In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—Genesis 1:1(NIV).
“Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse,” says Philip Yancey in his book, Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud.
Questions. We all have them. Some, like those questions concerning God, will never be answered while we’re here on earth.
One of my recent columns, “What would you tell an atheist?” has generated many emails from both Christians and atheists alike.
One woman wrote the following: “I was a devout Christian for the first 25-30 years of my life. I had developed questions as a teen that no minister had a reasonable answer for, but was content (for a time) to leave it at ‘God is mysterious.’
“But, as time went on,” she wrote, “the more I questioned, the more illogical the answers seemed to be. I even tried a couple of other religions, Taoism and Pantheism, but they didn’t seem accurate, either. What finally opened my eyes, strangely, was a meme saying, “God loves you SO much that he created hell to send you to if you don’t love him back!”
Her message continued: “If you think about it, why would you want to worship someone who only made hell to punish people eternally and who could, in his omnipotence, destroy Satan and hell, but chooses not to. Also, how happy would you be in heaven, knowing your loved ones (or friends, or neighbors, or even strangers) are suffering unimaginably in hell?”
Daryl E. Witmer of the AIIA Institute says, “The Bible says that God prepared hell for the devil and his demonic cohorts (Matthew 25:41), that He is ‘…not wishing for any [person] to perish but for all to come to repentance.‘ (II Peter 3:9), and that He has done everything possible to save us from that terrible, terrible place. Yet, in the end God will not violate or overrule the deliberate choice of those who consciously and willfully turn away from Him.”
I grew up attending church and was a believer, but I didn’t have a personal relationship with God until I was in my late 40s. In my sin and shame, I reached out to Him.
Almost 20 years later, I can agree with Yancey’s quote above. Because I’ve experienced His amazing grace, I can look in reverse and see God’s fingerprints all over my life. What a testimony I have to share!
From a world-renowned evangelist praying at my hospital bedside when I was 17-years-old to the leaps of faith I’ve taken since I decided to trust God completely, my life is witness to an almighty Creator God. I know, because of the doctor’s verdict, I would not have survived without the prayer of that evangelist who was the baccalaureate speaker for our senior class in 1971.
So, what would I say to the woman above who doesn’t believe in my Creator God? Read John 3:16 and know He doesn’t want anyone to perish. However, He does give us free will to believe or not.
Have you turned away from God?