Many people laugh at Christians for choosing to believe in a God they cannot see. Secular society will use education as their reasoning for saying faith in a deity is for those of no or lower education. Once science is introduced faith should crumble in the eyes of the educated. These statements are met with anger by those who do hold their religion dear. In many of my rants, I myself become angry at Christians who believe higher education causes young Christians to walk away from their faith. Since the introduction of God in the Bible, He has offered creation a choice. Moses, who heard the voice of God in the burning bush, came from an upbringing in Egypt that was filled with a pantheon of gods to which images of their likenesses were made. Yet Moses chose to follow and obey the God He had never seen, or no one else for that matter. He believed because he chose to.
Abraham wasn't any different. His brothers made the idols for worship of gods for the community. Yet, Abram heard the voice of the invisible God and chose to follow him. The God of Israel, in that time to many, was just one more God added to the pantheon of gods, the difference was in those who chose to believe in God. Can you imagine when Jesus lived, he was just seen as a little boy in a town and then one day he declared He was the Son of God with an offer of love and eternal life? Well, the Jews did not make a choice to believe that message while the Gentiles embraced it.
Since the beginning of time man has attached a higher being as being in control of the things that they themselves could not conquer. In their lack of or little knowledge, they knew there was something greater than themselves. That feeling still exists today. The origin of ALL has never been fully explained by science. The Theory of Evolution has been presented and has points in it that has pushed mankind to a new level of understanding. The flow of thought is logical and feasible. But it cannot answer every question and yet many choose to believe it. In the Big Bang Theory there are valid points. But who created the matter that exploded? Again, we are faced with a choice in what to believe. Who has and where are ALL of the answers? Christians being exposed to secular education will not cause faith in God to crumble. No matter what is presented to any person, a choice has to be made. There is someone or something greater than man and this universe. There is something or someone that began before man and the universe.
Usually, science is only true if it can be reproduced, and no one has reproduced another universe yet complete with life. In Christianity we are offered an answer for the unanswerable. We are given one supreme being who says all began with me. I'm going out on a limb here, as you know I am prone to do, and tell you a secret of mines. In man's quest to gain some control or order of life and its seemingly randomness, man created gods. There were gods for everything. Man pleaded, bribed, and manipulated these gods in an effort to have them act favorably to them in a world that could sometimes seem hostile with droughts, sickness, and death. Well, the Christian God seems to have been aware of these activities of man because His first commandment "You shall have no other gods before me" Exodus 20:1 tells man not to worship any other god over Him. The ten plagues were directed at the 10 different gods the Egyptians turned to for particular worship and assurance of favorability. God said those gods were only capable of individual acts whereas He was the all sufficient God over all and able to do all. He demonstrated He was the one true God.
There were those who even killed their children in an attempt to ensure the gods would answer their prayers. God of Israel said I am greater than them and require less. God offered love to His creation which other gods did not. You may say there was still a need for rules, the Israelites biggest stipulation was sexual morality. Okay time for another choice- sacrifice of a child or sexual morality? God had rules that needed to be followed as any operating society does. Is there anywhere in the world that is not governed by some type of law? As a parent who deeply love my children, I do have guidelines they are required to follow. In the end a person believes just because they choose to believe and that is the bottom line. It is not out of stupidity that man accepts an offer of love and assurance from a source they know exists without explanation by limited man. It is the height of intelligence that says there is something greater than that which can be seen with the eye that made all that you see that exists. Is it a stupid choice to believe in something beyond ourselves? No more than it is to believe there is some form of life on other planets that we have not found yet. That belief rests on the fact that we cannot be the only forms of human life in the universe. All science can do is study and try to explain what is already in existence. It has struggled in its completeness in explaining the origin of what it is studying. Science says from nothing came something. God says from nothing I created something. These are your two choices and God allows us to choose. But He also said nature itself testifies to my existence. And it is to that very nature - evolution- that science turns to to explain the world.
Don't run from explanations or explorations of what is truth. God did not run from it, He said let me reveal this truth to my creation. God can stand up against anything man can come up with, remember we are in His image. Let your children be exposed to various creation myths; God can handle it. Let people make the choice of God freely. Have faith in God that He is just that compelling and able to draw His creation. I wrote this post because I am fully aware that Christianity is not the oldest written religion and there are many creation stories in many parts of the world. That is fine with me. I made a choice of what I wanted to believe with this full knowledge. In an upcoming post I will present the timeline of the evolution of written religion and some samples of those creation stories. I myself will not settle all of the questions that are out there. But the biggest question of heir being something greater in the world than all of us is settled in my spirit and mind and I have chosen to say it is the Invisible God who said He was the "I Am."
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