I want to share with you two fundamental principles for being human:
First, you are not God, and it’s just as well.
Second, if you want to know God, then look at Jesus.
1. Why should we care about God?
Our sermons over the next few weeks are going to be about God. We are going to speak about his existence, his identity, and his character.
Now, that may not surprise you. You are in a church, after all.
But even so, you might complain: the subject of God is infinitely abstract and complex. God, whoever he, she, or it, is, dwells in some far pavilion, unknowable, mysterious and unapproachable.
Isn’t this going to be a lot of what an English friend of mine calls ‘vicar waffle’? Aren’t we better off simply talking about things from the human side – about the pressing ethical issues of our day, for example?
It’s what I call the Wizard of Oz view of God. You will remember the story of Dorothy, the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow who set off for Oz in the hope that the Wizard will give them what they each lack – a home, courage, a brain, and a heart. But of course, it turns out that the Wizard is just a strange little man who can’t give them anything. Instead, each of them finds the answer to their problems that have been inside them all along. And so the message of the Wizard of Oz, if we take the Wizard to be a metaphor for God, is that you should stop looking to him up for anything useful and instead look inside yourself and around at your companions on the yellow brick road of life.
This is a common feeling, even among many Christians. God may exist or not, but it makes little tangible difference, and we should just focus on being kind. I recently read an interview of the Sydney Roman Catholic priest Monseigneur Tony Doherty by atheist journalist Peter Fitzsimons, in which Fitzsimons complimented Doherty for not talking about God at his father-in-law’s funeral. Instead, he talked about what makes a good human life. After all, isn’t this all that matters in the end?
But I want to challenge this for two reasons. First: Doherty and Fitzsimons assume that God is really like the Wizard of OZ - so distant that we can’t really know anything about him, if he exists at all. But if you think about it, this is a very strong claim to know something about ultimate reality. It only works if we can’t know things about God – and, as we’ll see, Christian faith says that God has made himself known and that it makes a huge difference.
Which is my second challenge, which is to say: how do we know what is good, without God? It’s all very well to say: ‘forget God, and get on with doing good’, but without God, you are just guessing what doing good looks like. Now, because of the impact of Judaism and Christianity on our culture, and because of the human conscience, even an atheist like Fitzsimons will make guesses that are close to the mark. But you can see the division on this question growing all around you. Without God, the only measure of what is good is your own impulses and feelings as they are shaped by peer pressure.
And so: the God question really does matter – and it matters for us to know who we really are and what human life is for. Who you are and what the meaning of your life is. That’s pretty huge, right? If you really are a creature, that is, a created being, not simply the product of a billion-year long algorithm of genes, then it’s a pretty important thing to know, I would say – and to know who it is who created you. Since God is a more basic to our existence even than the earth upon which we walk and the air with which we fill our lungs, then we need to know the one on whom we depend.
The poet Alexander Pope once said:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
But this is wrong: the proper study of humankind starts with God. To know him is to know yourself.
2. Does God even exist?
But wait a minute, you might say: a lot of people seem to be confident these days that God doesn’t exist. Or at least that it’s not an important question to give any quality time to. And they seem to live more or less happily without reference to God at all, busy with all the other things that humans do – working, raising families, going on holidays, cooking and eating food, giving to charity, watching Netflix. Contemporary life is very full, after all.
Now, of course, you’ll be pleased to know that I am not going to give a full account today of the reasons why should believe there is a God. But I do want to just put somethings on the table here.
The first of these is that we always need to ask which God people say they don’t believe in. Why? Because very often contemporary atheists get the definition of God wrong. They disprove the existence of a god who is more like a superhero than the God that most theists believe in. It’s interesting to me that the leading atheists are scientists. The job of science, whether physics, chemistry, or biology, is to understand the material world. Scientists are spectacularly unqualified to analyse a being who, almost all religions say, lives outside the realm of time and space. Looking for empirical evidence of God is like trying to tune in to the internet with a transistor radio – and then saying the internet doesn’t exist.
Second, there is a remarkable consensus across cultures and religions, and down the passage of human history, about the existence of an eternal, invisible being who is the uncaused cause of all that is. The Greeks, the Jews, the Hindus, indigenous religions – the similarity is striking, even if they then add a raft of lesser gods into the picture. Now to be clear: there are huge differences about how we might as human beings relate to that being; but there is a very strong hunch amongst humanity that such a being exists.
This leads me to the third thing: which is to note the common experience that many people have in encountering the natural world of overwhelming immensity that seems beyond the natural world. It’s a feeling of awe. My friend, who talked about vicar-waffle, was actually a submarine commander in the British Navy. And he told me once of an experience of walking the deck of his sub at dawn in the middle of the vast and empty sea – and of feeling at once the immensity of the sea and yet also the presence of a bigger immensity than the sea.
