I saw the clip in the morning and the words banged around the neural networks all the long day, rattling and clattering about, upending all the shelves in the mental library, scattering beliefs far across the floor.
“Ten questions for Intelligent Christians” lured the video clip’s title. I bit. Though I knew full well that I didn’t meet one of the qualifications, and I only pray the other, so, I concede, I really should have just quietly declined and went about my way.
But I listened to the footage; isn’t it good to thoughtfully listen to another perspective?
1. If God’s real and we claim He hears, answers prayers, heals people, why has He never spontaneously (or slowly) healed an amputee — a quantifiable miracle?2. If God’s real and is love, why do children in Africa, ribs protruding and skin stretched taut over bulging hunger, scavenge for even insects to beat back starvation?
3. If God’s real and hates divorce and we make vows and prayers to Him on our wedding day, solemn and sincere, candles burning, yet later, we blow out the candles and divorce at the same rate as non-Christians?
I listened to all ten questions. And the commentator’s ensuing argument that the only way to intelligently answer those questions is to make an excuse for God, come up with some strange rationalization. Thus his deduced conclusion: that a strange thing happens when we don’t come up with excuses and simply admit that God is imaginary. Then, according to the commentator, everything makes sense.
That the only way the world makes sense is to understand: God is a figment of our imagination.
The mental furniture hardly quaked.
I know in the very twisting double strand helix of my DNA that God exists. We’ve met. I’ve felt for His face, intimately experienced the touch of His hand, know the warmth of His breath.
True, I could attempt a rebuttal, positing that man’s free choice and sin has shot our world through with toxic evil. That we’ve ourselves have done irrevocable damage of Christ’s name by our flagrant disobedience of His precepts. That the miracles we pray for will be accomplished in full one day, assuredly and entirely one day. But I need not.
Because ultimately, God isn’t an argument. He is a Lover.
He isn’t one to argue about; He is one to fall in love with.
He simply and plainly is: I AM. That’s how He revealed Himself to Moses, as One who exists. One who is to be experienced. He offers no lengthy self-explanations, no justifications, no rationalizations. All He says: I AM.
When Job and company put God on trial, God again refuses to engage in the complexities of His sovereignty, but with breath-stealing grandeur only questions Job,
“Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens?” (Job 38:38).
He simply is. I AM: That is enough of an answer.
True, there are those who come to know Him through apologetics and, undoubtedly a defense of the faith is a critical cornerstone of the Christian faith, the Apostle Paul using the word apologia in his trial before Festus and Agrippa when he declares, “I make my defense” (Act 26:2). And in 1 Peter 3:15, Paul uses the cognate of apologia when he exhorts believers to be prepared to give an “answer” to the faith.
Yet aren’t our own personal stories — of touching His glory, knowing Him in undeniable ways, of our passionate, fire-in-our-bones love for God — the most muscular defense to the existence of God? Apologist Paul’s own story was that of encounter: he had seen God face to face on the road to Damascus.
Arguments and apologetics can grow fiery; heat can change positions. But what is hotter than having ourselves pressed into the very heart of Someone? I know God is real; the warmth of His blood, transfused, pulses (wildly) through these veins. No mere analytical argument can undermine that kind of fluid, perfervid reality.
But what rattled, sent things a-sliding and crashing within was just that. I may smugly dismiss the ten questions with my certainty of God’s existence — but if I really believe Almighty God is really real, shouldn’t my life shake…. with wonder, praise, awe?
‘Ten Questions for Intelligent Christians’ shook up my Christian faith:
I may wax on about knowing God’s real, but do I live with shoes off, trembling on holy ground, wearing my crash helmet, braced for His electrifying Presence? Do I only pay lip service to believing, not waiting for the burning ember of His Spirit to burn these lips clean? Do I mumble prayers, rote mantras, not expecting earth to rip open and fire balls to rain down? Do I believe He’s just real enough just to comfort me, get me past heaven’s pearly gates… but not real enough to blazingly tear up my comfortable days?
Do I think God sleeps?
Or is that just me dozing, blanketed in semi-comatose faith?
God on High, is the body of Christ so drowsily indifferent that it’s shockingly obvious?
We don’t really know You’re real.
Upend our stagnant faith,
turn us over,
us in need of radical conversion
a wild stoking of our first love,
into all consuming-flame
feeding off You,
the I AM who soul-loves.
