God: Busy Elsewhere?

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In "Darkest Hour," a Netflix movie about Second World-War England, Winston Churchill – the frumpish prime minister who rallied his country to resist the Nazis – told King George VI: “My father was like God. Busy elsewhere.”

One of my recent blogs was about the necessity of showing up – at the job, in the family, in prayer. So, what about the importance of God “showing up?”

For many, God’s silence clinches their rejection of faith. God is missing in action, they say, and there’s no way to get around it. If he/she exists, you’d hear from him/her. So, learn to live without God and you’ll be much happier.

Generally Happier

Problem is that opinion polls don’t support the latter statement. For many years, they have shown that believers are generally happier than non-believers.

But why is faith required? Why would God design things in a way that requires human beings to believe instead of knowing God directly? Why require an intellectual and emotional struggle about faith? If God is so smart, couldn’t God have come up with something better than the need to believe?

First, faith IS a way of knowing, just not in a scientific way. And for believers, God is not silent. They see and hear God in others, in nature, in the Bible, in their work, in science, literature and art.

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Personally, once I get past the question of belief in the existence of God, I have no problem believing the rest – in my case, that Jesus is God and that he indirectly founded the church to which I belong. After all, if God exists, anything is possible. Of course, there's a choice involved, too. I choose to believe in Jesus and in my church, just as others choose differently.

None of this is to say that I don’t simultaneously have doubts. On some days – usually because of some media report of man’s inhumanity to man – those doubts are grave. On most days, I’m a happy, believing camper.

I can imagine what human existence might be like if God were not silent, if God did “show up.” We would lose our freedom. We would find it impossible to say “no;” to decline to live lives that reflect what we know about God. No matter how benign a God, it would by necessity be a relationship of dictator and dictated to.

My answer to the “why faith?” question is basically the same. Requiring faith gives us the freedom to reject or ignore God. In this, I see God as the loving parent who knows when to let his children go their own way.

Related Questions

Part of the reason these answers are not satisfactory is that they leave a lot of related questions unanswered, such as questions about the nature of God, the afterlife and the role of religion in the search for God. But here, too, the Bible, prayer, study and a relationship with believers we respect are helpful.

One thing I can say about all this to the skeptic who is genuinely searching for God: faith doesn’t require us to have all the answers, just the desire and effort to seek answers. We all are so influenced by our culture, we have to get beyond what may have become comfortable. We may have for some time substituted career, sports, music, food and drink, sex, exercise or “stuff” for God.

Jesus puts it nicely in Matthew’s gospel: “For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”

 

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