Part 2: A Finger In My I

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

Even though our condition might truly be as “ego-bound” as Part 1 described it (see link above), we still manage to speak of God. We all do this.

Simply consider how common it is to hear the phrase shruggingly spoken, “God only knows,” for example. As in, God only knows how long this warm weather’s going to last. What is this phrase, if not a shorthand for expressing our shared perception that the uncertain is somehow certain after all, and that everything unknown is still ordered and guided by some kind of greater will? The frequency with which people use and accept this and similar phrases suggests that the meaning of the phrase is held to be at least plausible, if not self-evidently true.

But the words we speak casually are symptomatic of something deeper. More significant than what our outward verbal expressions reveal is the way that all of us rely upon God for the very foundation of our thinking. The most basic premises that underlie the ways we think about ourselves and think about the world are based on the expectation that God exists.

An old saying goes: “It takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.” The truth of this is found in the fact that the atheist—the one who believes that the world and his own self came into existence and keeps on existing without God—must then by extension believe that certain assumptions are wrong that his own mind seemingly cannot help but to embrace.

* * *

For example, we have ideas. A person gets a concept, picture, or connection within her mind that wasn’t there before. This is an idea. Few of us doubt that we have experienced this phenomenon. Similarly, we have thoughts. We make decisions through reasoned analysis. Sometimes, we even make decisions based upon ideas that have come to mind. We mentally choose—each one of us does this. We compare competing alternatives by using our reasoning and our imagination to forecast which choice will lead to the outcome we like best. We make up our minds and then we change our minds. We all do these things, and we all are aware that others do these things, too.

So where does all of this thinking come from?

It’s not an idle question. If there is no conscious will that created the universe, then everything in the universe happens without anything willing it. By default, everything happens because of unwilled or “random” events. Subatomic particles collide with other particles at random, or waves intersect other waves, and the result sometimes is that the collisions and intersections produce events that can lead to other events.

A waterfall, for example, could be seen as the product of random events in this way. The waterfall might seem like something distinct and singular, but in fact it is just the result of various sorts of collisions. Random interactions over time produced the planets, produced the landscape of a particular continent, produced the rainfall, produced the rocks as well as the earthquake that left a sharp cliff, and then produced the course of the river that sends the water cascading over this cliff. The waterfall is the result of an uncountably vast number of random events in this way, and to believe that there is no supreme being creating the universe is to believe that everything in the universe—including you and all your thinking—was produced exactly the same way.

That is, random electronic firings in your parents’ brains mixed with whatever experiences they had randomly encountered up to that point in order to generate the belief that they should have you. The random events surrounding you have then produced your life and your experiences so far. In fact, random collisions of electrons in your own brain even produced the most recent thought you had, perhaps the thought to continue reading to the end of this sentence. Precisely like the waterfall, your own self—or the thing you think of as a “self”—is just an undirected end product that is cascading along on collisions.

But no, you might say, there is something more than that. There is a will in the universe, and it is my own will. Though the waterfall is not conscious, I am. I do have a self. I make decisions. Randomness does result in what is—but one of the things that randomness has produced is human consciousness. Human beings have this consciousness, and each human being exercises a will.

The basis of this argument is that the waterfall is different from the human being. More specifically, the waterfall is different from “consciousness.” That waterfall, as complex as it is, cannot take credit for having decided to do anything that it does. It is the product of external events and external events still drive everything about it. But the “consciousness,” by this argument, can take credit for what it does. It arose from randomness, yes—but randomness no longer drives it, because a self is in control.

How, then, did the randomness take this leap into selfhood?

To assume that consciousness arose out of random events is to assume that somewhere, sometime, there occurred the very first conscious thought. What were the circumstances that led to this thought? Presumably there had been nothing in the world up to that point except random collisions and their results. If so, then this random cascade created the first thought.

But wait! If this thought was only the latest result of the latest random collision, then it could not be considered a “conscious” thought at all. A “self” must have thought the thought in order for it to be a conscious thought. So where, again, did this “self” come from?

