The Seeker's Path

But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.

- Deuteronomy 4:29

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

- (God) Jeremiah 29:13

These two verses clearly state what my pastor called the "Seeker's Promise" yesterday, the promise being that if you seek after the Lord with all your heart (with all that you can) you will find him. Sadly enough, many people decide to not make a decision about God. That in itself is a decision against God. There is no limbo, or purgatory in the relationship with God - only known and unknown. Think about it, if there was someone who wanted to be your friend, but you weren't sure about him or her, and you decided to avoid them so that you would not have to make a decision about whether or not you liked him or her and wanted him or her to be your friend, wouldn't that avoidance of the person (and the issue of friendship) be the same as a rejection of that person and that friendship? Though the analogy breaks down eventually, the same logic is at stake here. Most people don't want to take the time to figure out who God is, so they reject him and push him aside because it would be too much trouble to begin to know him.

And the acquisition of any knowledge of God is not easy, that's why God says you must do it with all your heart - he doesn't want less than all of you, and if you commit less than all of you to the task, you might find a god who requires less than all of you - and that would not be the True God.

The quandary of whether or not to pursue God brings to mind the lines from a poem whose title I can't remember, but the author talks about coming to a point in a path were he had two choices of where to go, and states something along the lines of, "...and I took the path less traveled, and that has made all the difference."

Lastly let me note that just because something is hard to acquire or accomplish doesn't make it bad. If all of life were easy, none of us would have need for any decent measure of strength. It is the struggles and battles of life which separate the naivete and weakness of childhood from the maturity and strength of adulthood.

The Honor of Atheists

"For this reason, the atheist who cannot believe for moral reasons does honor, in an elliptical way, to the Christian God, and so must not be ignored. He demands of us not the surrender of our beliefs but a meticulous recollection on our parts of what those beliefs are, and a definition of divine love that has at least the moral rigor of principled unbelief."

- Hart, David Bently. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005) 25

A very interesting quote. It really stuck out to me, mainly for the reason that many people believe in God without truly taking stock of the god which they claim to believe in. An atheist, on the other hand, has taken stock of a god (arguably not the True God revealed in the Word, but some facsimile thereof) and truly looked at that god and then decided whether or not that god is worthy of their service/worship. The honor that an atheist does Christianity, and ultimately God, is that he/she says, "I cannot serve a god like this, for it is not right," as they perceive/encounter a variant or degraded view of God. Their honor is given by their refusal to settle for and/or accept something which is actually less than God.

But the challenge to us, as Christians, is ever to make sure that the reality of God, in all his Trueness, is being presented to these which refuse to believe in these lesser gods. The goal is so that they can see the moral consistency and supremacy of the True God and the Way* (in it's true and real practice).

This is also the reason, as Hert points out, that we cannot just brush aside atheists (and their arguments against God) because they are actually arguing against a God we do not believe in as well. But rather it is our responsibility to address their misperceptions and to accurately portray God to them.

Therefore the challenge is for us, ourselves, to know God in Truth.

* "the Way" is in reference to the followers of Christ as they were referred to in the book of Acts, before they were known as Christians.