Fourth, there are a number of good arguments that show the reasonableness of belief in a God. The best three are that everything physical must be caused by something else, so we need to have a point where this chain of causes began; that the universe shows evidence of design; and that we live in a meaningful and moral universe that shows there is a God. Now, that’s a lot to take in all at once, but the bottom line is that we are right to suspect that there is a God.
we are right to suspect that there is a God.
But how do we know him? How could we say anything meaningful about a being who is so incomprehensibly vast, so immeasurably powerful, so hidden behind the black depths of the night sky? Do we know him to be cruel, or to be kind? Novelist Thomas Hardy described God once as “the dreaming, dark, dumb Thing/ That turns the handle of this idle show”. And I wonder if you have that feeling sometimes: that you aren’t an atheist, but you might as well be for all the difference it makes in terms of knowing the identity of this mysterious being?
3. God reveals himself in the history of Israel and the life of Jesus
We cannot fathom God. In fact, the Bible agrees with this.
In Isaiah God says: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”
And John 1:18 says: “No one has ever seen God.”
In his classic book Knowing God, JI Packer puts it this way:
We cannot know Him unless He speaks and tells us about Himself. But in fact He has spoken.
God has not been silent. He has spoken! He has led us to the place where he has introduced himself to human beings. He has disclosed himself so that we might not just guess about him, or know some things about him, but that we might actually know him, as he really is – know him personally, as we know one another.
I can’t tell you how vital this for Christianity. The Bible is not a record of some speculations about God that some people had over time. It’s the account of God’s true words about himself. It’s the story of God’s relationship with human beings. And in that story he tells us who he is, so that we might know him.
The letter to the Hebrews opens like this:
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…
God reveals himself in the history of his people, the people of Israel. It’s the story that stretches from Abraham all the way through Moses and the Exodus to King David and the kings that followed him. It continues through the tragedy of the exile to Babylon and then when the people came back to the land. And around that history, we hear God’s voice in the laws of Israel, in the songs of the Psalmists, in the wisdom of the Proverbs and in the declarations of the prophets.
But the history and the hope of Israel was all pointing towards the coming of Jesus. God has spoken by the prophets, but now he has spoken to us by his Son. John puts it this way:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
As we saw in Jesus words from John 5, the Son and the Father are on extremely intimate terms. Paul will call Jesus Christ ‘the image of the invisible God’. And Hebrews says that the Son is ‘the exact representation of God’s being’ – the Greek word is the same word used for the picture of the Emperor’s head on coins.
The bottom line: if you want to know God, look at Jesus. If you have a hunch that God exists: don’t make it up, or give it up. He comes to meet us in Jesus, who represents him exactly as he is.
4. Knowing God
So what does this mean in practical terms?
a) You aren’t God: so stop acting like it
I hope it’s not rude of me to say so, but the existence of the true God means that you aren’t God, and that God is.
Some of you will know the story of Job – that he wrestled with God to given him an account of his suffering. In the end, God speaks to him and says: hey Job, did you put the earth on its foundations? Did you put the stars into space? Did you make the crocodile or the ostrich? And this answer is strangely comforting to Job, and he accepts it: you’re not God, Job, but I am.
Now, most of us would not actually think of ourselves as God; but we do often act like it. If there is no God, or if God is unknowably confusing and distant, then in the end I must act as the centre of everything and the arbiter of good and evil, right? The burden of meaning and wisdom lies on my shoulders! All I have is my own experience and my own judgement.
But this is actually one of the most liberating truths of all. It’s true freedom to know that the Lord God – he is God! And that I am one of his creatures. I don’t have to make myself, or find myself; I don’t have to know everything; I don’t have to decide what right and wrong are. I don’t have to pretend that I am infinite and eternal, because I am not. I am a dependent creature.
b) You are made to know God and be known by him
And that’s the second thing for us to take away today. You are not God; but you are made to know God and to be known by him. You and I are God’s special creations, made for relationship with him. And this God is not absent or silent, or hidden behind smoke machines like the Wizard of Oz. He has, you might say, swiped right on you. He knows you; and he has invited you to know him.
And knowing this about yourself is like discovering the key that fits the lock.
Packer writes:
Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord.
That’s the invitation today: not simply to know about God, but to seek to know Him as he shows himself to us in Jesus. To listen to his voice as he speaks about himself and about you, and to speak to him in your own voice. Maybe seeking to know God is a new idea for you. Or maybe it is an old one, but you are out of practice. Take some small steps today to begin – a few short words of prayer, a fragment of Scripture. For there is no greater comfort that anyone may discover than to be on intimate terms with the infinite creator.