You might finally say, “I have no problem with the contradiction. I fully acknowledge that the universe we perceive is not all there is. Our ‘selves’ are greater than the material world. I am a spiritual person—I certainly have a sense of this. However, that does not mean I believe in a single great ruling ‘God’ per se.”

This is the belief in the transcendent self. It is a compelling belief, given the way our time-bound linear lives seem too small to contain the totality of all that we feel ourselves to be. This provision of ample space for a more abundant view of the other self therefore feels like it answers the puzzle of consciousness—but the answer is incomplete.

This “ample space”—where is it? The transcendent self has a different existence from the way we understand existence, yet still is must exist (for lack of a better word) “somewhere.” That is, it exists in some “place” (again, lacking a better word), in that it emerges from and remains connected to some different sort of realm that also transcends the material world.

If so—if the above description at least partially and crudely expresses the nature of the transcendent self—then what is the origin of this transcendent realm?

Specifically, did a conscious will create the transcendent realm? If not, if the transcendent self is instead just the result of an ongoing series of unwilled “random” transcendent events, then one cannot take credit for having a conscious transcendent self either.

In short, no matter where you put the “I,” the “I” does not exist. This is true whether the universe is random or whether heaven and earth are random together. Either way, the randomness means that you speak falsely whenever you say that “I” decided something, because there is no “I” that is able to decide. All of your thoughts and ideas instead just come from collisions. Every opinion you hold comes from the same thing—ultimately the opinion is just the product of electrons among your neurons happening to go one way instead of another. Even this very feeling of being a self, this feeling you carry with you all the time, is also a result of electronic collisions. You are not a self—not really. You just feel that way. You feel like you decide things, but in fact you have no autonomy. Instead you are just flowing downstream on the course of random interactions that have never been consciously influenced by you or anyone else.

* * *

This idea is more than just disquieting, more than just dispiriting. Part of the horror of this idea is that it implies that a living human being is no better than a corpse. Neither one is conscious, after all—and both are equally subject to random events.

We seem viscerally opposed to this idea.

And in fact, the reason we object relates to a second basic assumption that our minds seemingly cannot help but to embrace. We have already seen that we believe we think thoughts. In addition, we also believe that some things are better than other things.

A human being is inherently “better” than a corpse, for example. A living organism is inherently “better” than a thing that does not live. Some monster might disagree with those statements, but that monster would still share the premise that there are things that are “better.” And like the idea that I am an autonomous self, this idea also is incompatible with a universe that has no creator.

Next: The End of All Continuums

How Do We Know God Is Real? Part 1

You don’t need a bible in order to know God. The Bible itself says this.

“What may be known of God is manifest,” reads chapter 1 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. In other words, the evidence is already plain. “God’s invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Thus, not only can we infer that God exists, we can also learn about his nature from what we perceive around us. Creation testifies about its Creator.

In fact, creation itself provides enough information about God, somehow, that human beings who disregard God anyway are, in Paul’s word, “without excuse.”

So: Those of us who have bibles do not necessarily have an advantage.

Those of us who know the word “Jesus” do not necessarily have an advantage either— because presumably an illiterate tribesman in the most distant wilderness somewhere might speak an obscure syllable for the being he is seeking and coming to know, but cannot explain. God knows when his name is called.

These verses from Romans 1 (specifically vv. 19-20) represent a remarkably confident passage of scripture. Confident, that is, in the universality of our awareness that we live in the presence of God. The implication of Romans 1 is that even this remote tribesman has access to at least enough insight about the God we all share to be able to piece together a sufficient framework for how to experience this being and how to conform to him. I do not know precisely how this insight comes, and doubtless it can be different for every individual. It might involve dreams in some cases. In other cases it might involve the words of missionaries reaching the most remote tribesman third- or fourth-hand. In still other cases, the tribesman might intellectually build this insight out of the clues that are manifest in the material world.

