Is there really a God?

Well, everybody, it is great to see you, whether you're here in the room or tuning in from wherever you happen to be.

We're honored to have you along for the ride.

As you probably noticed, today we get to begin a new series called Asking for a Friend.

And in the series, we're going to wrestle with a few of the biggest questions that people tend to have about God and faith and Christianity.

And I chose this title for a couple of different reasons.

First, it's because I suspect that most of us have friends who are asking important questions about faith.

Maybe it's like the coworker who sits in the cubicle next to you, or it's your neighbor who looks at you across the fence, or one of your kids, or someone in your family.

And I think sincere questions really deserve thoughtful answers.

And so that's one reason.

But the other reason is a little more interesting.

It's because, I don't know if you ever heard this, but asking for a friend is what we tend to say when a question is actually ours, but we're not ready to admit it.

You know what I'm talking about?

Like we walk into Walgreens and approach the pharmacist and say, um, what's the best ointment for a strange rash?

Asking for a friend who happens to be the same age as me and have similar insurance coverage.

Just asking for a friend, right?

And I think that we sometimes do that same thing with our questions about God.

Like we have a question, but we aren't sure it's okay to ask it.

Like maybe, maybe you're not a Christian and you're afraid you're going to offend someone who is, or maybe you are a Christian and you feel as though you should already know the answer to your question, or you think maybe by asking this, like I might reveal a weakness in my faith, and I don't want to do that.

And so that said, um, I want to make something really clear right at the start of this series.

Having questions doesn't mean you don't have faith.

Having questions does not mean you don't have faith.

And refusing to ask your questions doesn't make them disappear.

You know this, right?

It just forces you to wrestle with them alone.

And around here, like for the past 30 years, we've sought to be a safe place to ask honest questions about faith.

And so uh that said, today we get to explore what I consider to be the most foundational faith question of all.

Is there a God?

Like, is he actually there or is he simply someone we want to believe is there?

Uh is belief in God reasonable?

Is there anything we can point to beyond what our parents taught us and what a pastor told us as evidence?

And if God is there, like why isn't he more obvious?

Why does he leave so much room for doubt?

Is it some sort of strategy?

Is he playing hard to get?

Or maybe have we been looking for him in the wrong places?

Those are great questions.

And for me, these questions aren't merely theological, they actually became an important part of my journey of faith.

Uh as many of you know, I grew up right here in West Michigan during the 1980s.

Yes, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, right?

It was last century, as the kids like to say.

But back then, um, as I remember it, I was basically surrounded by two types of people.

There were the people who went to church like me, and then there were people who used to go to church.

And I had some of my friends who would talk about God and friends who didn't talk about God, but even the people who didn't weren't offended if I did.

And then came that faithful day in the fall of 1992 when I drove to Ann Arbor to attend college.

Um, Ann Arbor is only about a hundred miles away, but culturally it felt like I was visiting another planet.

Like for the first time in my life, I found myself surrounded by people from literally all over the world.

I met people from countries I had barely heard of who practiced religions that were completely different than mine.

And I even met in my freshman dorm a few people who weren't religious at all.

And more than a few of them were convinced that there was no God.

That was new for me.

I had known people who didn't attend church, but I had rarely encountered people who could explain why they didn't believe.

And when I sort of pushed them, some of them told me that they believed science had all the answers and made God unnecessary.

And others viewed religion as something humans created to make an uncertain world easier to endure.

These were people who thought deeply about faith and concluded it wasn't true.

And here's what got under my skin: they were smart and thoughtful and confident, and they were asking me questions I had never been forced to consider.

So for the first time in my life, I found myself defending my belief in God.

And as I tried to defend my faith with all the passion my 18-year-old self could muster, I quietly began asking questions of my own.

Important questions like, um, are faith and science really at odds with one another?

And if I choose to believe in God, do I have to sort of give up on reason?

And then a deeper question still, was my faith something real or was it something I just inherited?

And as you might imagine, eventually these questions inspired me to investigate, and I made a commitment to sort of follow the evidence wherever it led, even if it challenged something I had always believed.

And what I discovered, um, it didn't destroy my faith.

That's not a newsflash, right?

But it gave me a faith that was finally my own.

And I say that to say, wherever you find yourself on the journey of faith today, I want you to know that I'm not going to pressure you to pretend you're convinced.

That's not helpful.

I simply want to present some evidence for the existence of God that I personally find incredibly compelling.

And if you're here and you already believe, my hope is that this content strengthens your confidence and prepares you to help someone else as they pursue faith.

And so now, um, with the rest of our time together, what I want to do is introduce you to four places that I think you can look for evidence of God.

And the first place I would encourage you to look is around.

And here's what I mean by that.

Tonight, after sunset, go and look up at the night sky.

