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A drunk was looking for something on the sidewalk one night under a streetlight. He groped along the ground, feeling the cement, occasionally grabbing the pole for support. A passerby asked what he was looking for. “Lost my wallet,” the drunk replied. The passerby offered to help him look, but with no success.
“Are you sure you lost it here?” he asked the drunk. “Course I didn’t!” the drunk replied. “It was half a block back there.” “Then why aren’t you looking back there?”
“Because,” answered the drunk with baffling logic, “there ain’t no streetlights back there.”
Searching is important, but it doesn’t do any good unless we search in the right places.
The governor of one of our states entertained us in his home and after dinner asked to talk to me privately. We went into his study and I could see that he was struggling with his emotions, but finally he said, “I’m at the end of my rope. I need God. Can you tell me how to find Him?”
A young man, toughened in the Green Berets, so strong that his hands had been insured as lethal weapons, fell upon the floor of his room one night, weeping like a helpless child. “God, God, where are You?”
From the ghetto to the mansion, from community leader to prisoner on death row, a man wonders if there is a God. And if there is, what is He like?
A remarkable fact for all seekers of God is that belief in some kind of God is practically universal. Whatever period of history we study, whatever culture we examine, if we look back in time we see all peoples, primitive or modern, acknowledging some kind of deity. During the past two centuries archaeology has unearthed the ruins of many ancient civilizations, but none has ever been found that did not yield some evidence of a god who was worshiped. Man has worshiped the sun and carved idols. Man has worshiped a set of rules, animals, and other men. Some seem to worship themselves. Man has made gods out of his imagination, although basically through a fog of confusion he believes that God does exist.
Some people give up the pursuit of God in frustration, calling themselves “atheists” or “agnostics,” professing to be irreligious. Instead they find it necessary to fill the vacuum left within them with some other kind of deity. Therefore man makes his own “god”—money, work, success, fame, sex, or alcohol, even food.
Today many use their nation as an object of worship, espousing the gospel of nationalism. They mistakenly attempt to displace the true and living God with the religion of nationalism. Others make a god of their cause. Although many radical groups deny faith in God, thousands willingly lay down their lives and suffer privation and poverty because of their belief in “the cause” or “the revolution.”
Failing to find the true God, millions declare their allegiance to lesser gods and causes. They find no ultimate answers or satisfaction, however. Just as Adam was made for fellowship with God, so are all men. Jesus commented on the First Commandment by saying, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
He meant that man, unlike a stone or an animal, has the capacity to love God.
Two-Way Search
Although the wise person seeks God, we have seen that he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to reason his way through to God. He must raise a serious personal question: “Is there any hope of being successful in this search? Can I really know God?”
Once when being interviewed by Ludovic Kennedy on BBC in London, I was asked, “Who made God?” The answer was simple. “No one made God.” God is self-existent.
“In the beginning God” are the words which build the cornerstone of all existence. Without God there would have been no beginning and no continuing. God was the creating power and the cohesive force that brought cosmos out of chaos. By divine fiat He brought form out of shapelessness, order out of disorder, and light out of darkness.
Scientists cannot see God in a test tube or a telescope. God is God and the mind of man is too small!
Blaise Pascal, the celebrated seventeenth-century French physicist, said, “A unit joined to infinity adds nothing to it any more than one foot added to an infinite length. The finite is swallowed up by the infinite and becomes pure zero. So are our minds before God.”
As we seek this great God, what route are we to take? How can a created, finite human being, limited by time and space, understand an infinite God?
Our failure to comprehend God fully should not strike us as strange. After all, we live surrounded by mysteries we cannot explain—mysteries far simpler. Who can explain why objects are always attracted to the center of the earth? Newton formulated the law of gravity, but he couldn’t explain it. Who can explain reproduction? For years scientists have tried to reproduce a living cell and solve the mystery of procreation. They believe they are coming close, but as yet they are without success.
We have become accustomed to accepting as fact many mysteries we cannot explain. I am amazed when my wife mixes cornmeal, shortening, eggs, baking powder, and buttermilk, and I see the soupy mixture slowly rise in the oven and come out light and fluffy with a crispy brown crust. I don’t understand it, but I accept the results.
God is far more complex than some of the earthly phenomenon we cannot understand. However, we could present many arguments before a very skeptical jury which would suggest the existence of God. In the scientific realm we know that whatever is in motion must be moved by something else, since motion is the response of matter to power. Yet in the world of matter there can be no power without life, and life presupposes a being who produces the power to move such things as tides and planets.
Another argument says that nothing can be the cause of itself. It would be prior to itself if it caused itself to be, and that is an absurdity!
