The Problem of an Invisible God.
Psalm 84:2, 1 Jn.1:1-4.
Many Christians claim a personal relationship with an always present God. But there is a problem how can you get personal with someone you cannot see?
I suspect many of you are here today because you do want a relationship with God. You want God to be real. You want God to show up. You want to God to make a difference. You want to feel and touch God.
You wonder if all this Christianity stuff that seems to work for someone else could work for you.
There are people who have struggled to know God, and gave up. In the book Disappointment with God, Yancey, told the story of Richard who struggled to know God, he prayed through the night and basically asked God to show up “Finally at 4 o’clock in the morning, I came to my senses. Nothing has happened. God had not responded. Why continue torturing myself? Why not just forget God and get on with life, like most of the rest of the world?” “I had been honest with myself. Any pretense was gone, and I no longer felt the pressure to believe what I could never be sure of. I felt converted - but converted from God.”
Are you sensing like Richard, you too may be coming to a place where you got to make a choice and stop self-torture.
Some years ago Dr. J.I. Packer wrote Knowing God. Basically a book on theology. But sold like hot cakes, like life insurance on a sinking ship. Sales surprising as did not contain dramatic testimony, personal stories, theology re: attributes of God. But why then sold so well?
One writer, Tim Stafford, theorized:
“My theory is that the title and introduction sold the book. A vast unfed hunger hides just below the surface of our churchly activities, a hunger to know God intimately and personally.”
It would seem like if Stafford is right, people, includes Christian people are hungering for God.
One wise man observed about God’s design in people in Ecclesiastes 3:11 “…He has also set eternity in the hearts of men…” i.e. something eternal that is in people, and only something eternal can fill, or else it is a big hole in the heart
1. What causes believers dismay?
Believers down the centuries experienced this hunger. More than likely exp. It this way: frustration
Ps.84:2 My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh cry out for the
living God.
Here’s a believer writing about his experience. Sense his hunger… My heart and my flesh… sense his need to experience God deeply, my soul yearns….
2 Cor.5:2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling
Sense his longing, sense the groaning… i.e. unfulfilled… in pain
Here’s another believer struggling to make sense of pain
Ps.42:2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
sense the thirst and frustration asks when?
Frustration speaks of the human struggle to know God
Ps.89:46 How long O LORD? Will you hide yourself forever?
The cry is heard and down thru’ the ages… people are still asking… show Thyself Lord… and The command to pray without ceasing seems to be an exercise doomed to failure.
The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by God.
1 Cor.8:2-3
I like what Stafford said in light of Scripture “Prideful certainty, in fact, is a certain sign of knowledge gone astray… His knowledge of me, not mine of him, is the crucial certainty” (Stafford,1986,p.12).
No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.
Ecclesiastes 9:5
Tim Stafford: “The Bible does not hint that our intimacy with can be satisfied through prayer or through ecstatic worship experiences or through the Bible or through spiritual gifts or through miracles or through an attitude of faith.”
Some satisfaction may come and is not to be sneezed at.
Moses who wanted to be see God, experience Him up close and personal, could only see the back of God, not face to face encounter, Paul admitted even He saw but a poor reflection, like through a glass darkly.
So what is God’s response to this universal cry of frustration for God to show up.
Ps.42:2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
The Christmas story.
The Bible tells us about an invisible God “that which was from the beginning” so says John, who is revealed to us . Not out of some mystical mountain experience with a guru or from meditating under a tree, or from UFOs, plates with divine writing, but in real flesh and blood -“which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes and our hands have touched”. God showed up... taking on a human body as his own. Approachable, touchable, Christianity’s main symbol, the cross, is earthy and its vision based on a God who with his fleshly arms splayed outward, eyes in agony. Here is a God with a face. Here is Jesus. But How can that be God?
Indeed, religious experts around the time Jesus was alive could not accept that. How can God be encased in body? Sounds unholy, arms and legs, walked and talked ate, had brothers and sisters and parents, Mary and Joseph. Hungry, tired, thirsty, he experienced what all humans experienced. Holy God involved in the dirty dusty and smelly world of the Middle East?
How could it be?
Why did God bother to show up like that?
One answer is that God could not face sin and defeat it for human beings except as a human being.
Heb.2:14 "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death."
Story of Christmas tell us his purpose is to destroy stranglehold of sin on humanity.
But then what is the purpose of rising from the dead bodily as well., couldn’t he just disappear into some mystical spiritual Disneyland. Wouldn’t that be much more mysterious? Yet He chose to prove to his disciples, a very earthy experience – they heard, spoke, touched, saw his resurrected body.
It seems to me that God has a body for the sake of relationships.
An omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Spirit has power a body cannot have, but a physical body has the power of human intimacy.
H.G. Wells famous story The Invisible Man illustrates this:
a man find, thru’ science, a way to become invisible.
Who has not dreamed it being invisible, overhear conversation, sneak pte,place, do things without being noticed… dream for this man turned into nightmare
To get what he wants in the physical world, money food clothing he must touch what is visible
When does this, powers became useless, for he can be discovered.
When he eats, food shows up till digested
Steals money the evidence floating down the road gives him away
can take money but not spend it, overhear secrets but not tell anyone
see bodies of beautiful women but not touch them. I.e. as long as remains invisible he will be alone.
