Where to Find God  

Where to Find God

Did you know that God wants you to find Him? The Apostle Paul
preached this message to the unbelievers of his day [1st century AD]:

24 God that made the world and all things therein, seeing
that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples
made with hands; 25 Neither is worshipped with men's hands,
as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and
breath, and all things; 26 And hath made of one blood all
nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and
hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds
of their habitation; 27 That they should seek the Lord, if haply
they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far
from every one of us: 28 For in him we live, and move, and
have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said,
For we are also his offspring.
        -- Acts 17:24-28 (KJV)
We are all the offspring of God; we are not apes; we are not evolved
beings. Yes, we are all the offspring of God, but we are not all saved.
For that, we must humble ourselves before the Holy God and accept
Jesus Christ as our savior, for there is no other name nor other way
by which men can be saved. If there were any other way for people
to be saved, then why did God have His Son die on that cross? You
cannot be saved merely by adhering to a set of 'good' rules, for
that set of rules didn't suffer on a cross for your sins. God chose
the way of salvation: We either take it or leave it.

How should we 'feel' after God? Feeling after God is an apt description
because to find God we need to apply all our spiritual resources. And
what are those? Jesus told us that we need to serve God with all our
hearts, minds, souls, and strength. Those are four modes of worship and
service to God, but they are also four modes of communion with the
Heavenly Father. If you only try to find God with your mental faculties,
you may be hopelessly distracted by the world's attractions and false
leads. But I have argued elsewhere that we need to seek after God with
more than our minds. Nevertheless, what I want to present now is an
appeal to your mind, but you may not get it if you refuse to appreciate
its significance by use of your heart and your intuition.

I return to the Apostle Paul to one of his presentations to the
people of Lystra. He had just healed a man whose feet were crippled.
When the crowds saw what he had done, they were beyond amazed
and they over-reacted. They set about to worship Paul and his
traveling companion Barnabas. Then Paul urgently preached this
to them:

15 And saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men
of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should
turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven,
and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein: 16 Who
in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways.
17 Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he
did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons,
filling our hearts with food and gladness.
        -- Acts 14:15-17 (KJV)
And way back in the days of Job, God spoke to him out of the
whirlwind and declared His providence over the care of all
the earth:
Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters,
or a way for the lightning of thunder; To cause it to rain on
the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is
no man; To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause
the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? Hath the rain a
father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? -- Job 38:25-28
It seems that the rain does have a father -- Father God.

You people who have rejected God, how often have you ignored or
dismissed the wonderful things that exist in this universe that don't
need to be, but are so enriching to us, if used in moderation. God is
trying to be a witness to us of Himself through the universe He has
created. But when you downplay the evidence He provided, you are
discrediting the fingerprints of God in the world.

God has not left the modern Western world without witness of His
existence by the works of His hands. You love to discredit the unlikeliness
of all the values of fine-tuning of the universe by which life could evolve on
earth, because you refuse to give due credit to the creator of the universe.
That's approaching God only with your mind and with a bias intellect
against Him. Instead, you run to worship before the idol of the Multiverse.

But what about the cosmic curvature parameter (Omega_k)? It can be
positive, negative, or zero. In that continuum range of values, think of
how unlikely it would be to be zero instead of any other number. One of
the problems that cosmic inflation was invented to take account of is
the flatness of the universe.

But there is no particular reason we need to argue that the universe must
have zero flatness to account for the existence of life on earth by evolutionary
means. So the cosmic curvature value just happens to be zero for no particular
reason at all. Now, I know what you are saying. Any other real number value
would be just as unlikely, but not to the appreciative human mind. At least
not to my mind. That it came out to be zero is deeply meaningful to me. As
far as I'm concerned, that's God witnessing to the modern Western world of
His lordship over His creation, the universe.

But atheists and naturalists are in the habit of ignoring coincidences, so
that they have lost the ability even to be impressed by them at all. Not all
coincidences are equal. Some of them are highly unlikely, yet provide some
benefit or harm to us. Either way, we should interpret that as significant.
Jesus warned us that the people who will get His preaching are those who
have ears to hear and eyes to see (whose spiritual eyes have not been blinded).
Many heard Him preach, but few understood the message. But why? It was
the same message to one and all in the crowds.

My life as a Christian is very complicated. I have gone over it elsewhere so
I won't go over it here. But in brief, I was a believer in the late 1970s. Those
were still my university years. For one semester I stayed with a friend nearby
the university and we went to campus most week days. My purpose there
was to visit with the believers there and to be a witness of Jesus as the
circumstance gave opportunity. I was not one of those scream-out-the-Gospel
campus evangelists.

One day I decided to go to the mall in the morning and witness to someone at
random, though I had no particular plan how I would do that. As I stood on
the mall to the west of Hayden Library, I waited for God to show me how to
interact with someone on the mall. At the time, classes were in session as
evidenced by there being very few people traveling on the mall. I waited
patiently on one spot for some event to make clear to me what I should do.
Eventually, I closed my eyes and praised God and then heard a voice in my
head say, "Say hello to the next person who goes by." Was that the voice of
the Holy Spirit in my head? Maybe. I soon came to believe so. Here's why.

