I've had cancer and I am not angry with God

When I first heard about Stephen Fry’s now infamous outburst against God in a recent interview on Irish TV, I admit that I dismissed it as the ranting of a celebrity amateur atheist.

However, I’ve started to take it a little more seriously after something I saw on facebook. What I saw was Stephen Fry’s ranting replayed in someone’s own words in commenting on a Christian tweet. “Reasons we should be angry with God,” said the person, “He allows all the suffering in the world. Cancer, rape, war, murder…”. Fry’s comments, I assume therefore, have struck a chord with a number of non-Christians, who would call themselves either atheists or agnostics. And therefore Christian responses also need to be heard and spread.

However, what follows here is not attempting to be a full response. In fact it’s not even how I would usually approach this issue.

What is on my mind on this occasion is simply that lots of Christians suffer and still love God.

In fact I have suffered myself and I am not angry with God. I have had cancer twice in the last 5 years and I am not angry with God.

I have been made redundant at least 3 times, and had one 8-month period where I was unable to find a job and almost came to financial ruin, and I still believe in God. In fact I love God.

Perhaps someone will say to me, as Satan suggested to God about Job (Job 2:4,5), that I haven’t suffered enough to really test my faith. Perhaps that’s true. And perhaps there are harder challenges to face in the future. But for now, no one can accuse me of speaking with no experience at all of suffering. At the very least people should concede that when I speak of my faith in relation to suffering I am not speaking abstractly.

I guess this is on my mind because people like Stephen Fry (when they say “God is mean”, “God is horrid”, “How dare you God?”, etc, etc) speak as if it’s obvious that if there is a god we should hate him for all the bad things that happen in the universe. And they don’t bother to ask what Christians actually believe about God and about the suffering in the world before making vitriolic statements. The implication is that if you’re suffering and remaining a Christian then you must be stupid, because suffering should lead you to hate God. But I want to point out, 1) there are, and have been, millions of Christians that have suffered and have not lost faith; and 2) the Christian worldview in fact does have a perfectly cogent positive explanation for the existence of suffering in the world.

Suffering is bad

Perhaps I should also make clear at the outset that I hate suffering. I hate cancer. I hate war. I hate murder and oppression. I hate earthquakes and the death of children in floods and hurricanes and plane crashes. Suffering is bad. Pain is bad. Death is bad. Illness is bad. There is no sugar-coating the awfulness of suffering, whether it’s the middle-aged lymphoma sufferer being laid aside for a few months suffering sickness, exhaustion and financial difficulty, or whether it’s the thousands of infants both killed and orphaned in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

And I could write another whole article explaining how those statements make sense within a Christian worldview but don’t make sense in an atheist worldview. If we are just randomly formed collections of atoms, developed as a species after billions of years of random mutations, how does it make sense to say that cancer cells are abnormal? How does it make sense to say that pain is bad? How can we make value judgments about random purposeless happenings, painful or not?

But that’s not what I want to draw out here.

The question I want to explore is: Why do we Christians love God in the face of such awful pain and suffering?

God is all-powerful and perfect by definition

First let me say that God is most certainly all-powerful and perfect. I say that because it’s common for atheists to argue that the all-powerful and perfect God of Christianity cannot exist because of human suffering. They say that a good and loving God would want to alleviate suffering, and an all-powerful God would be able to alleviate suffering. So they say that the fact that human suffering exists shows that such a God doesn’t exist. If a god does exist, suffering exists because he is either powerless to prevent suffering (and therefore he is not all-powerful) or he doesn’t want to prevent suffering (and therefore he is not perfect). The force of the Fry-type argument is the latter. But the outcome is similar.

And atheists and agnostics come to the same practical conclusions. An atheist may say that God doesn’t exist because if there was an all-powerful good God then there wouldn’t be suffering. An agnostic may say that there may be a good God, but if there is He’s irrelevant because He can’t do anything to make a difference in the world (this is the kind of God mocked in The Simpsons). On the other hand the Fry-esque agnostic may say that there may be an all-powerful God who created the world, but if there is He’s not worth bothering with because He doesn’t do anything to prevent human suffering. For both atheists and agnostics there is no God they want to believe in, and certainly no God they want to love.

But as a Christian I see things differently.

God created the universe. And if He is powerful enough to create the entire universe in all its mind-blowing scale as well as its infinitesimal detail, then He is certainly powerful enough to do something about human suffering. He could have made fire that doesn’t burn flesh. He could have stopped the earth’s crust from fracturing and causing earthquakes and tsunamis.  He made our emotions, so He could change our emotional responses. He made our bodies, so He could make them impervious to pain. He created desire, so He could have created only pure unselfish desire.