Whatever the case, the being he comes to recognize is living, constant, and true in a way that is distinct from the trinkets of worship that are scattered around him. A missionary might find this person and teach him the story of the cross, but the tribesman is receptive to this message only because of the way it ratifies, intensifies, and “fleshes out” the picture of the one he has already come to appreciate. He speaks a syllable, perhaps, and this is his own private name for the “I AM” of the Bible and the One-through-whom-all-things-were-made who was born on earth as Jesus Christ.

* * *

Don’t get me wrong, though. The Bible is, to say the least, extraordinary. The Bible is, among other things, food.

I have seen the truth of this. The Bible characterizes itself as nourishment, and I have come to recognize the ways that I go hungry when I try to live without its instruction. Yet the Bible derives its authority from God, and the Bible is all but meaningless if God is not real. Therefore, to address the question of whether God exists, we should begin by setting the Bible aside.

Indeed, one might wonder why we in the modern, developed, wealthy, “industrialized” portion of the world have been given this particular blessing—bibles—in such abundance. The book is available in libraries, stores, churches, and almost every hotel room. Plus it is easily accessible in every English version through all of our Internet connections. We are tempted to think of ourselves as special because we have this special document in such an array, but could it be that we are just especially in need of it? Given the hyperbusy, fretting, intellectual minds that our culture produces, perhaps we need to have God’s insight—God’s food—arranged for us in these sequential verses on which we can focus our thoughts. In the Western world, perhaps that is the only avenue left by which to reach the gut where we are starving. Perhaps our culture leaves us so sealed with an ego-bound shell, and therefore so oblivious to God around us, that God has to parachute literature into our midst just to get through. I mentioned that I do not know exactly how the illiterate tribesman pieces together the way of God, but it could just as well be that the tribesman doesn’t understand how I am not able to see it.

Next: A Finger in My I

I Think I’m Getting the Hang of Walking on Water

I think I’m getting the hang of walking on water.

Jesus walking on water was a different sort of miracle. It was different from all the other miracles he did. With every other miracle, Jesus simply showcased something prominently that the Father was already doing with less recognition. Jesus turned water into wine, for example—but the Father turns water into wine as well. The Father simply uses such mechanisms as rainfall, grapes, and fermentation. In the same way, Jesus turned scarcity into plenty (Mark 6:41-44), just as the Father routinely turns a few seeds into an abundant harvest of crops. Jesus even said (see John 5:19) that he does only what his Father shows him to do.

But then there is the apparent miracle of walking on water, which arguably is not presented in the Gospels as a miracle at all. Jesus seems to do it casually, striding across the water when no boat is present (Matthew 14:24). The naturalness with which he does this seems to imply that this sort of capability is part of the character of the surrendered life. We haven’t heard of another believer since Jesus’ time who has replicated precisely this act—but perhaps there is more going on here that just water. I Thessalonians 5:19 says we are not to “quench” the Spirit. The Spirit, in other words, gets extinguished as if through drowning. In doing the best we can at what our Savior shows us to do, we follow his model of walking on water by gliding lightly across any of the things of this world that would submerge us.

In the case of one episode involving Peter, that “water” was literally water. Peter is the one other person in the Bible to pace across a lake. He did this one time, at the direct urging of Jesus, for only for a few steps before sinking. Becoming free enough that we relax gravity’s hold on us is thus possible—but apparently it requires such faith that few human beings do it and even fewer do it for long.

Yet other forces besides gravity also pull us down, and more than just water threatens to wash over us.

In our modern busy lives, for example, there is just so much to do.

Indeed, the pace, possibilities, and convenience of the modern world seem to make it easier than ever to succumb to a life of spiritually drowning. Most of us end up angry much of the time, and we don’t know why.

