(10-15 min).
What can you see?
Can you see the spreading tree in the top, right hand side of the picture below? It is casting a circle of shade on the ground. Not everyone can see it, but most can once their attention is directed.
Our perceptions are like this. For example, I don’t typically pay much attention to the businesses that exist on a road unless I use them. My friend was describing where something was for me and said it was next to the Dodge dealer. Even though it had a big sign that was hard to miss, I didn’t know there was a Dodge dealer despite driving past it countless times. My friend knew of it because he paid attention. Is it this way with God? For me, and maybe others, it is.
The evidence we may miss
27 years ago, I sat in the pew of my relatively new church at 10:00 p.m. having just come from a social/work gathering where I argued with one of my colleagues. The disagreement had stirred up anger in me. Anger I did not like. Nobody should have been at the church when I arrived, but there was a wedding that day and the janitor came in late to get the church ready for the service on Sunday. He shouldn’t have let me in because we didn’t know each other. I told him I just wanted to pray, and he acquiesced.
I headed to the sanctuary and sat there looking at the stained-glass window of Jesus. Full of emotion I prayed: “Lord please give me anything, anything at all, just to let me know you are there”. No response. No noise. No visions. No voice in my head. No indication that anything had changed in the sanctuary from the moment I sat down until the time I got up to leave.
Why would God deny someone who yearns so intensely to have a relationship with Him? After a long time of not believing in God, the silence returned me to the scientific perspective from which I came. A perspective that said this was just silliness. There is no God. Jesus Christ is not God’s son, and there is no Holy Spirit within us. There’s just us.
This reclamation of an old conviction produced a problem for me. I was involved in the church where I prayed, even to the point of teaching Sunday school largely because of my wife and a desire to believe. The silence in the sanctuary and my response to it made me think I should be honest with those who believed their fifth grade Sunday school teacher was a faithful Christian. Moreover, the discord of helping my wife teach something I didn’t believe gnawed at me.
I scheduled an appointment with the pastor and confessed it all. He took it well considering that one of his teachers was calmly confessing atheism, but he wasn’t ready to talk about teaching Sunday school yet. Instead, he began to ask me questions trying to discern why I believed what I did. It went on for a while before he finally said, “Dave, I can’t help you”. It was my answer to one of his questions that got him to this point. He asked: “Why do you think you are here?” I said I was here as a natural consequence of the events that started with the Big Bang. I’m just here like the rest of life on this planet, and when gone, that will be it for me. He followed up by asking: “So you don’t think you’re here for any reason at all?” I said no, and he said “Dave, I can’t help you.”
He wasn’t quite through. Turning to his bookshelf he pulled down Reasons for Faith by John H. Gerstner, believing maybe Dr. Gerstner could help me. We moved on to a discussion of Sunday school, and I left recommitted to the atheism of my past. Even so, I thought I should read the book since a man I greatly respected gave it to me.
Weeks later reading one of the professor’s arguments I had a thought. Maybe God was real. This took me by surprise like when you’re reading a mystery novel and are caught off guard by who did the crime. My complete surprise at the thought revealed I never truly considered that God might be real until that moment.
What we miss
You may be wondering why did I want to believe in the first place? I don’t have a good answer although reformed theology most definitely does. But in terms of life experience, my wife is a Christian and I love her. The pastor of my church at the time was a good person, and his sermons were insightful about how to live. The Christians I knew seemed like good people with good morals. Finally, somewhere I read or heard if you act like you believe, you will. These things pushed me to give it a try, but they all failed. Why?
Look back at the picture. There’s a Dalmatian with his head to the ground in the middle of it. Likely you missed that before because I didn’t direct your attention to it. The evidence for God in our lives is like this. People who doubt as I did will look right past it.
So where is the evidence in my story? Where is the Dalmatian? It’s in my answered prayer for God to reveal himself. That prayer was answered when a wedding was scheduled and a janitor was called in to clean on the same night I was moved to pray. It was paradoxically answered when I received no response to a request for a miraculous sign that undoubtedly would be written off later as an overactive imagination. It was answered when Dr. Gerstner responded to the urging of a colleague to write a book, he had no business writing (from the preface) and when Baker Publishers decided to reprint Dr. Gerstner’s book in 1967.
Far from being unanswered as it seems in my story, my prayer was answered in a long cascade of events that led to 1994 when Dr. Gerstner’s book found its way into my hands. My pastor chose not to focus on me as a Sunday school teacher first, but instead questioned in an effort to understand. My shocking responses flummoxed him to the point of looking for help on his bookshelf where he found a book written by a reticent Dr. John Gerstner, who was a Professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and wrote a book that wound up on the shelf of a pastor and was given to a man who moved to Pittsburgh as an atheist probably 40 years after the book was written. When God is a possibility, the Dalmatian is easy to see.