God is all-powerful by definition, because He created all by His power, and he created all power (heat, light, gravity, magnetism, etc) by His power.

And God did not have to create the universe. He was happy and complete without it. It was His decision to create it. And having decided to create the universe He wasn’t bound to necessarily create it in a particular way. There is no physical or logical law in the universe that meant God had to (i.e. was bound to) allow suffering.

So if I believe God has power to prevent suffering, and if I hate suffering, why do I still love God who still allows me to suffer, and others to suffer more? Doesn’t that make Him mean and uncaring? Doesn’t that also make Him hypocritical on one level, because He commands His followers to love and care for others, even their enemies, and yet He apparently doesn’t do everything in His power to do the same?

Before we get to answer that, though, there’s something else we have to be clear about. God is not just sitting back, folding His arms and not doing anything about suffering. He is not an idle bystander who could intervene but chooses not to. In the Bible God tells us that suffering is something that He initiated in response to human disobedience. God created a perfect world with no suffering, but God brought suffering into the world.

The first time suffering is spoken about in the Bible is in Genesis 3, where God responds to the first sin: “I will surely multiply your pain…” (v16); “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it…” (v17)

Stephen Fry and today’s angry atheists/agnostics make out that God allows suffering because He isn’t perfect. How can He be perfect? How can He be called Good if He causes and allows all this suffering? But the opposite is true.

God initiated human suffering and universal decay because He is perfect.

Being the Creator of everything makes God the definer of everything. Human beings, we’re told are created in God’s own image (Genesis 1:27). That means we are made to function in the same way, with creativity, with relational capacity, with moral sense, acting, thinking, speaking, and so on. And by definition the original is always the perfect version, against which the ‘copies’ are compared. So when we look around the different moral standards operated throughout humanity, if we want to know what is perfect we must look at the original. God is by definition perfect, because we were made to be like Him. He is the original, who we were intended to be ‘copies’ of.

Sin has marred us as His special creation, because we have distanced ourselves from His character. We are no longer the perfect ‘copies’ that we were before The Fall. And just as sin marred us, God has ensured that human beings cannot live without the frustration and pain of an unmarred universe. Why should beings that have shrugged off the image of the perfect live in a world fit for the perfect?

So God’s omnipotence (all-powerfulness) and His perfection are foundational. If God is the Creator of everything He is all-powerful. If God created human beings in His image then He is perfect. And suffering, pain and death, are the consequences of sin ordained by the all-powerful, perfect God.

The unfairness of suffering points to the solution

Now at this point I’ll acknowledge that part of the struggle we have with thinking about suffering is not with suffering per-se. If Osama Bin Laden suffered, who cares? If Adolf Hitler suffering, who cares? If a mass murderer or terrorist suffers, who cares? Right? The suffering we struggle with is the suffering of those who don’t seem to deserve it: The child who has leukaemia, the poor who starve in the Third World, the families devastated by earthquakes and tsunamis. Even if we admit that nobody is perfect, the pain that some people go through seems out of proportion with their sin.

Why do I love a God who seems so unfair?

Jesus’ disciple, John, said, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10)

God loved us? With all the pain and suffering and misery and death in the world? God loved us?

Yes. Because if we struggle with the unfairness there seems to be in suffering, we need to ask ourselves what was the most ‘unfair’ suffering in the history of the world? The widest disparity possible between the extent of suffering and the amount it was deserved would be between infinite pain and sinless perfection. Jesus was sinless perfection, and yet on the cross suffered infinite pain in His death and in separation from His Father.

The worst suffering in the universe was inflicted on the One who least deserved it. And who is Jesus? He is God’s one and only Son. He is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), “all the fullness of God” is in Him (v19).

And what did He die for? As John said, He was sent “as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” He took the ultimate punishment that we deserved so that our sins could be atoned for, removed, dealt with, so that we wouldn’t have to face that punishment.

Paul characterized Christ’s sacrifice in this way: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (Romans 5:6-10)

Elsewhere we read, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:16-17)

So those who accuse God of not doing anything about human suffering are ignoring the most significant event in human history. In dying on the cross, and rising from the dead, Jesus, God’s Son, was not just dealing with suffering. He was dealing with the root cause of suffering – sin. He was dealing with the sickness and not just the symptoms. And that leads us to three points:

•      The physical suffering, pain, betrayal and rejection Jesus suffered, and the wrath he suffered at the hand of his Father on the cross, shows that we under-estimate the seriousness of our sinfulness. We don’t appreciate how much God’s image has been radically ruined in our selfishness, our desire for self-rule, our hatred of His rule. Because Jesus died for our sins we see in the horror of his death the horror of our sins. Not only is it what we deserve for our sins and our sinfulness, but you can get a measure for the seriousness of the disease from the seriousness of the treatment. Just as cancer requires drastic treatment like chemotherapy, surgical organ removal, stem cell transplants or radiotherapy, sin requires drastic treatment in the death of God’s only Son. That shows you how seriously God takes sin.
•      Jesus’ death takes away our sin, and through his resurrection God’s purpose was to give us the hope of eternal life. “The wages of sin is death,” Paul says in Romans 6:23, “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” So our concern for the suffering and pain of this life (as well as the meagre pleasures) must always be set against the infinitely greater pleasures of the eternal life that is promised in Christ.
•      More than that – for those who have repented of our sinful, self-centred ways, and have faith in God through Jesus Christ, it is those very pains and sufferings that prepare us for the glory of eternal life by exposing to us the transience of this life. “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)

It’s these perspectives that characterise the Christian gospel and worldview. It’s why the Christian worldview is good news, not just an alternative philosophical system. It teaches us, as it taught Job in the Bible story, to be humble as we both recognise our sin and recognise the eternal nature of God’s good purposes for His people.

That’s why Corrie Ten Boom could remain joyful and faithful when living in the squalor of the Nazi death camp.

It’s why Joni Eareckson-Tada has remained joyful and faithful after being totally paralysed below the neck in a diving accident 50 years ago.

It’s why the apostle Paul stuck to his mission to preach the gospel in spite of beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck, illness and persecution.

And that attitude is displayed by Christians the world over. Not perfectly, not consistently, but visibly and tangibly. Suffering may knock back the true believer. It should still shock us and move us. But rather than despising God for allowing it, we recognise God’s justice in it, and look to God our Father for our relief both now and for eternity.

My hope

Atheists and agnostics who tell us all the reasons why God is worthy of our hatred and anger imply in doing so that Christians are either sadly deluded or dangerously stupid. But I hope at least two things emerge from what I’ve outlined above:

•      Christians have a faith that is rational. Suffering is not a philosophical problem that undermines our belief in the existence of God. On the contrary: The big picture solution to suffering is what the Christian message is essentially all about.
•      The joyful, faithful, Christ-praising, lives of suffering Christians around the world, will I hope at least give pause for some thought among those tempted to jump on the Stephen Fry bandwagon. If Christians can be joyful in the face of the inescapable awfulness of suffering – some much much greater than my own – if their faith does not fail, shouldn’t that at least cause some tempering of the rhetoric?

Ultimately my hope is that somebody somewhere would read this and rethink their attitude to God, because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross, turn to him in repentance and faith, and enter into eternal life.

God is the way He is

If we are created by God – and not the other way around - why do we feel like we can challenge, and take exception to, aspects of His character and His work? 

What made me think about this was the way some people have reacted to my getting ill again. One or two people who care a lot about me have reacted really angrily. How can God allow this? Surely we don’t deserve this? How can anyone dare suggest that God allows these things for our own good? How can any good come from this situation? I’m sometimes not sure whether they are suggesting that my serious illness is evidence that there is no God, or whether they are saying that they just don’t like God if He lets ‘good’ people suffer. 

But it triggered a thought (which means I am not directing any of what follows to those people I mentioned above) that the suffering of the world sometimes washes over us, without bothering us too much, until it directly affects us. Why suddenly get upset with God or lose faith because bad things are happening to us? Bad things are happening the world over to millions of people. 

And we can’t dissociate God from any of this suffering, as if He only does things we like and the bad things are outside His control. 

This is the God who decreed that death should be experienced by every single human being, because of the sin of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:19). This the God who destroyed every single man, woman and child – in fact every living thing - on the face of the earth, except for 8 people and a big boat full of creatures (Noah et al), with a cataclysmic flood (Genesis 7:4). This is the God who decreed painful toil for mankind because of Adam’s sin (Genesis 3:17), and the one who decreed pain in childbearing for women because of Eve’s sin (Genesis 3:16). 

This is the God who killed all the firstborn of the Egyptians when they would not let the Israelites free (Exodus 12:29). 

This is the God who punished the evil of the Canaanites with annihilation (Deuteronomy 9:4-5). 

I could go on. Ultimately this is the God who will send unrepentant sinners to Hell, showing His wrath upon them for their rejection of His Word (John 3:36). 

But someone might point out, rightly, that these are examples of bad people suffering at God’s hand. What about good people? Leaving aside the Bible's assertion that 'there is no-one righteous, not even one' (Romans 3:10), have we also ignored the fact that good people suffer, and that the Bible does not flinch from this? 

There’s always been the example of Job to turn to. He was an upright and righteous man (Job 1:1). And God allowed Satan to afflict him with bereavement, financial ruin and painful sickness. In fact, in Job’s mind his affliction is under the direct supervision of God (Job 1:21-22). 

