This is Episode 4 of my five-minute series, Faith in Five. It deals with the question, “Why Isn’t God More Obvious?” and outlines 4 clear reasons why God isn’t more obvious to us.
MEDIA:
VIDEO: Why Isn’t God More Obvious?
AUDIO PODCAST: Why Isn’t God More Obvious?
Alternatively, you can read the script below:
SCRIPT:
Welcome to Faith in Five, a series which provides short answers to big questions in just five minutes. In this episode, I’m answering the question, Why isn’t God more obvious? It’s a question asked not only by sceptics, but also by people of faith who sometimes wonder about God’s silence in the midst of life’s challenges. And underlying this question is the thought that surely God wants people to believe in him, so why doesn’t he just come out into the open and make his existence obvious and undeniable?
There are several reasons for God’s apparent hiddenness, but I’ll focus on four of the most important.
Firstly, God’s current hiddenness is at least partly a direct consequence of ‘The Fall”, described for us in the first few pages of the Bible. For a brief period the first humans experienced God in an immediate, tangible way, but that privilege was soon removed due to mankind’s rebellion against his authority. In essence, we pushed God aside, and God acquiesced. A whole lot more can be said about that (and you can explore this more fully on my website), but let’s move on.
Secondly, God’s apparent hiddenness is also partly a result of his fundamental nature. The Bible says that “God is Spirit” (John 4:24). In other words, he is a being who is not limited to a physical body with spatial dimensions. He is incorporeal – bodiless. Furthermore, and as an adjunct to this, he is omnipresent – which means he is present throughout every cubic millimetre of the universe. He is everywhere, as Psalm 139 tells us. And the Bible also says God transcends the universe – he doesn’t merely inhabit every part of it, he exists BEYOND our physical universe. So there is a spiritual immensity to God that transcends mere physical dimensions. All of this means that God is not living in a shack on the moon, or orbiting the earth in a fiery chariot, and you certainly won’t bump into him at the local supermarket. He is too big to perceive at our puny level because he exists in a dimension that transcends mere physicality.
Thirdly, God’s hiddenness is necessary to preserve our free will. God certainly COULD manifest himself to us in some kind of undeniable way that eliminated all doubt. He could appear in the sky in blazing glory and command us with a thunderous voice, with the result that everyone would kneel and tremble before him. But that is not what God wants at this moment. He desires freely chosen faith and love, not forced submission. Blaise Pascal famously observed, “God gives enough light for those who desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”
Which brings me neatly to the fourth point: God has already sufficiently revealed himself to us. The Bible says, “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). In other words, God is obvious enough for those whose hearts are open. And he is most obvious of all in the incarnation of Jesus Christ who demonstrated his divine power through a series of extraordinary miracles and who ultimately proved his divinity by rising from the dead.
And so we have these two great signs or testimonies. On the one hand, the universe, with its beauty, grandeur, complexity and order, points irrevocably to an all-powerful, intelligent Creator. And on the other hand, the miraculous life, death and resurrection of Jesus points not only to God’s mindboggling power, but also to his love and presence with us.
So although God may appear to be hiding, he’s not hiding very well. While he doesn’t overwhelm us, neither does He abandon us. He wants to be found by you, as a choice of your own uncoerced free will.
In the Bible, God promises, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).
So keep earnestly seeking. And I pray that you will find him, as I once did many years ago.
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For a much more extensive discussion of this topic, you can check out a whole bunch of resources on my website, smartfaith.net.