God made it easier for us to come to know Him, by coming to us bodily even after he experienced death.
It is easier to be a friend to a Visible man than an invisible one.
The fact that God bothers to show up in the Christmas story with a body, brand new baby, born in a earthy manner, with all the messy bodily liquids shows us that God seeks intimacy with human beings. How is he to contact us? With only way He knew would not scare, repel us. So He came vulnerable baby born in a humble manger, not in some private hospital, or palace removed from everyday life. He did not come as a macho action hero, larger than life figure that have bodyguards around him but he came as God with us Emmanuel, eating and drinking with sinners! For we want to see, feel, touch, we want our senses to come alive with a real God, if he stayed a pure spirit, we will never be able to relate. But a tangible touchable approachable little baby, a man with real skin and bones, we can relate.
We do know He came as flesh and blood, he did for fellowship with men and women. We connect with God through participating vicariously with sure testimony who have experienced Jesus.
“you may also have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.” v.3. Yet this is still not fully satisfacory, there is something missing we still long, groan… as the Bible says kinda feels like in prison.
Ray Bakke:
I knew of an old Glasgow professor named McDonald who, along with a Scottish chaplain, had bailed out of an airplane behind German lines. They were put in a prison camp. A high wire fence separated the Americans from the British, and the Germans made it next to impossible for the two sides to communicate.
MacDonald was put in the Am. Barracks and the chaplain with the Brits.
Everyday the 2 men would meet at the fence and exchange a greeting. Unknown to the guards, the Americans had a little homemade radio and were able to get news from the outside, something more precious than food in a prison camp. Everyday Macdonald would take a headline or two to the fence and share it with the chaplain in the ancient Gaelic language, indecipherable to the Germans.
One day, news came over the little radio that the German High Command had surrendered and the war was over. Macdonald took the news to his friend, then stood and watched him disappear into the British barracks. A moment later, a roar of celebration came from the barracks.
Life in the camp was transformed. Men walked about singing and shouting, waving at the guards, even laughing at the dogs. When the German guards finally heard the news three nights later, they fled into the dark, leaving the gates unlocked. The next morning , Brits and Americans walked out as free men. Yet they had been set free 3 days earlier by the news that the war was over.
Those prisoners can teach us how to live in middle of terrible conditions. The got transformed, set free because of a reality of war was over.
The cross and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ provides for us the great and good news, the WAR is over! Sin is defeated! The cross took away the sin barrier between God and people.
It won’t be long now, Christ will come again bodily, to answer all our longings for a flesh and blood encounter with God. Gotta realize now, - while Christ’s Kingdom is not fully revealed, it appears veiled (not visible yet) we see but a poor reflection, we know the outcome of the war. We still live in the circumstances that look a lot like a P.O.W. camp. But we also have a distinct advantage... the fellowship we have with God is confirmed not only in the testimony of the early apostles but countless billions who have experienced Christ. I John 4:12-13 (NRSV) tells us "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know we abide in him and he in us, because hehas given us his Spirit." Did u get this? It is when the fellowship of Trinitarian God is actually personally received, lived out, and experienced in community (i.e. loving another through the bond of faith in Jesus) with other family members in Christ, we will get a taste of the love of God today!
I John 4:15 (NRSV) also says: "God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God." Thus, the challenge for God’s people is to really touch one another in genuine community, i.e. be close enough physically, so touch is felt, not theorized. My own life was transformed when I felt the love and warm touch of the hands of Christ through my flesh and blood brothers and sisters in Christ who hugged me and loved me as I am. Caution: we are good at congregating but do we really move to the inward parts of the human personality in our meeting together... do we encourage faith or diminish it? do we deal superficially on matters of no importance that when we get together, no one is affected by grace and the touch of love in Christ? Challenge: Free up self, time, resources, touch each other, get close enough, build a community of love, with real relationships, get personal, and see if God’s love is not felt through real flesh and blood encounters.
Do u see now how we can be set free and experience a touch from God? Can u see, if we trust Christ, His Word, His power from His Spirit, we are free to fellowship via testimony of apostles, sure witness. Free to rejoice though stuck in the mud and muck and the mire of an earthly imperfect existence.
Can we also see the need to trust the love of God that can be felt and experienced in and through the lives of those in the community of faith? Have we really tasted this? There is power when two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name!
Thus, 1 John 1:1 is starting point, this is what makes fellowship with God the Father possible, for God has taken a flesh and blood form on earth to be relevant to us. He is not somewhere out there, as if truth is out there. God the only Son has made Him known (Jn.1:18). Our access to God is through the flesh of His Son Jesus, the One the Apostles had touched, seen heard. This is the Jesus the Holy Spirit reveals.
Whatever conditions you find self in, you need worry…you can have personal relationship, with God by believing the news that the war is over. You can become pure. There is a God, His name is Jesus and He wants to get to know you.
And He has said: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall SEE GOD!" So come by faith to Jesus, He will make you pure, one day you will get your heart’s longing to see God, he promised it!
Will you let Him in?
Furthermore, there is a community of the redeemed! Oh to realize the awesome potential of a church in love with God. The power of God in us can set us free, we too can do wonders, if we are free to come near each other! Love one another as Christ loved you.