And it’s not just Old Testament stuff. In John 21:18-19 Jesus tells Peter that he is going to suffer a death sentence similar to his own ‘to glorify God’. Paul was given ‘a thorn in the flesh’ by the Lord (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). 

And of course, we believe in a God who sent His own Son to suffer injustice, betrayal and an excruciating death on a roman cross. 

Suffering and pain have been part of God’s universe, and part of His plan, since Adam and Eve fell into sin all those years ago. So isn’t it a bit selfish to expect God to keep us healthy and happy, but direct the suffering and pain to people we don’t know? 

But the answer may come back, ‘why would you want to believe in a God who can act in this way?’ There are many different ways of responding to that. One starting point is to say that since there is only one God, then this is the only one worth believing in, because He’s the only real God. The fact of His existence is, in my view, inescapable. 

And He is who He is, no matter what I think. I can’t really pick and choose aspects of God’s character to be true, and forget the rest. God has revealed Himself, His character and purpose – as comprehensively as we are able to take on board. It’s all or nothing. The Bible portrays God as perfectly good, righteous and holy, and as just, judging and punishing; full of love but showing wrath to those who rebel against Him. Unless we accept the truth of all of these aspects, we will have an absolutely false view of God, and we will not be able to say that we believe in the God of the Bible – the only real God. 

But there is also a very great difference between believing in God, in the sense of believing He exists, and loving Him. James says that, ‘even the demons believe’ in God, ‘and shudder!’ (James 2:19). 

To those who reject the very idea of God, I say, try to come up with a consistent account of how you know anything, the nature of reality, the meaning of moral statements. Try to work out a meaningful explanation for why you care so much about me or anyone else, why suffering and hardship upsets you so much. Without God it’s impossible, and you finish in absurdity. 

To those who believe God is there, but just don’t like the way He runs the world, I say, He is your creator and you owe it to yourself to fairly listen to what He has to say about how hardship and suffering fit into the order of His universe. If you assume that what you desire is always what you should get, and that this life should always give you fortune, happiness and good health, then you will get a shock, because the real God does not promise that. But if you are prepared to submit to Him and faithfully wait for Him to bring you into an eternal world full of happiness, good health and joy – in the presence of the real God Himself – you will be prepared to face anything. Jesus Christ – through His suffering and death – enables you to have that hope if you trust Him. If Christ’s road to eternal joy involved pain and suffering, why should I expect any less? As C.S.Lewis is portrayed as saying in the film Shadowlands, "Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal."

For the Encouragement of Faithful Doubters - Part Two

Times of doubt

A while ago I wrote to encourage those who are worried that they don't have strong enough faith. I was, to be honest, concerned that my previous reflections may be overly dogmatic, and end up discouraging those who read and say, "I still don't get it!" I don't want to give the impression that I have everything sewn up, and that having everything "sewn up" and solidly grounded is part of the character of saving faith. I want my public reflections to be encouraging and not discouraging.

So I pointed out that nothing can be absolutely crystal clear to us in this life, both because of our finiteness and because of our sinful nature. I showed the examples of those we sometime see as the great men of faith in the Bible, who quite often went through times of doubt and fear. I pointed out that salvation comes through believing in Jesus Christ, in having faith, not a certain amount of faith. And I held out the Bible as God's means to lead us into greater knowledge and certainty about the hope that we have, to enable us to grow in faith.

I hope that was helpful, and pray that these reflections will be an encouragement to grow through studying deeply in the Word of God, relying on the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to see ever more clearly the wonder and glory of Jesus Christ.

But it also made me think about some of the times of doubt I've had in my own life, and the way that I have been brought back from the brink of unbelief. I admit that when I talk about "the brink of unbelief" that's a little over-dramatic. By God's grace, I have never even temporarily given up my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But that doesn't mean I have not had times when I have seriously questioned what I believe, and have times when I simply do not know the answers.

Sometimes I have come across difficult passages in the Bible that I can't make sense out of, and seem inconsistent with other teachings. And I have thought to myself, "What if this isn't true? What if this undermines everything? What if my faith is misplaced?"

Sometimes I have envied the prosperity and "freedom" of those who do not follow God. Like the psalmist, "I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills… always carefree, they increase their wealth. Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure." (Psalm 73:3-13) Freedom to be promiscuous, freedom to get pleasure out of life and get what I want without caring about anyone else - surely that would be easier sometimes. Am I restricting my own progress and enjoyment in life because of something that I simply accept from an old book?

