Hints Of God

Hints of God

Psalm 25

1 Peter 3:15

Good morning, Church. I would encourage you to grab a pen or pencil, a piece of paper because I am a going to give you a list of six things that may come in handy in the days ahead.

Our Psalm this morning is Psalm 25. Even with a casual reading of this Psalm you will notice the name of God is found in almost every verse. In Hebrew two names are used: Elohim, the Strong One, and Jehovah = the great I AM. God pervades not only Psalm 25 but all of the Bible.

If you are not comfortable with the idea of a God, then perhaps the book of Esther is for you. It is the only book in the Bible that does not have the word God in it. God is everywhere in this book. The odd thing is nowhere in the Bible does God set out to prove His existence. And I cannot prove there is a God either. At least not in the way it would stand up in a court of law.

When it really comes down to it, none of us can prove there is a God. We can’t see him, there are no known pictures of him, no legal documents.

It’s not like if I stood before a judge and he said are you married to Muriel. Legal people do ask those kinds of questions. I would be able to produce a document from Edmonton Vital statistics, I would be able to show some old pictures taken in 1967 of a girl in a white dress standing next to me. I would be able to line up four kids and six grandkids that have a family resemblance and carry our DNA.

I can’t do that with God. But do have clues, hints that there is a God. 6 Clues. Get your pens ready because I want to give you 6 clues for the existence of God. The Bible says in 1 Peter 3:15 that we should always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect. So, when someone asks you about God here are 6 hints that God exists.

Each one taken by itself may not be all that convincing but when you put these 6 together, they are very convincing. It’s like the terrible events of 9/11. The first plane may have been an accident but as soon as the second plane hit the south tower everyone knew this was deliberate.

Back 300 years before Christ there lived a man by the name of Plato. Most of you have heard of Plato. To this day he is considered one of the brightest thinkers in all of history. One day he tried to make sense of our crazy world. He used this allegory. We are like a prisoner in cave. Been there all of our life, chained to a rock with our face away from the cave entrance. All we see are shadows and garbled sounds from the outside. That is our reality. Any person in this darkened state, thinks about these shadows, these strange sounds, and says ‘there has to be more to life than these chains, there has to be another reality beyond the walls of this cold cave These shadows, these sounds, mean something. There is more to life then this cold cave.’

This morning very quickly, I want to help us look at the clues of reality beyond the pain, the bondage, the suffering of this present evil world. Here are 6 hints of God.

1. Our fine-tuned Universe. For human life to be possible in our universe there had to be hundreds of things happen exactly the way they did. One cannot be sloppy when putting together a carbon-based life system. If you are making bread and the recipe book says 3 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt you cannot say well it all looks white: let’s put in 2 cups of flour and 1 cup of salt. Good luck with that!

Study after study have shown that our entire universe is fine-tuned for human life. As Christian Scientist Dr. Alister McGrath points out ‘The existence of carbon-based life on earth depends upon a delicate balance of physical and cosmological forces. Were any one of these qualities slightly altered, balance would have been destroyed and life would not have been possible.’

Let me give you one example, just one of many hundreds in our fine-tuned universe. We all know about gravity. The force that keeps us from floating away from the surface of the earth. The force that keeps the sun and the moon in their orbits. If gravity were 1/1000th weaker than it is the universe would have expanded too fast and too far and no galaxies or stars or planets would ever have formed. If the gravity had been 1/1000th stronger than the universe would have collapsed long ago and I wouldn’t be preaching this sermon. Our universe is fine-tuned for life.