Consider the law of life. We see objects that have no intellect, such as stars and planets, moving in a consistent pattern, cooperating ingeniously with one another. It is evident that they achieve their movements not by accident but by design.
Whatever lacks intelligence cannot move intelligently. What gives direction and design to these inanimate objects? It is God. He is the underlying, motivating force of life.
Many evidences and arguments suggest God’s existence, yet the plain truth is that God cannot be proved by intellectual arguments alone. If the human mind could fully prove God, He would be no greater than the mind that proves Him!
Ultimately you must come to God by faith. Faith is the link between God and man. The Scriptures say you must believe that He is. “Faith” is used many times in the Bible, and God has taken it upon Himself to encourage that faith. God continues to pursue man—just as man is searching for Him.
In spite of man’s repeated rebellion, God loves man with an everlasting love. Some earthly fathers give up on their children when they fall into habits and company that are despicable. A father might order his son or daughter out of the house and tell them never to return. On the other hand, some fathers and even mothers deny their children before they are even born. We know young people—even grown ones—whose lives are scarred by parental rejection. The only way such a person can be healed is to accept the fact and ask the Lord to supply the lack. The Bible says, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up” (Ps. 27:10, KJV).
God has never forsaken man. The most dramatic quest of the centuries is God’s loving and patient pursuit of man.
When man chose in the Garden of Eden to defy God’s law, to break the line of communication between himself and God, he could no longer have fellowship. Light and darkness could not live side by side. Why did this barrier come between God and His creation? The cause is a characteristic of God that the average person does not comprehend. God is absolute “holiness.”
Long ago God said to Israel, “I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2).
In the book of Revelation the cry in heaven night and day is, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God, the Almighty, who was and who is and who is to come” (Rev. 4:8).
A holy God recoils from our evil; He cannot look upon sin because it is ugly and revolting to Him. Because man was stained with sin, God could no longer have fellowship with him. However, God loves us—in spite of ourselves.
God had a plan to restore fellowship with man, in spite of his sin. If God didn’t have a plan, certainly no one else can! He had said to Adam and Eve at the very beginning when they broke His law, “You will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). In a later chapter we will discuss the three dimensions of death. Man had to die or God would have had to go back on His word, and God cannot be a liar or He would no longer be God.
We can see that because man still sins, still defies authority, and still acts independently of God, a great gulf exists between him and God. Twentieth-century men and women are no different from Adam and Eve. We may have added some sophisticated technology, built a few skyscrapers, and written several million books, but there is still a chasm between sinful man and holy God. Yet across this dark, barren abyss, God calls, even pleads, with man to be reconciled to Him.
God loves us. The apostle John said that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).
The prophet Jeremiah quotes God as saying, “‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness’” (Jer. 31:3).
Another prophet, Malachi, said, “‘I have loved you,’ says the LORD” (Mal. 1:2).
In every good novel or play there must be conflict. But even Shakespeare could not have created a more powerful plot than the divine dilemma. We know that man is sinful and separated from God. Because God is holy, He couldn’t automatically forgive or ignore man’s rebellion. Because God is love, He couldn’t completely cast man aside. Conflict. How could God be just and the justifier? This is the question Job posed: “But how can a man be in the right before God?” (Job 9:2).
God Speaks
Radio was just coming of age when I was a boy. We would gather around a crude homemade set and twist the three tuning dials in an effort to establish contact with the transmitter. Often all the sound that came out of the amplifier was the squeak and squawk of static. It wasn’t very exciting to listen to all those senseless sounds, but we kept at the controls with anticipation. We knew that somewhere out there was the unseen transmitter, so if contact was established and the dials were in adjustment we could hear a voice loud and clear. After a long time of laborious tuning the far distant sound of music or a voice would suddenly break through and a smile of triumph would brighten the faces of everyone in the room. At last we were tuned in!
Perhaps you have been puzzled that the prophets said God spoke to them. Does He speak to us? Does He tell us where He is—how we can find Him—how we can be right with Him? How God has answered these questions in His Word is the subject of part 2 of this book, which deals with the kind of person Jesus Christ was and the work He did. God has solved the problem, He does tell us about Himself and His loving concern. The key is a line of communication which is “revelation.”
Revelation means “to make known” or “to unveil.” Revelation requires a “revealer,” who in this case is God. It also requires “hearers”—the chosen prophets and apostles who recorded in the Bible what He told them. Revelation is communication in which God is at one end and man is at the other.
In the revelation that God established between Himself and us we can find a new dimension of living, but we must “tune in.” Levels of living we have never attained await us. Peace, satisfaction, and joy we have never experienced are available to us. God is trying to break through. The heavens are calling and God is speaking!
Have you heard God’s voice? At the same time you are searching for God, He is speaking to you.