Some unbelieving friends may have told me not to be so hard on myself at those times, though they never got the chance because I have always kept these thoughts to myself. You see, many unbelievers admire faith in other people. They see noble qualities, selflessness, love and giving, grounded in a kind of hope and certainty that they simply don't have. They wish they could have that, but they accept that they don't. They would think it a shame for someone to give up such a faith, because they want to believe that it is possible.

I may have mentioned elsewhere how I was intrigued by the film, The Invention of Lying, written by and starring Ricky Gervais. It's what I would call a double philosophical satire. It mocks Christianity, because it wants to make out that God is just a concept made up by people who really want to believe there is something more than emptiness in life. But it also mocks anti-Christian philosophy, because it wants to point out that faith brings about great things and great feelings. The worst position in the world, it implies, is to know for sure that God is a fantasy and yet have to get by in life.

But I just don't get that. For me, either life is something or it isn't. Truth is truth, and I can't change it. If God exists and Jesus is the Saviour of the world then I have to accept that as true. If it's not true, then I must live consistently with that alternative. There is no point living my life as if God exists, and that I can have the hope of eternal life through the death and resurrection of Christ, if it's not true. Paul said the same thing too. He said, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men." (1 Corinthians 15:19) There is nothing noble or praiseworthy about faith in something that is not true. Like the dying man in the desert who staggers on towards the mirage on the horizon, we would be pitiable, not pious.

What are the alternatives?

But what has brought me "back from the brink" time and time again is the emptiness of the alternatives. And this was brought home to me again while listening to John Piper preach on John 6:68 (you can find a transcript of the sermon, and the audio and video, at http://tinyurl.com/2vpvhak).

In John 6, Jesus feeds a huge crowd of people with only five loaves of bread and two small fish. He is then tracked down all the way to the other side of the lake, because this miracle has made him so popular. Condensing the story somewhat, Jesus treats this popularity with contempt, seeing that all the crowd wants is a miracle worker to carry on feeding them. He therefore gives them some pretty strong and difficult teaching, not only about the nature of his person, his mission and the ultimate gift he came to give, but also the inability of man to come to him without God's inner working. "No-one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him," he concludes in 6:65.

The result, we are told in v66, is that, "from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him."

Jesus then turns to the twelve who are left with him, and asks them, "You do not want to leave me too, do you?" (v67)

"Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.'" (v68) Who else is there to turn to? Every other alternative is empty. To quote John Piper, "'Lord, to whom shall we go?' In that simple question, Peter is saying, We’ve considered it. We’ve allowed ourselves to ponder what it might be like to turn away from you."

In one Christian Fellowship meeting at work, when I worked in Windsor, instead of sharing testimonies about how the members became Christians, we were asked to share the answer to the question, "Why am I still a Christian?" It was a very valuable session, which I think came from the recognition that sometimes maintaining a life of faith as a Christian is hard. How do we do it? In the face of being told day-in, and day-out, in the media, in comedy sketches, by friends, work colleagues and family members, how stupid we are; how repressed we are; how the world's problems are all down to people like us (ref Dawkins and Hitchens, etc al); how we are bigoted, prudish, killjoys; why do we persevere in faith? When we find things in the Bible that we don't understand, when we face hardships that we can't explain, when we see evil in the world, why do we keep going?

My answer was the same as Peter, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" The alternatives are empty, they do not make sense. I've heard what atheist philosophers have to say. I've listened to other religions. Faced with the impulse to be rational, I have put a lot of consideration into that question. And no other alternative works. Far from the Christian worldview being a leap of blind, irrational, faith, it is the only rational choice. Of course, that's just my testimony. It doesn't prove anything. And it does not mean that I just dismiss the problems that I face - in life and in thinking - or that I have every area of life and existence "sewn up". I simply see enough to know that God is real, that I deserve His wrath for the ways I dishonour Him, that Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead so that I can have that wrath taken away from me, and that through faith in Jesus I can look forward to a wonderful future when God finally brings an end to this present age. I say to Jesus, "'You have the words of eternal life!' (John 6:68) I trust you. Every other alternative is either empty and hollow, or dishonouring to God. So I will continue to cling to you by faith, even when my tiny, sin-tainted mind cannot fathom the answers to the questions that arise from life."

The main alternative, living in Western culture that has lost its Christian foundations and that is increasingly secular and godless, is the prevailing secular atheism and pluralism. This is where most of my unbelieving friends and family come from when they look at my faith with varying degrees of scepticism (this may be the scepticism of pity, which "tolerates" faith only when it does not impinge on their "freedom"; or it may be the scepticism of admiration, which wants the faith without the restrictions on personal autonomy). And so, whether they like it or not, I feel the pressure to conform and live like them.