Take a look at the picture one last time. It’s hard not to see the dog now isn’t it? Jesus says that’s our job. Help people see the evidence they would otherwise not see. The evidence for God is not only in the historically verified events of the Bible, but also all around us in every one of our faith journeys. If we listen carefully to our doubting friends, like my pastor listened to me, maybe we can help them see the signature of God in their lives.
That’s not evidence
There is a problem bubbling around in my recommendation. There are many (me among them prior to 1994) who would reject my description above as anecdotal in the extreme. Anyone could decide to believe in God and suddenly manufacture God’s hand everywhere in their life. A naturalist might well claim if this is your best evidence, it’s laughable.
Maybe so. But what if my request in the sanctuary had been answered differently? What if Jesus appeared out of the stained-glass window and told me there was a God and I should believe? Would a naturalist accept that as evidence? Likely not, because that too is anecdotal only experienced by me. An artifact of my brain and intense desire. What if the sanctuary was full and the whole congregation saw it? Would that be evidence a naturalist would accept? The answer again is unlikely, but this time the reason starts to hint at the core of this post.
How can an entire congregation see this event and all be experiencing the same intense desire and brain artifact? That seems improbable in a conventional church where members are coming from all sorts of belief intensity. Consequently, a trick might be proposed or an unusual, but wholly natural, phenomenon could explain the experience. If no direct evidence could be found of such shenanigans or phenomenon, the evidence seen by the whole congregation would still be rejected because after all people don’t see a resurrected Jesus emerging from stained-glass windows. In other words, the evidence is now subservient to a preheld belief. By the way. If this line of thinking sounds familiar, it’s because these are the strategies used to discount the resurrection and many sightings of Jesus after his death.
Can’t leave the theology behind
And that is where I was when I visited my pastor. God interacting with this world or even existing was not possible because there is no God. I was surprised when I considered God’s existence a possibility because in my heart, I didn’t believe there was a God. 1 Corinthians 15:6-8 describing the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to lots of people oftentimes simultaneously is a lie. It must be a lie because there is no God.
How then did someone like me who held these views ever have the insight Dr. Gerstner’s book produced? The answer is found in Ephesians 1:4-5 and a host of other places in the New Testament.
“Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,”
Jesus says it in a slightly different way in John 6:44
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
A person seeing the evidence for God in the world and believing is God’s choice. I was predestined to believe (read Predestination and Free Will: A Matter of Perspective for more on this). Consequently, Gerstner’s words found fertile ground. If this is true, then why this from Matthew (28:18-20):
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teachings them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
If you and I are predestined to believe, then why does anyone have to do anything to make it happen? In a previous post I speculate about this, but for my story and many others it is apparent that others are to be involved. My hope for this post is that anyone reading it will believe this and be encouraged to be Dr. Gerstner, my pastor, the janitor, my wife, good Christians I observed, and every other necessary person in my journey to faith for another. You may be the one person necessary for he/she to see the evidence of God all around them.
I’d like to finish today with a woman who decided to share her evidence. New York Times journalist Dana Canedy lost her partner Charles Monroe King in Iraq in 2006. He left a Journal that is the subject of a movie directed by Denzel Washington (released 12/2021). Recently, Canedy and Washington were interviewed about the movie and she revealed a bit of her life right after her husband died:
Question: “Dana, how did your faith help you as you coped, first with Charles being away in the military, and then with his death? How do you describe the state of your faith now?”
Answer: “The older I get the stronger it gets. I didn’t grow up in a traditional Christian home. My parents were believers, but we didn’t attend church regularly. And so when Charles died, I always assumed if someone close to me died, I’d be angry with God. But I felt enveloped in his love and uplifted by knowing that I can get through this with my faith. There were all these signs, from the moment he died, that God was with me and Charles was with us, very specific things. Like coming home one day, three days after he died, from a military base where I had to fill out all this paperwork — we hadn’t buried him yet. And I remember walking in the door, thinking my son — who was a 6-month-old, I was holding him — suddenly he was heavy. And I thought, Charles, how am I going to do this? Please give me a sign you’re still here. And this was a time when we all had answering machines at home. I turned on the answering machine. And one of his soldiers is calling from Iraq, saying, “He gave me your phone number and made me promise that if anything ever happened to him, I would call you and tell you he loves you and you’re going to be OK.” That was God”
Maybe Dana’s evidence for God is just the thing you or someone else needs to hear. Apparently, Denzel Washington thought so because he describes knowing her this way: ““It’s cliche to say, but I’m a living witness, having gotten to know Dana,” he said. “True love never dies. That’s what they have — not had — have.” Indeed, through knowing Dana, Denzel is further convinced that Michael is saved and his love lives on.
I pray that if you took the time to read this, you will look at every day as an opportunity to be the one person to help someone see the evidence for God in their life and to help her or him turn toward the living God as I did. The most wonderful thing of all is that doing this brings deep, God-infused satisfaction into your life. May God bless you this and every day in your faith journey.
Dave
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