The Question of God

Will it be when you’re young, or when you’re old? Will it happen in the wake of tragedy, or in the stillness of an unguarded moment? Will it come after a lifetime of religious service, in a season of stark survival, or during an ongoing battle of intellectual resistance? Whenever or however it happens, the moment is coming when you must do business with God, either taking Him seriously by responding to His overtures, or pushing Him away into the background and turning up the volume of your inner voices. No matter how smart or careful you are, how determined you are to chart your own course, you’re going to reach the end of yourself.

But when you get to that isolated place, accessible only to you, you’re going to find that you’re not alone. In fact, you’ll learn that you never were. When the weight of that reality settles on you, will it crush you, or will you let yourself be unburdened? To know for sure, you’ll have to answer this question: What if I’ve been wrong about God? As the seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal once insisted, you have far more to lose if you’re wrong about God than if you believe in Him and He doesn’t exist!

What if God does exist? What if He can be known? What if He already knows you and loves you deeply? What if He is pursuing you the way lovers pursue each other, the way fire consumes oxygen, the way a mother pulls her child from the street? What if your Maker wants more than anything to meet you? If you want answers to those questions, you’re going to need one thing: faith.

Hebrews 11 is a well-known New Testament chapter that’s all about faith. It recounts a who’s who of Old Testament figures, praising them for their faithful journeys through life with God, sort of like a Hall of Fame of faith. These were lives covered with enough “fingerprints” to point to the invisible God who left those fingerprints. The chapter begins by providing a definition of faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (v. 1 ESV). Faith calls what is invisible fact and what is not readily apparent guaranteed.

So in asking the question “Can God be known?,” Hebrews 11 gives us the answer: “Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (v. 6). This verse points to two great realities and two subsequent responsibilities. The two great realities: God exists and God is personal. They go hand in hand with two great responsibilities: faith and pursuit. So know this: You can know God. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). Commit yourself to act in faith as you encounter Him, believing that He wants you to know Him better.