I have been angry. Only slowly have I begun to see why. I find that I have insisted on tidy appearances because I am ashamed of what others might say about the mess. I pursue distant goals because I fear having only meager success by which to let other people measure my worth in the end. I even do nonsensical and unnecessary things that others tell me to do, simply because I fear their pointing a finger of criticism at me if I don’t do them. In each of these cases, I am not worshiping God or submitting to God, but instead submitting in worship to other human beings. No breath of life can come of this, so no wonder I am angry. More accurately, I am panicked—thrashing at anyone close to me in my desperate groping for air.

The way of Christ is not like this. We still submit to other people. We serve them and regard them as treasures—this is the most vital thing we do in the world. But we do not worship them. We do not fear them, and we submit to them not out of insecurity or shame, but out of love.

I am still tidy, though. Nothing about that is inconsistent with a life in Christ. I still aspire—and I also still do many things simply because other people ask me to do them. The life of surrender is not free from pleasing other people, and not even free from chores.

Before I do any of these things, however, I breathe. The way of Christ is to pray continually (I Thessalonians 5:17). This includes praying for God to work through us and with us, recognizing that he provides the time, energy, and opportunity for all that he would have us do.

It is therefore pointless to get frustrated. It’s pointless to get frazzled. The gift I have right now is the present. “I AM,” the name of God, consists of only the present tense. God is here now, and God comes first—followed closely by the people God has put into my present life.

I breathe before taking the next steps in a full day. I remind myself that the expansiveness of the air of God is the medium through which I wish to move and live, rather than yet again making myself heavy by taking the things of this world too seriously. One of the simpler messages I derive from that picture of Jesus walking on the water is this—that all of us, by his power and grace, can discover the ability to decide not to sink.

The King James Punctuation

Dallas Willard wrote in The Divine Conspiracy that, “when trials are permitted, it only means that [God] has something better in mind for us than freedom from trials.” Earthly trials are the specific implements God uses to reshape us in his image, and to set us free from prisons we hadn’t even seen confining us.

I noticed, in that spirit, that the King James rendition of I Thessalonians 5:18 adds a semicolon. This might not seem like much. However, it is a striking mark of punctuation, given the way it transforms the meaning of the whole passage.

Here is how the New International Version treats I Thess. 5:16-18. It puts semicolons instead after verses 16 and 17:

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Now here it is in the KJV:

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

The significance of the semicolon in the NIV is that it separates away the last part, and frames this last part together. It says that because all circumstances flow from God’s will, we are to give thanks within those circumstances as part of our recognition that God is in control. The thanks, in the NIV, is the one fundamental response.

By contrast, the King James Version uses the semicolon to separate off the phrase, “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Thanks to the KJV’s ordering of the punctuation, this version says that there is more for us to do in recognition of God’s will than just to give thanks. The thankfulness is part of a threefold response.

I had been more accustomed to the NIV rendition. Yet seeing the difference in the KJV treatment has me rethinking the way I understand this set of verses.

Neither punctuation could claim to be authoritative. The original text presumably had no marks to indicate which of the readings is right. However, if we believe that God wishes a relationship with us and speaks to us by means of the ways he crafts our lives, then the King James punctuation stands as more compelling.

It says that we have a greater role to play. Experiencing the will of God at work in ways that challenge us, we have more to offer—and more to bring to bear—than just thanks. We can also derive value from those trials and resist being submerged in our reactions to them through a set of interrelated responses. Namely, we are to...

1. “Be” joyful—being ruled by joy, which comes from the Spirit, and not being ruled by bitterness or fear;

2. Pray continually—asking in particular for the wisdom (see James 1:5) by which we can receive the instruction that God would have us learn from this challenge; and

3. Give thanks—not for the difficult circumstances but for God himself, the one who loves and safeguards us eternally, and the one who chose us in particular to be transformed by these trials.

The Most Fundamental Fact of the Universe

I heard a radio program recently that included a conversation between a man well-known for his faith and a woman whose cherished friend had died at a young age. If God is real, the grieving woman wanted to know, then why did this happen?