Maybe tomorrow during your lunch break, uh, go online and just study how the human body functions and wonder at the absolutely astonishing amount of information contained in a single strand of DNA.

It's the language of life.

And again, prepare to be amazed, because as it turns out, the deeper we look at the universe and how it works, the more astonishing it becomes.

And this is not a new observation.

I mean, uh, thousands of years ago, Israel's king David looked at the world around him and wrote the following.

He said, The heavens declare the glory of God.

The skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech, night after night they reveal knowledge.

He says they have no speech, they they use no words, no sound is heard from them, yet their voice goes out into all the earth.

Their words to the ends of the world.

David's point is that if you're paying attention, creation is saying something.

There's something about this world that points beyond this world.

And this is where I want to gently challenge a common misunderstanding that has convinced some people that they have to choose between God and science.

The Christian faith is not threatened by scientific discovery.

Here's why.

If God created the universe, then scientific discovery doesn't move us away from God, it just helps us understand what He has made.

And that also means that the Bible and science are not conflicting accounts of how things came to be.

Science helps us investigate how the universe developed and how it operates.

The Bible tells us who stands behind it and why it exists at all.

And that's why I think followers of Jesus should be fascinated by science.

The more it helps us understand the universe, the more it gives us to wonder about.

And if you start down this path, one of the first questions that emerges as we're looking around is surprisingly basic.

You find yourself asking this why is there something rather than nothing?

In other words, science does a great job explaining how the universe developed and how it operates, but it can't really tell us why there is a universe at all.

Like, how did it get here?

Here's a fun example to show you what I mean.

Just imagine with me, you're on vacation, you're walking on a beach, okay?

And uh, for the sake of the argument, you're walking along and you see a watch buried in the sand, right?

And you look down, and let's just pretend you've never seen a watch before.

I know that's a stretch, never seen a watch before, and you you were like thinking about this watch.

You would assume that the watch did not pop into existence suddenly one day out of nothing, right?

You'd think someone or something was responsible for making it, and then potentially someone else dropped it here.

And the same basic reasoning can be applied to the universe.

It's just simple like this.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

The universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a cause.

And if you think about it, whatever caused the universe, whatever caused space and time and matter and energy to exist could not itself be limited by them.

It would have to exist beyond the natural universe it caused.

Which sounds remarkably similar to what Jews and Christians mean by God.

In fact, that is why the Bible begins with these words.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And the first book in the Bible wasn't written as a modern science textbook, so its primary purpose wasn't to explain every process through which the universe developed.

Its central claim is that the universe is not self-existent or purposeless.

Behind everything that exists is a creator.

And of course, your your combative friend might say, okay, smart guy, then who caused God, right?

But but the argument isn't that everything needs a cause, it's that everything that begins to exist needs a cause.

And Jews and Christians believe that God has always existed.

And I know you might not find that argument wholly persuasive, and that's okay, because causation isn't the only thing we discover when we look around.

The universe doesn't merely exist, it exists in an incredibly specific way.

As it turns out, the existence of life depends on a precise combination of conditions.

Things like the strength of gravity, the slow expansion of the universe, and the relationship between the fundamental forces of nature.

If some of these values fall outside a remarkably narrow life-forming range, stars can't form, complex chemistry can't develop, and life as we know it would be impossible.

Scientists refer to this as the fine-tuning of the universe.

And if you want to nerd out on it, Google it, it's amazing.

And some of these scientists conclude that the universe appears to be fine-tuned because it was fine-tuned by a creator.

And then there's more, because if you think about it, the universe doesn't only contain stars and planets and forces and physical laws, somehow it also contains us, like people who are capable of studying the universe and asking these questions.

So the second place I would encourage you to look for evidence of God is actually in the mirror.

I mean, human beings are a part of the natural world, and yet there is something extraordinary about being human.

You don't just exist, you know you exist.

You can examine your thoughts and question your motives, and you can love and grieve and create and even ask whether your life has a purpose.

And I know your dog is great, but he doesn't do that, right?

I mean, you can stand inside the universe and wonder why there is a universe.

And I know science continues to teach us more about the miracles of the human brain, but but describing brain activity doesn't fully explain the experience occurring within it.

I mean, how did consciousness arise from a universe that wasn't conscious?

How did the personal emerge from the impersonal?

And the author of Genesis doesn't explain every process involved, but he does offer a reasonable explanation for why a personal, rational, relational creature exists.

After describing the creation of land and sea and plants and animals, he writes this: He says, Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God.

He created them, male and female.

And so, according to the author of Genesis, we possess personality, creativity, and the capacity for relationship because we were made in the image of a personal God.

And the implications of that are astonishing.

It means that every human being reflects something of God's nature, and that gives every person inherent value.

It means your worth isn't determined by your intelligence or your productivity or your appearance or your health or what someone else thinks of you.

You possess value because you bear the image of God.