The apparent attractions are obvious. Conforming is easy. I wouldn't have to say unpopular things about abortion being the murder of a child; or about homosexual, pre-marital or extra-marital sexual acts being sinful. I wouldn't have to be seen as repressive and prudish in my complaints about what gets shown on TV and in the media. I wouldn't have to offend my friends and family with the unstated implication of my faith, which is the implication that they are sinners (along with me) and are facing an eternity in hell. I wouldn't have to face the laughter of the intelligentsia when I say I believe that the whole universe and the whole spectrum of existence was created by God, let alone that I am one of these terrible fanatics who believes that He did it in six days. Ok, so I would drop out of the support net of the church, which is widely acknowledged as a great force for social good on both a personal and cultural level. But on the other hand I could do my own thing, without worrying whether it's right or wrong. I could choose to follow my own path to my own happiness. I could follow money, or power, or sexual pleasure, or all three! I could save time and mental energy on prayer and Bible study. I wouldn't have to worry if the Bible said something I didn't understand. I could go on with the list of the apparent attractions of secularism.

But having been attracted, and having thought about it, I still call them "apparent" attractions. They are superficial, because when I start to dig deeper and examine the foundations of this secular worldview that appears so attractive, it crumbles. I would have to give up too much in terms of rationality. I would have to live in a world of wishful thinking. Let me give you a brief example.

Atheism, because it denies the existence of God, has to posit an alternative theory for the existence of everything. It normally suggests the theory of evolution. Note that I put it that way. If you look into atheist philosophy it is never put the other way around. So we never hear of people being persuaded there is no God because of evolution being the way everything came into existence. For one thing, evolution is still a theory. It is not a fact, as popular presentations of science would have you believe. People believe evolution because they want to believe something about their origins and the origin of life and existence. If God did not create everything, how did it get here? (There are other basic philosophical questions that we could consider - such as, what is reality or how do we know anything - but I don't want to go on too long.)

Existence (broader than just simply life) is either meaningful or meaningless. Being meaningful or meaningless are mutually exclusive. The atheistic theory of evolution says that every present form of existence has randomly formed over billions of years by a process of mutation and the survival of certain of those random formations. The implication of that belief is that every form of existence is meaningless. It's meaningless in the sense that evolution implies no significant difference between forms of existence. E.g. A human is just a different formation of matter to an elephant or a tree. E.g. Life and non-life are just different ways for matter to react within itself. E.g. Love, hate, good and evil are just different reactions within the different formations of matter. But if it's all randomly formed, then distinctions between formations and reactions are meaningless (by applying the definition - if the distinctions between things don't ultimately signify anything then they are meaningless).

The thing I find empty about today's atheism is the shrug that everything may all in fact be meaningless and with no ultimate significance: lymphoma or good health - equally meaningless; love or war - equally meaningless; care for our children or abuse them - equally meaningless; kill people or heal people - equally meaningless!

And yet everybody lives as if existence has meaning, in that everybody gives significance to things, and to things that happen. What I ask is where the significance comes from, and why do we live that way. If you reject God as ultimately being behind everything, then you are left with randomness, which doesn't give significance to anything. It's at that point that I believe that the Christian worldview provides consistency (living solidly based on belief), but atheism does not (because atheists say there is no meaning, but act as if there is).

And coming back to the point, therefore, I find that I would have to give up too much if I were to give up the Christian faith. I could go for the ease of conformity with the secularism of the age, and give up my allegedly restrictive faith. But I would have to then accept a view that ultimately says that nothing has any meaning, or everything has no meaning. And yet I would find it impossible, honestly, to live that way. Can I see the love of my wife and children as meaningless? Can I see the terror and awfulness of war and oppression as insignificant? Can I cry real tears? Can I feel real joy? Can I have real fun? Can I experience real love? Can I know real guilt? Can I know real forgiveness? I honestly cannot accept these things are unreal, illusory, meaningless or insignificant. And therefore I cannot accept atheism.

To whom shall we go?

And so I am forced back to God, in Christ, where I find real love, feel real guilt, experience real forgiveness, real sadness and real joy. Because He made the world and made me in His image, and that gives me the capacity to understand these things and really feel them. He gives me a concept of sin, judgment and justice which explains the evil in the world. He gives me hope. I find atheism bankrupt. Atheists have to live in a dream world of wishful thinking. As hard as it is to be a Christian, or to understand some aspects of theology, it is the only worldview that makes sense and fits with reality as we experience it.

So don't be afraid to consider the alternatives to Christianity. But dig into the roots. You will find that every alternative ultimately crumbles into a heap of inconsistencies and irrationality. And so you always come back to Christ, "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3) and say, with Peter, "You have the words of eternal life!"

Get Real!

Well it's not quite what I expected to be dwelling on when I started my blog just over 6 months ago, but my thoughts on hardship and suffering as a Christian do seem to be multiplying. So this is turning into a series, and I intend to pursue it as long as I can find useful things to reflect on. And by useful I mean God-glorifying.

