What if God doesn’t want to be found in the way that we want to find him?

So many Christians work so hard to prove God one way or another, but God openly says that he hides himself from certain people in certain situations.

This means that finding him won’t always work like science works. You can't necessarily use some sort of earthly discovery process to pin down an infinitely powerful living being when he decides to veil himself from the wrong sort of search.

Photo Credit: Morgefile PaxOne

Understanding this should knock Christians back on our seats. It should change how we do ministry. It should change what we expect raw truth to do when we push it out into society.

Somewhere along the way American Christianity got the idea that tight arguments and proofs would force people to admit that God exists. And sure, God has provided a hefty number of clues that allow for logical, historical, scientific people to discover things about him.

But God says he has created a dynamic with intentional gaps, and those gaps require more than cognitive assurance to fill. They require human beings to do engagement humbly, seeking God himself instead of just arguments about God. It's like that old metaphor about the door so low you have to kneel to get through.

Nonbelievers might argue that this dynamic is unfair or cruel, but it’s neither.

Just because we’ve been able to learn a lot about the universe inside certain empirical or rational limitations doesn’t mean these are the only means of learning about truth. And if we are too proud or too stubborn to look beyond a process that we are accustomed to, that exposes our biases more than it exposes God's.

Just because we’ve been able to learn a lot about the universe inside certain empirical or rational limitations doesn’t mean these are the only means of learning about truth. And if we are too proud or too stubborn to look beyond a process that we are accustomed to, that exposes our biases more than it exposes God's.

In past centuries the human race has been forced to admit the possibility that the world isn’t flat and that the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Our presuppositions were wrong.

Everything was bigger than we thought.

But the main problem in getting there was the same problem that exists today. A lack of humility.

We tend to prefer haughty, Donald Trumpian platforms where we have it all figured out, spewing out self-assured, borrowed rhetoric. We like to shoot from the hip and just clock people in the jaws when they don't agree, then go back to our punky friends, and laugh and say, "Hey, they're so stupid."

We don't tend to look very deep before we conclude. We tend to be more comfortable with mockery than with getting down in the mud and asking questions that might crack our hearts wide open.

We are impatient, demanding, and intolerant. That's why pride doesn't make us look like kings, it turns us into Nebuchadnezzar's jackass.

"Bottom as Ass" by Arthur Rackham

Hey, maybe if there is a God, he’s not going to let us find him by popping off at the mouth and acting like jerks with a library card and ninja Google skills. Maybe he's even going to love us enough to go adversarial on that approach and block it so we come up empty until we are willing to hear properly? Maybe if we saunter up to God, cocky and dismissive, he's going to prevent us from finding him at all?

This isn’t a fifth grade science fair project. He’s not Cosmic Baking Soda that you can pour your vinegar into and demand an explosion.

And if you don’t like how that works, okay. Sometimes I haven't liked it, either.

But we can not like something because it asks an uncomfortable posture of us... and it can still be true. We can shut our eyes, and run around in a dark room shouting angrily that we can’t find whatever it is we are looking for while it’s sitting right there in plain sight.

If we demand to find God in only our way, and if we are unwilling to accept anything else but our way, that probably that says more about how we go about looking for stuff than it says about what God is offering to us.

If we demand to find God in only our way, and if we are unwilling to accept anything else but our way, that probably that says more about how we go about looking for stuff than it says about what God is offering to us.

We go to him like a whiny boyfriend saying, "You have to sleep with me tonight, or else I'm breaking up with you," and we are shocked when he says no.

And Christians. Two things.

1. First, the elephant in the room. Too many people who claim to know Jesus have been (and still are) cocky and arrogant, too. It's not just the atheists, right? I absolutely agree. But since 500 Jesus-hipster bloggers with beards, soft hands, and nasal voices have been complaining about this for the past ten years, I hesitate to add much to that conversation. Whatever needed to be said here has probably already been said.

2. This truth needs to impact evangelism, I think. Who are we trusting in when we ask others to trust God? Are we really expecting a living God to show up?

Post Enlightenment pride has done such a number on our society. What started by lifting us up has ultimately dumbed us down. The pendulum swung to a needed correction, then to an equal extreme, then it fell off into a swamp.

Eyes are now shut to truths that logic and science can't open, even if we had every proof in the world. I don't mean this is the struggle of all nonbelievers. Some are on a different road altogether, an honest road that will just take a while to walk.

But some are.

Even as I write this post, I'm asking the Holy Spirit to do the bulk of the work through it. I'm a decent writer. I'm moderately educated. But I'm not all that much to reckon with in the end. I'm like a six on a ten scale.

Still, even if I had the best resume in the world, and even if I were the most gifted evangelist on the planet, those five or six people I pray for when I write posts like this could not ever be moved if God didn't go before me and rattle them up.

I expect my persuasion to do nothing on its own merit. If God doesn't take splinters of truth from my words and embed them in hearts so that two or three years from now something pricks somewhere, I have nothing at all to say.

Photo Credit: Morgue File by OldGreySeaWolf

In the end, I can't do much but throw this net on the wrong side of the boat and trust Jesus to bring up a catch. So here goes. Ker-plash.

God, open eyes. Shake hearts.

Make my friends humble enough to listen in new ways. And keep me bending me back to humility in my own heart as well.