think, is where a lot of “believers” really get stuck. Because to believe doesn’t guarantee that your life is going to be pain free all of a sudden (far from it – see John 16:33 to see what Jesus Himself has to say about this!). In truth, many Christians experience extremely difficult circumstances – some are so severe that they begin to doubt the existence of an all caring and loving God. They can’t rationalize the world they see with a God who is love. And, I don’t blame them at all – bad theology, a church that isn’t always willing to do what Jesus said to do, spiritual forces, intellectualism, pop culture, etc. are always working to tear our belief in God to pieces.
The reality is that once this type of doubt starts to creep in, it is not all that hard for a belief in God to evaporate very quickly, just as it did for the person in the article I linked to. This is the “the intellectual and emotional energy it takes to figure out how God fits into everything” that he mentioned. When your daughter gets raped, your dad dies of cancer, or you’re ruined financially, it’s easy to wonder where the heck God is because he’s supposed to be there ALL THE TIME and IF HE REALLY LOVES YOU HE WOULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING. If your situations wasn’t “fixed”, God must not really exist or love you. To try and “prove” otherwise is a very difficult exercise for most people – why would someone who loves you as much as God claims to let you feel pain like that?
I think what this points to, though, is the reality that “belief” is completely insufficient in order to have a relationship with God – we’re called to something higher…FAITH.
You see, faith isn’t an intellectual exercise nor is faith “rational”. Yet, it is essential if one really wants to understand who God is and the [good] plans He has for your life. Why, though? I think many of us (myself included!) believe that once we start to believe that it would be a WHOLE lot easier to “keep our faith” if God just took care of every need and hurt, all while shielding us from the evils of this world. So, why doesn’t He just do it that way?
The answer is: He tried that first, and it didn’t work.
In the story of Adam and Eve, God had a system setup that we would describe as ideal. “Belief” in God was easy – He freely walked with mankind in the Garden of Eden. “Faith” was easy too – every need was taken care of! Things were so good they didn’t even need clothes to wear!
But, we all know the story – it wasn’t enough…Eve and then Adam both allowed themselves to believe that God was holding out on them and therefore ate the fruit of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil. They didn’t have enough faith in God’s character to believe in His word and His best for them.
I know we’d all like to believe that we’d all be different were we in that situation, but the reality is that we wouldn’t be, and God knows it.
So, the system God works with now is way more difficult and risky, but what it does is produce a faith that is far more durable – it goes beyond belief and provision and into a place where you continue to have to build your faith day after day.
He does this by allowing us to go through trials so we are forced to continue to question what we believe. And, He promises that He sees our pain, that He is there to help us through it, that those who hurt us will have to answer for this some day, and that some day things will be a whole lot different. But, accepting all of this when sometimes God seems to not be there or is invisible requires something beyond the rational – it requires faith.
However, when faith makes it through the difficult storms of life, it becomes more permanent, to the point that no matter what happens, complete and total belief in who God is never in question. And, that’s the type of people God wants in His Kingdom – an army of authentic people who know who He is…so the unfortunate events in the Garden of Eden never happen again once Jesus comes again to reclaim His creation. And, that’s a pretty cool picture if you ask me!
I’ll close this post with a brief note about reading the Bible, because I believe doing so is essential if you want to hold onto your faith through tough times. The reality is that the Bible is full of people (Abraham, Isaac, Job, Jacob, Judah, Joseph, David, to name a few) with flaws just like you and me who went through even greater problems than the ones we face every day and God saw them through their circumstances every time. And think about this – they didn’t have a Bible available to them that they could use to build their faith! The reality is that most of them were flying blind and being asked to trust God in a far greater capacity than we ever will.
That truth is what encourages ME to keep pressing into tough questions and seeking to build my faith in the midst of difficulty. May God build your faith until it’s bulletproof!