To set the context, I'm starting to write this on 13 February 2010, four days after completing my first cycle of chemotherapy. I am still in hospital. The lymphoma was found primarily in my duodenum (pipe between stomach and intestine). This meant that as the swollen area got worse it was not letting food through, and therefore I kept being sick because my stomach was just filling up. I now have a naso-gastric tube which relieves pressure in my stomach if it happens to get blocked up. That isn't comfortable, I can tell you! And I've been back on IV fluids for a few days. So fully tubed up - that's me!

Apparently even the first cycle of chemotherapy will reduce the swelling, so I should (according to the doctor) be able to eat normally again within the next few days or so. And I can leave hospital when I have shown signs that food is going through properly. So hopefully I will be home in a few days, and be eating fine. And since I haven't had a proper meal since just before Christmas, that will be great.

All that probably sounds unpleasant. And don't get me wrong, it is a bit of a pain. But I am well looked after in hospital. The nurses are brilliant. And there are always drugs on hand to make things feel better. And my mind is, most of the time, pretty alert, even when my body is a little weak. I praise God for those mercies! But it's not particularly the aches and pains of my body that bother me most of the time.

Surely I should be worried about the fact I have a life threatening disease? But I'm not. Not at all. I do not worry about what is going to happen in the future. Not only is there no point worrying about things I cannot change, but I also trust the One who has the future in His hand. And as I have said elsewhere, He holds not just the future in this life, but assures the place of believers in the glorious New Creation after the judgment day.

But it might be that some people are thinking that this all sounds a bit 'pie in the sky'! We "fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:18) "We live by faith, not by sight." (2 Corinthians 5:7) "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1) "Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently." (Romans 8:24-25) "Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls." (1 Peter 1:8-9) "Then Jesus told him, 'Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.'" (John 20:29)

We Christians seem to take a lot of comfort from something wonderful that is completely inconceivable in the present world, promised to us by a God who is invisible, to be received a time perhaps way off in the future and almost certainly after we die… by which time it will be too late to change our minds about it! What grounds do we have for having that kind of hope? Is this "blind faith"? Isn't it just too convenient that we rationalize all the bad things that happen to us by saying it will be all outweighed by something we can't see, in the future we can't see, promised by the God we can't see?!

For those who are not Christians this may be a major obstacle to them having a faith in God. For those who are Christians it is not always easy either. In fact it is in the nature of the "spiritual battle" I have been talking about elsewhere. Part of our struggle is against "the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12), which we can't see! So this is the fight of faith, the battle to find our satisfaction in God, trusting Him for the present and the future through the love of Christ.

Belief in an invisible God

First of all let's quickly deal with the issue of having an invisible God. Is it irrational to believe in a God that you can't see? Doesn't it involve a leap of irrational blind faith?

Unfortunately, some Christians do talk about a "leap of faith", as if you take leave of your senses and just believe. But true Biblical faith has never been like that. The Bible portrays the truth about God as something rational, reasonable, logical. And can it be otherwise? God, who created the universe in an orderly design, with laws of logic and laws of physics inherent within it, surely would not then hide himself behind a mask of irrationality! Human beings are made "in the image of God", and therefore it is His imprint on us that requires us to be rational and logical in our reasoning. So I am not arguing that this is a battle between faith and reason. I am arguing that faith itself is reasonable, but a lack of faith in the Christian God of the Bible is irrational.

If you were reading fast at this point, I urge you to slow down and pause a few seconds and re-read the last couple of sentences. They look fairly innocuous, but they are pretty significant and worth reflecting on.

So let's deal with this issue of the fact that we can't see God, or the future that He promises, and yet we hold firmly to hope in Him. Is the fact that we can't see Him a convincing reason for not believing in Him? Shouldn't we only trust fully the things we can see, or sense (touch, smell, hear, etc)?

Well, let me ask, can you see the laws of logic? Did a law of physics ever bump into you? No! These are intangible, abstract, concepts. They are not made of physical matter. And yet we live our lives, necessarily, putting our faith in them as universally true. We could not function if we thought that somewhere the laws of logic did not hold true, because the fundamental law of logic is that of non-contradiction. i.e. something cannot be true and not true at the same time. If something could be true and not true at the same time, then all our reasoning would fall apart. So we have to believe that the laws of logic apply universally.

Similarly with the laws of physics. We could not function if we thought that the laws of physics were not true universally in all places at all times. All our movement, our conversation and our living and breathing depends on it. For example, oxygen has the same effect on our lungs anywhere in the world at any time. If it didn't we would live in fear of dropping dead randomly one day because a physical law suddenly changed! All our technology, building, design and communication, energy production, medicine and so on, are all based on the belief that physical laws are true all the time, in every place, and never change. So we have to believe that the laws of physics apply universally.

