It’s Not Enough Part 2

Today I would like to focus on the question, how can we identify and find God, the creator and sustainer of the Universe? Last week we talked about this being one of the important questions that people are seldom willing to ask themselves.

First, I would say that the initiative is provided by God himself. He has chosen to make himself known to humanity. This may sound alarming to some people as they might say that He has done nothing to make himself known to me personally. However, that is because you might have a preconceived notion of what you think this discovery must look like. Atheist Bertrand Russell championed this idea in the mid 1900’s. His thinking was that since God did not provide the evidence on Russell’s terms, he must not exist. This is a closed-minded view of life, one that is destitute and clueless to the reality around him.

The Bible speaks of this in Psalms 19 that the heavens declare the glory of God, night after night they pour forth their speech. Russell rants that there is no evidence, but all he needed to do is look up at the night sky and marvel at the beauty and majesty of the exquisitely designed space above him.

The scriptures also describe humanity as being fearfully and wonderfully made. How true is that! We see the complexity of design woven into our genes. Our cells are amazingly complex, our minds have cognitive abilities that are beyond any possibility of being formed by chance. Russell could have looked at his own ability to reason as enough evidence for the existence of a grand designer.

Russell stated that when he died, the first thing he would ask the God that he did not believe in,”where is the evidence? How can I be held accountable when there is no evidence to be found?” I wonder how well that played out in Russell’s case when he passed away?  My contention is that this line of thought probably was not compelling and had zero credibility.

There is also the compelling evidence of the historical biography of Jesus Christ found in the New Testament. Eyewitness documentation of the events of his life are well attested. We have more copies of ancient manuscripts of this document than any other text by far. Like 26,000 + compared to 10-20 copies of other age-old works. The Bible has remained intact for over 2,000 years. We can compare the texts, one to another to insure accuracy. Nicky Gumbel, the pioneer of the world-renowned Alpha course states, “How do we know that what they wrote down has not been changed over the years? The answer is that we do know, very accurately through the science of textual criticism, what the New Testament writer wrote. Essentially the more texts that we have, the less doubt we have about the original.” All of this is a very powerful validation of the evidence that God has given to humanity. The question that remains is this, are you willing to go where the evidence leads?