I live in a college town. I grew up in a college town. I have many friends who go to said college, or who work for said college. And I can often be found hanging around the college campus with friends. As a Christian in a college town, I have many friends who are not Christian and who often ask me questions about my faith. One the questions I have been getting more and more recently is this: “Why isn’t God more obvious?”
The logic goes like this: If the God of the Bible is real, and He is as loving as the Bible says He is, and the only requirement to go to Heaven is to believe in this God, why doesn’t He make it easy to believe in Him? Why doesn’t He make himself more obvious?
Now my knee-jerk reaction to such a question is simply: What do you want God to do? Do you want an angel to come down from heaven? Do you want to talk with a burning bush? Do you need to want to see blind people healed or hear deaf people speak? Do you want God to come down and talk to you face to face and put His power on display? What about if He took the form of a man, died, and rose again? He has done all of these things, as Scripture records. What more do you want?
But I have to stop myself there, because I realize that even as someone who grew up believing these things, “Why isn’t God obvious?” was still my biggest question. I still wanted God to be more obvious. When I read the Bible I couldn’t help but notice the disconnect from what I saw in the Bible, the signs, the miracles, the people who clearly heard God’s voice, and my own life. Had God stopped speaking? Do miracles no longer happen? Or was it all made up?
I cam to the point during my middle school and high school years where I found myself asking why God wasn’t obvious. If He could prove to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that He was real, then there was nothing more important than to follow Him. However if he wasn’t real, then I was wasting my time.
So I began looking into the arguments and evidence for God’s existence:
- How the universe seems to be designed. Just as how I can tell that the watch I wear on my wrist has a creator, because there is a complexity and a logic to it, so also the universe from the largest galaxy to the smallest atom is both logical and complex. It is too complex to have just happened.
- The fact that the universe has a beginning. Everything that has a beginning has something that began it. Scientific consensus says that everything in the universe seemingly came from nothing. Nothing cannot create something, so for anything to exist at all, there must be an uncreated creator.
- The idea that there are some things that are enjoyable without clear reason for them to be so. I am a Sherlock Holmes fan, and in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories Sherlock is interrupted in his analysis of a crime scene by the sight of a rose. He then says, “Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” (Sherlock Holmes, The Naval Treaty, Sir Arthur Christian Doyle) Things that are beautiful, such as the view from a mountain summit, the colors of a sunset, and the sight and scent of a rose, are beautiful and enjoyable for no apparent reason, other than there must be something out there that wants us to enjoy the world we live in.
These arguments were convincing, but they were not enough for me. I didn’t want theoretical and philosophical arguments for the existence of God, I wanted to see God’s power at work. I wanted to see miracles, and while I was in high school, I did.
I watched as my high school secretary, who had suffered with a chronic pain that was so bad she couldn’t lift her arms past her shoulders, was prayed for by a Christian evangelist, and afterward had full motion in her arms without any pain or tension. She was beaming as she threw her hands up in the air as high as they could possibly go without any pain at all.
I was there when one of the girls in my school developed a tumor in her throat on her vocal chords. Due to the nature of the tumor, she had to go in for multiple surgeries otherwise they risked damaging her vocal chords beyond repair. Between two of these surgeries, my entire Christian school spent a week fasting and praying for her healing. When she went in for her next surgery, the surgeon was shocked, when using the camera placed down her throat, he could not longer find the tumor, nor the scar tissue from the previous surgeries.
I have had several friend who were diagnosed with cancer, were prayed for, and by their next appointment were in complete remission.
I was seeing miracles, and it was exciting. However, if you are anything like me, you are probably skeptical upon reading or hearing of a couple of healings second hand. So if you take these stories with a grain of salt I do not blame you. It is something you have to see with your own eyes.
That said, it wasn’t the miracles that convinced me of the reality of God. It was a personal one on one encounter with the God of the universe. I was at a lock-in with my church’s youth group, an all night prayer and worship event. During that time I found myself praying that God would speak to me. Sure, the evidence pointed to God, and sure, I had seen miracles, but what I really wanted was for God to speak to me, to give me a glimpse of Heaven. And as I stood there praying in some outrageous hour of the night (or morning) suddenly I felt a presence and I heard a voice. The voice didn’t say anything super profound, nor was it anything that could be considered prophetic, but simply four words: “Dalton, I love you.”
At that moment any doubt I had about God’s existence melted away. Any fear I had of God was gone, because the God of the universe had spoken to me, and He loves me!
And He loves you too.
At that point it was like my eyes were opened and I started realizing that God is obvious. He is everywhere. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen him before when he was right there all along.
Perhaps the reason why God doesn’t seem obvious is because there is something actively working to hide Him from us. Perhaps we just don’t care to look. Or perhaps, in some strange way, God wants us to look for Him, and like a parent playing hide a seek with a child, wants us to find Him.
If this question: “Why isn’t God more obvious?” is one that you have, allow me to encourage you to seek out the answers on your own, don’t use this one question as an excuse to not look a little harder. Ask God to reveal himself to you, in a way that you will understand, whether it be through evidence, miraculous experience, or a personal encounter with God Himself. I am willing to bet that He will reveal himself to you.