The man’s response was earnest and tender, but it was built from elements that would best make sense to a Christian. He spoke of sin resulting in a fallen world. The woman was neither satisfied nor comforted. The host of the radio program—himself sharing the woman’s lack of faith in God—observed that the difficulty in communication between people with and without this faith is that the two groups seem to hold such profoundly different premises.

That difference in premises seems crystallized in the list of exhortations toward the end of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. One of the items on that list says, “In everything give thanks [emphasis mine], for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” A person of faith interpreting this might say that, in God’s plan, everything ultimately makes sense—so we are to find a way within our hearts to give thanks for what occurs. My understanding of this verse used to stop there. But the grieving woman would likely respond, “No way! My friend died. Everyone who knew her and everyone who might have known her has suffered a loss. I won’t give thanks for that!” And the woman would be right.

The preposition is important. We are to give thanks “in” everything, not “for” everything. Awful things do happen. Jesus never promised happiness, and he did say there would be trouble (John 16:33). We do not have to be thankful for the awful things. But in the midst of them, we can give thanks for the God who is in control of everything and does have a plan that is fuller, more glorious, and more elaborate than what we can understand. Over the sweep of sufficient time and from the vantage of sufficient perspective, what seemed to be bad or evil—indeed, what was bad or evil—can also be seen to flower, by God’s love and grace, so that it becomes integral to the wholeness of a vastly greater good. This was the truth that the Joseph of the Old Testament glimpsed in the face of the brothers who had treated him cruelly. See Genesis 50:20. This, indeed, was truth of the execution of Jesus Christ.

To the grieving woman, this is not necessarily satisfying either. But the grieving woman’s question is phrased in a way that it cannot be satisfied. Perhaps the most fundamental fact of the universe is this: God is God. He announced this fact just before he gave the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2), and he gave his name to Moses as “I Am That I Am” (Exodus 3:14). When we say to God, if you are real then why do you allow X, we place ourselves higher than God. That is, we set ourselves up as the judge of God’s plan. To do this is not only spiritually rebellious, but also illogical. He is the Creator and I am not. I might find myself in pain because of trouble I find in this world. Even so, nothing true can proceed from the false premise that he must explain himself to me.

The freedom comes in finding that we can give up constantly trying to be God. When Jesus promises that his way is freer and easier than what we are accustomed to (Matthew 11:30), I think part of what he is saying is that we don’t have to respond to what happens in our lives anymore as if we were little gods and goddesses. We don’t have to try to carry everything on our own. God is real, and his reality becomes increasingly apparent as we turn our hearts to him. With or without Jesus, we will have trouble, but with Jesus the burden is lighter because he shares it. It’s all true.

In the midst of sorrow, it can be hard to give thanks. In a different way, it can also be hard to give thanks in the midst of happiness, because we get so full of what we have. The beginning of all things is God, and in the midst of all things we give thanks—including thanks for the fullness of all he understands, and thanks for what he is going to do that we couldn’t possibly do on our own. That is, he is going to see us all the way through.

Praying Beyond Words

Walking outside, I noticed a weathervane.

I didn’t have a reason to be out. I had just felt a stirring to leave the house for a bit, and I answered as best I could. Not knowing quite what to do, I waited in the air, I drifted up and down the block with my hands in my pockets, and I let everything slow down to as slow as I could get it to go. I leaned for a while, looking at whatever I happened to see. And at some point, I was moved to fully regard and appreciate a weathervane on a nearby roof.

I don’t necessarily have the words for what it means.

Jesus often retreated into silent places to pray (Luke 5:16). I wonder what he said in those prayers. Indeed, I wonder if he “said” much of anything at all.

We are to pray continually, or pray without ceasing—or so says I Thessalonians 5:17. If prayer consists only of speaking to God in word or thought, then we have a problem. We can’t do that continually.