And so does every other person you encounter.

And if you think about it, our ability to reason and to love and to recognize meaning actually makes sense if our minds came from a greater mind and our personhood came from a personal creator.

And the mirror reveals that.

And if you think about it, it actually reveals something else.

Because human beings possess a nearly universal conviction that some things are right and others are wrong.

Like we don't merely say generosity is useful, even though generosity is useful.

We believe people ought to be generous.

And we don't just say cruelty is inconvenient even though it is convenient.

We believe it's wrong.

And when a culture approves of something cruel, we don't look at them and say, well, that must be right for them.

We believe that culture is wrong.

Which means that somehow we're appealing to a moral standard higher than culture.

And what fascinates me is there's an early Christian leader named Paul who describes this internal awareness of right and wrong in a letter he wrote to some early believers.

He writes the following, and he's a Jew, and Gentiles are non-Jews, so he's saying, indeed, when non-Jewish people who do not have the law do by nature the things required by the law, they show that the requirements of the law, look at this, are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness.

It's like Paul says, listen, human beings, we have a conscience, a persistent sense that certain things should be done and other things should not be done.

And he says that human conscience, it's like a compass.

It points beyond itself towards a fixed reference point.

But where did our sense of moral obligation come from?

You know, my scientific friends would say, well, evolution and culture, you know, would explain some of it, and sure, it explains some of it, but explaining why we hold a moral belief is not the same thing as explaining why that belief is true.

Like the need to survive can tell us what is advantageous, but it cannot by itself tell us what's good.

And so if morality is nothing more than biology, culture, or personal preference, we can say we dislike cruelty, but it becomes difficult to explain why cruelty is objectively wrong.

So if you think about it, belief in God offers an incredibly coherent explanation.

The idea that there is moral law because there is a moral lawgiver.

Like goodness is grounded in who God is, and because we were made in his image, something within us recognizes the difference between good and evil.

And I know once again this isn't absolute proof, but I think it's well worth considering.

And so if you're looking for God, look around and look in the mirror.

Our consciences, our reason, dignity, and moral awareness all point beyond themselves.

And again, these aren't the only reasons that Christians believe.

So if you're looking for God again, don't just look around or look in the mirror.

I'd encourage you also to look back.

Because at the center of Christianity is the incredible claim that God stepped into human history as a man called Jesus of Nazareth.

And that actually brings the question of God's existence into sharper focus.

I mean, has God stepped into history and allowed us to see what he's like?

The overwhelming majority of historians agree that Jesus was a real person who lived in first century Israel, and they believe that he gathered disciples and he taught publicly and he came into conflict with religious authorities, and then he was crucified by Rome.

So that's generally what historians agree on.

And then the earliest accounts of his life make it clear that when Jesus died, his disciples assumed his movement had died with him.

Like nobody was standing outside Jesus' tomb on that first Easter Sunday, counting down to the resurrection, right?

They had watched Jesus die, their hopes died with him, and when his body was placed in a tomb, they believed his story was over.

But then something completely unexpected happened.

The same people who had scattered in fear began to publicly announce that Jesus was alive again.

And what's fascinating, they didn't just say that his teachings lived on, or that they could feel his presence in their hearts.

They claimed that Jesus had physically risen from the dead and that they had seen him.

And years later, Paul preserved an early summary of what first Christians believed in one of his letters.

Here's what he tells us He says, Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, he was buried, he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, that's Peter, and then to the twelve.

So historians generally agree that Paul was repeating a tradition he had received earlier, one that can actually be traced to the first years of the Christian movement.

And so the resurrection wasn't a legend that developed centuries after Jesus.

It was the message that Christians proclaimed from the beginning.

Jesus died, he was buried, and he is alive again.

That's what transformed a frightened group of disciples into a movement willing to carry the message throughout the Roman world.

But for today, here's what matters Paul was remarkably honest about how much depended on the resurrection.

In fact, just a few verses later, in the same letter, he writes the following.

He says, If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless, and so is your faith.

It's like Paul staked the entire Christian faith on one historical event.

He said, If Jesus remains dead, Christianity is not true.

But God raised Jesus from the dead, and if he did, then Jesus claims about himself and about God demand to be taken seriously.

It also means that the creator of the universe has stepped into history to make himself known.

But Jesus shows us that Creator's heart.

And it's beautiful.

In him, we see a God who moves towards broken people and who welcomes outsiders and who forgives sinners and who gives his life for his enemies.

But even that said, I know evidence can only take us so far.

I mean, you can know all the arguments about God without ever actually knowing him.

And so, if we're being honest, eventually the question we've been Exploring today becomes more than is belief in God intellectually reasonable?

I think it is.

But the question becomes, the real question becomes: if God is there, am I willing to reach for Him?

Which brings us to the one final place I would invite you to look.

And that's within.