I opened my eyes and looked around to see a young man approaching me from
my right, but a few steps away and maybe eight to ten steps in front of me.
(It's hard for me to remember exact distance details as this event was a long
time ago.) Anyway, as he was about to walk just opposite to me, I said
"hello" to him in a normal tone of voice. But just as the word left my mouth,
someone on a bicycle, approaching from my left, rode between the other man
and me and he apparently intercepted my voice. He quickly slammed on his
brakes and turned around and then said my name loudly, and apparently in
shock, as also was I.

The bicycle rider just happened to be a former friend of mine, whom I knew in
high school six years earlier, but I hadn't seen him since then. I had no idea
that he was even on campus. To meet him again in this unlikely manner I
reckoned to be virtually impossible. But to an atheist, to meet up with a
long-lost friend in that manner is nothing to wonder at -- it's all ho-hum to
them. No deity was involved, or even could be involved in it. See what I mean?
When God tries to meet up with them by these synchronicities, they aren't
paying any attention to them.

One day these atheists will stand before Jesus for their final judgments and
complain to God that He didn't bear witness of Himself to them. To which He
may reply, "I surely did, son of man, many times. But you weren't listening
to me. You didn't have an ear to hear what I was saying. You didn't see Me
in the circumstances around you -- but I was there.

So, I walked over to him with a smile on my face and said to him, "The Holy
Spirit told me to say hello to you," which is exactly what I believed at the time
and still believe. Why shouldn't I believe that? Jesus specifically said that
He would manifest Himself to His true followers:

He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that
loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I
will love him, and will manifest myself to him. -- John 14:21
Then we talked for a couple minutes and he left. If that former friend of
mine had been two seconds earlier or two seconds later, he likely would
not have intercepted my hello, and that chance meeting would never have
happened. But, you're an atheist, so ho-hum. Nothing special in that
occurrence, right?

You are an atheist or at least an agnostic, right? You put no credence
in coincidences being meaningful, much less a manifestation of God. But I
do. I believe that that was God manifesting Himself to me, and to my
former friend that He is real and is involved in the lives of even common
believers, such as myself.

God does not want you to 'forget that you have a mind' to follow Him on
the basis of one gigantic leap of irrational faith. It's quite the opposite.
God wants to manifest His reality to you in many different ways. He will
witness to you on the intellectual level if you will follow those proofs (Bible
prophecy for one). He will witness Himself to you through the love of
God in your heart. And He will witness to you through your soul by godly
intuition. All of what I have describe falls under the headings of either
the gifts or the fruit of the Spirit of God. God wants you to have
confidence that you are serving the true God, and not just to cross your
fingers and hope you are. He wants you to be able to say, along with the
Apostle Paul, "I know in whom I have believed." [2 Timothy 1:12]

And what is rationality, anyway? This is the first rule of rationality:

Whatever is true is rational.
Jesus wants us to employ our minds, hearts, and souls in our search for
the truth of God. This is what He said about those who fail to strive to
enter His kingdom on these bases. The Apostle John told us this:
But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they
believed not on him: That the saying of Esaias the prophet might
be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report?
and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed? Therefore
they could not believe, because that Esaias said again, He hath
blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should
not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be
converted, and I should heal them. -- John 12:37-40
God has not left Himself without a witness of Himself to the modern
Western world. There are so many ways to detect the supremacy of
God in the universe, but right now I just want to point out how it
manifests to us through His providence in our individual lives and
in the good things He has given to all humanity, which are not necessary
for humanity to have theoretically evolved on this planet. Hence, they
are the superfluous good things of life.

So, in the following list of things given to humanity by God, as a
blessing, you can find God through his benevolence towards us, if
you have eyes to see it. (Presented in no particular order.)

Nature, the Big Bang, Evolution, the Multiverse didn't owe us any
of those good things we so take for granted. They didn't have to
exist for our use, yet they do. And even if their modern forms are
the result of human manipulation, that changes nothing, for we didn't
create that animal or vegetable ancestral varieties from which its
modern form has been derived.

It's well not to despise the day of small beginnings [Zechariah 4:10],
by which I mean that just because we don't employ some of these
gifts from God in the modern Western world, doesn't mean that
they were of no importance in the past. But the ignorant are
habitually unappreciative. Close your eyes, fold your fingers together,
and the next thing you'll know, you'll awake at the Judgment Seat of
Christ. Wake up!

We are so good at being bad and at being ingrates and taking the
good things we have for granted. Look into the list I provided and
add to it all the things you take for granted. In them you will
find God there -- if you have eyes to see and a heart still capable of
feeling appreciative.

Final note: As I was finishing up my list of God's gifts to us, I
happened by chance and by coincidence upon a YouTube video
of a Sherlock Holmes episode (played by Jeremy Brett) and
Dr. Watson (played by Edward Hardwicke) in the second act of
The Second Stain: Holmes has just remarked to Watson that there
were only three spies who could make use of a particular state
document that Holmes had agreed to find. But Watson sees the
death of one of these suspects as merely an amazing coincidence.
But Holmes is not so cavalier. He concludes that this death must
be meaningful to their investigation of the missing document. I
point out this scene only to use as an example of how easy it is
for people to dismiss 'coincindence'. It can be tragic when we
do so in an instance in which God is trying to reveal Himself to us
but there are no equation for the atheist to regard, therefore he
will not see it for what it is. There are two other channels to
find God (the heart and the soul), and if you shut those down,
you may well miss God's appeal to you when He makes it. When
God calls you, you need to reply to Him.

I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears
upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when
I spake, they did not hear: but they did evil before mine
eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not. -- Isaiah 66:4