One obvious answer is that prayer is not just speaking. It’s also listening. The communication is two-way. You know the old saw: We have two ears to hear versus one mouth with which to speak, so respect the ratio. Does that ratio look anything like the way we pray—listening twice as much as we speak? “Listening,” that is, to all that he might be saying into our hearts, our moments, and our lives?

But there is more. When we speak with an omniscient creator who already knows us better than we know ourselves, there is the question of language. Jesus might not always have “said” formal words and sentences when praying because human speech is limited. He was God the Son speaking to God the Father, so they could be expected to wordlessly understand one another. Yet we are the people of God. We who believe have God’s spirit, meaning that we can expect some portion of this same understanding. Indeed, the Bible says that he hears our prayers even when we don’t know precisely what to pray to him (Romans 8:26).

We do pray using the words of our own human language, and we must pray this way. We are created in God’s image, and like God, our word has power. But prayer—communicating with the infinite—must also consist of more than finite language.

There is something musical about this. When we surrender lovingly to an instrumental piece of music, we recognize the order and meaning of the movements and melodies, even though the nature of that meaning is emotional instead of intellectual. We let go of our insistence on our own mood in order to resonate with the mood of the music.

In the same way, our praying involves not just bowing our heads and folding our hands on our own terms, but also submitting ourselves to resonate with the “music” whose meaning is spiritual.

What kind of music is this? Well: one might rightly say ... wind instruments. In both of two very different books of the Bible (John 3:8, Acts 2:2), the Holy Spirit is associated with the wind. Our prayer seeks any and all ways of understanding God, including this one. We do pray to lay specific thanks and specific appeals before him, and we do pray to listen for instruction that we might be able to translate into thought or deed. But then there is this other realm of prayer, perhaps the greatest realm of all. Over and above everything else, our prayer also includes the quiet seeking—in our hearts, in patience and stillness—for a renewed and wordless awareness of which way the wind is blowing.

A To-Do List for the Sanctified

There are all kinds of ways to take the light burden that Jesus promised in Matthew 11:30 and turn this into something heavy.

One of the ways I have found is by searching for the particular and specific will of God in my life.

Turns out, I didn’t have to search. God’s will for me is the same as God’s will for you. In the first letter to the Thessalonians—which is perhaps the earliest document in the New Testament—Paul states it this plainly:

“For this is the will of God, your sanctification”
—I Thessalonians 4:3.

That is, in the same way that certain dwellings, rocks, or spots of ground have been sacred because of the way people encountered God in those places ... now it is people themselves who are sacred. And the way to become a “living temple” in this way is to encounter God in your heart. (I am grateful to a sharp little book that highlights this I Thessalonians verse, Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung.)

“Fine,” you might say. OK—I am to be sanctified. But what does that mean? “Sanctified” is a state that comes from God’s grace. Meanwhile, I am still here on earth. I have a life to live. What am I supposed to do with it? What am I supposed to do with my energies, resources, attention, and time in order to make sure that I helping carry out God’s plan?

The answer—in a great many of the choices that we make—is that it really does not matter what we do.

That answer might be less than satisfying, but there it is.

In fact, it’s possible to become lost in the preoccupation with what to do. The teachings of Jesus focus on attitudes of the heart. If our heart is with Christ, then we will tend to make choices that further our capacity to bear good fruit (Matthew 7:16). The branches of the vine do not know the precise size, quantity, and color of the fruit they will produce. In the same way, we do not know precisely how our lives are supposed to proceed, but if we make choices day by day that are based upon faith and love, then over time we may see the result of those choices in various forms of fruit that Christ produces through us.

But even if that answer still feels unsatisfying, that’s all right. Paul seemed to anticipate this. We are people of action, after all, and so he closed that same early letter with a list of action items. I hope to explore some of these items in future posts. Here they are—a to-do list for the sanctified:

● Be joyful always
● Pray without ceasing
● In everything give thanks
● (For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you)
● Do not quench the Spirit
● Do not despise prophecies
● Test all things
● Hold fast what is good
● Abstain from every form of evil
—I Thessalonians 5:16-22