Because God isn't merely believable, He's knowable.

And it's possible to understand what the Bible teaches and to attend church for years and to still experience God primarily through someone else.

But God doesn't invite you merely to believe he exists.

He wants you to know him for yourself.

And we see this clearly during a speech to a group of first century Greek philosophers in the city of Athens.

Paul described that reality this way after saying that God determined the exact times and places where each person would live?

He said the following: He says, God did this so that they, people, would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he's not far from any one of us.

And I just have to wonder like, have you ever experienced a moment of beauty or meaning or clarity or unexpected peace and wondered whether God might actually be closer than you realized?

It's so common.

And to be fair, you know, personal experience can be misunderstood, and sure our feelings are not infallible, but that doesn't mean our experiences are meaningless.

Like eventually, our search for God has to become more than an intellectual exercise.

It requires us to decide whether we're willing to reach for Him.

And I think seeking God can begin with something as simple as an honest prayer.

And in fact, a few minutes, I'm going to invite you to do just that this week.

But for now, let's briefly return to the question we've been exploring today.

Like, if God is there, why isn't He more obvious?

Why does He leave so much room for doubt?

And I won't pretend there's a simple answer to that question.

And I'll confess there are moments when I wish God would make his presence unmistakable, and when I would hear from him audibly and he would answer every question I have.

But the story of Christianity doesn't describe a God determined to remain hidden.

It describes a God who filled creation with his fingerprints, placed his image within humanity, and then stepped into history through Jesus because he wants to be known.

And yeah, God has not revealed himself in a way that makes doubt impossible.

The evidence doesn't force us to trust him, but I would argue it invites us to trust him.

And that's really important because faith is not belief without evidence.

Faith is trust in response to evidence.

Which brings me to our big idea for today.

God has not made doubt impossible, but he has given us good reasons to trust him.

And if you're here today and you're generally unsure of what you believe, I just want you to know you're in a safe place and you don't need to manufacture certainty that you don't have.

That, again, is not helpful.

Maybe for you, part of you really wants to believe, but another part still has questions, and maybe something happened to you that made trusting God difficult.

Or maybe you're simply not convinced the evidence is strong enough, and that's fair, but wherever you are, you don't have to resolve everything today.

But I would encourage you not to confuse your unanswered questions with final answers.

Like don't allow what you don't yet understand to keep you from investigating what might be true.

You can take your doubts seriously without allowing them to end your search.

And you can remain open to God without pretending you're already convinced.

Okay, so that said, what do we do with all of this?

And um, I uh have two invitations for you.

The first, um, it's a bit nerdy, so forgive me.

Um, some of you are in love with this, some of you are like, I'm not doing that.

That's okay, I won't follow up.

Okay.

Um, first, choose one of the first three lines of evidence that we talked about and spend some time investigating for yourself.

Internet is a great tool for this.

Look at the origin and order of the universe, or maybe explore the mystery of human consciousness and morality.

Or for you, if you want to do something a little more like centered on Jesus, um, investigate the historical evidence for the resurrection.

It's so compelling.

So that's the first thing.

Take some time and explore.

The second is to take a personal step.

And so for the next week, I would just encourage you to begin each morning, like maybe before you even get out of bed, by saying, God, if you're there, help me find you.

Like, show me what I'm missing, and give me the courage to follow wherever you lead.

And it's a prayer we can all pray because you can begin right where you are.

Just bring God all of it.

Your curiosity, your skepticism, your disappointment, your disillusionment, even your doubts.

God is not threatened by your questions.

And sincerely seeking Him is never wasted.

So if I may quote Jesus, because he's generally way ahead of us on all this stuff, right?

Ask, seek, knock, and remain open to the possibility that the God you've been searching for has been drawing you toward himself all along.

And we will pick it up there next week.

Uh, but for now, I'd love to invite you to stand if you're willing and able, and I'll close our time in prayer.

Uh, once again, this week, if you'd like to pray with someone before you leave, we'll have some friends under the screen to the left.

And so take advantage of that.

Um, but for the rest of us, let's close our time.

Heavenly Father, uh, the word that just kept bubbling up inside of me this week as I was preparing these thoughts was just wonder.

The wonder of creation, the wonder of your love for broken, hurting people.

Um I pray for friends in this place who are genuinely seeking and maybe maybe you're frustrated because they still haven't found you.

I pray that this week um you would open their eyes anew to the wonder of being here and being human and the wonder of you visiting this planet in the person of Jesus Christ.

I pray that as we reach for you, we would find you and we would experience how good you really are.

So thank you for the invitation to trust and the freedom to seek.

And I pray a blessing upon us all as we continue to pursue you.

It is in the name of your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, we pray.

And everyone said, Amen.

Grace and peace, friends.

We'll see you next week or tonight in Grand Haven if you're gonna be there.