So if we have to believe that the laws of logic and the laws of physics are always in force, and yet we can't see them, then the fact that we can't see God should be no barrier to belief in Him.

But also this points to the nature of faith in God. I hope that you can follow me through the argument from this point. I'll try to put it as clearly as I can.

But someone may say that believing the laws of nature, laws of physics, laws of logic is nothing like believing in God. Yes, all of them are intrinsically invisible. However, we believe natural laws because we see evidence that they apply. We discover through mathematical and scientific research in the physical world (i.e. the world that we experience with our senses -sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing) that certain rules seem to apply to things. And therefore we believe them. On the other hand surely we can make no such discoveries with God, so why should we believe in him?

The answer to that is that it is incorrect thinking on two counts.

Firstly, it overstates the quality of the evidence for natural laws. Remember we live our lives on the basis that these so called natural laws (laws of logic, laws of physics, laws of mathematics, etc) apply universally. That means they work at any time in any place in the world. But there is no physical evidence that we have, or can possibly have, that the natural laws apply universally. We do not see every action and consequence at every moment in every place. We only see the things we see. How do we know there is not something different and contradictory happening somewhere else we can't see, or that we will see at some time in the future?

So how do we live our lives with the confidence that we can walk down the street without gravity suddenly acting differently, or without running out of oxygen, or without bumping into air? We have faith!

Secondly, the incorrect thinking I was talking about understates or completely discounts real evidence for God. The Bible says that, "God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." (Romans 1:20) The world around us shows the hand of the almighty, personal God. Even our own existence, and the inner workings of our hearts and minds, show the touch of a just, loving and personal God. If we would open our eyes we would see the hand of God everywhere, so that we are "without excuse" if we doubt his presence.

At this point we should note, importantly, that this is where it comes to the crunch. The committed atheist will often cry foul at this argument, saying that we only see design and beauty and emotion and justice as evidence of God, because we have assumed he exists in the first place. They say that all these things are illusions and don't really exist. We've evolved chemical and hormonal responses to external stimuli that we label as emotion or justice or design or beauty etc.

And at first that seems to be a valid argument. But it's not. You see the atheist is doing exactly the same. They are looking at the universe saying, "nope, no evidence of any god", because they have assumed he does not exist in the first place. They can explain away anything that the believer calls evidence because they have decided that it cannot be evidence based on their belief that no god exists.

So how do we resolve this? First of all, it is critical that we all understand and accept that we are seeing worldviews head to head. We are seeing what we call presuppositions. Presuppositions govern the way we all look at the world. If we are convinced God exists then we look at the world one way; if we are convinced God does not exist then we look at it another way.

There is a lot more that could be said, but I am already working way beyond my allotted space. And I want to mention something else important.

Are we at loggerheads? We Christians look at things one way, atheists look at things another. Is that it? No way of resolving the conflict of worldviews?

I believe there is a way to show that Christianity is rational and required, whereas atheism is irrational. And that is, briefly, to go back to the questions we came to above. How do we live our lives with the confidence that we can walk down the street without gravity suddenly acting differently, or without running out of oxygen, or without bumping into air?

With atheism or agnosticism we are left with nothing. No-one can say that they can see the future, so no-one can say that they know everything about everything. And therefore no-one can legitimately say that the laws of logic and mathematics that meant that their bank account balanced today will still apply tomorrow. But none of us questions that will be the case. We'd think someone nuts if they suggested that it wouldn't be the case. So why does the atheist believe it? It turns out that they are only capable of blind faith!

On the other hand the Christian has the reason for their belief. The reason that we have confidence in natural laws applying universally is because we believe in a God who is rational, personal and created the universe with purpose. He has set it up that way, and told us that in the Bible.

The philosophical way of putting it is that belief in God provides the "preconditions of intelligibility". That means that only belief in God can provide the beliefs that are necessary to make sense of the world.

So you see far from belief in an invisible God being irrational, it is the only belief that will make sense of the world. This, in its deepest sense, is why the design of the world, the way the universe works, its beauty, justice, our emotions and our unique abilities, are evidence. They are clearly seen in the world, and we all live using them. And yet the only belief that will make sense of them is Christianity.

So the punch line is that even atheists live like Christians, because they live by presuppositions that only Christianity can substantiate. And yet they use those very things (logic and reason) to try and prove that God doesn't exist!

I find this a really strong reason to believe in an invisible God.

There is more to say, but I will break at this point, and in the next article speak to Christians about how they can believe God's promises about the unseen world and the unseen future.