Sunday 10 January 2010

Looking For God In The Right Place

Where do you expect to find God except in the place He meant for you to find Him? Sceptics will scoff and say there’s a paucity of evidence, but if you want to find God, you must meet Him on His terms, and those terms are Jesus Christ - the fullness of god in man.
Looking for God in your daily routines or in the other areas of life is a bit like looking for Charles Dickens in Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend or A Christmas Carol – of course he is present, even in those who would exile themselves from Him (they too are made in God’s image like the rest of us) - God’s creativity is there in nature, but He is not present in the same way that Miss Havisham or Daniel Quilp or John Harmon or Ebenezer Scrooge are all present in the aforementioned stories, nor is He running through them like water down a stream. To get to know the man behind the stories you would need to meet him in person, and that is what God invites us to do with Christ Jesus.

Jesus is the Creator of the universe, but since the ascension He is not related to the world in the same way that gravity is related to the planets or the electromagnetic spectrum is related to gamma rays and radio frequencies; He is related to nature as Dickens is related to his novels. Each of our own individual stories are, in a sense, related to the whole of nature, just as each character in, say, Oliver Twist (Oliver, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sikes, Rose Maylie, Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Bumble, and so on) is related to the primacy of the story, and to the mind of Dickens himself. Thus demands to see God in nature as some object like a tree, or a snowfall, or a constellation as Ptolemy described them in his ‘Almagest’, or some mathematical formula, or even a person, are as insensible as expecting (or hoping) to see the person of Dickens in one of his stories.


God is the creator, and just as Dickens is the mind behind the characters, so too is God the mind behind all the characters in creation – so in order to know Him one must meet Him on His terms, and His terms are Christ Jesus, and love and grace, and free salvation on the cross. God didn’t want to remain a mystery, that is why He became a man to die for every single human being, and it is through that death, resurrection, and through His word that one will get to know Him.

I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.
John 14:6

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. Acts 4:12

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