A few weeks ago, I posted that picture on Instagram of the several books I was currently reading and the connection God made through my browsing them, and was asked what that was. It’s nothing really that significant to any but myself, but I wanted to share anyway! It’s taken me this long to sit down and write it out, partly because what seemed easy to connect in my mind at the time, I found, was more difficult to articulate on paper! So – here goes…
As background - Years ago, in a time of deep questioning, I shocked myself … horrified myself, really… with a possibility that rocked me to my core. “What if ‘this’-- my faith, my belief, everything I think understand about God isn’t true?
What if God – wasn't?”
Because of the wounds of spiritual abuse, because of the daily engagement with secular reasoning, because of my own pain, I began to wonder if any of it was real. What if I had it all wrong – what if there was no Gospel… no hope? What would that mean? I literally had to start all over again.
It started with considering HOW I got to be on this planet. Really – even more basic than that… how I got to BE at all. It was about that time I found a book called, “The Right Questions; Truth, Meaning and Public Debate” by Phillip E. Johnson. There were actually a myriad of things that God used at that time, radio shows, magazine articles, movie lines… He often does that to me - come at me from all sorts of angles. The book, though, was a definite fulcrum point. Through careful and logical reasoning, the author (and debater) helped me to reconstruct my belief in the core truth that we are created beings. And if we are created, there is a creator. And if there is a creator, we are created for a reason. Who is this intelligent designer, and what is his purpose – what is my reason for being?
With the “HOW I got to be here” out of the way, I could focus on the “WHY am I here?”. That, as you know, is a life-long adventure. In the years since my deep questioning, He has led me to CS Lewis, Brennan Manning, and countless others – Mike Bullmore and Crossway Church (“preach the gospel to yourself every day!”, “we are all far more depraved than we can bear to consider, and we are all far more loved than we can dare to hope”), Doug and Grant and Valleybrook – with the Rejection series and understanding what a God-Created identity is; Ted Dekker’s fabulous stories that resound with unfathomable love of the “Great Romance”, and being a “Water Walker” and “Outlaw” through the unimaginable power of forgiveness and trust. They have been resources, oasis’, for my journey – and it’s an amazing journey – that journey to wholeness, wellness, and perfection. The years of deep questioning have taken on a new perspective. Now I SEEK deeply. I am a seeker. It is a part of who I am. Seeking always starts with questions. Questions are no longer to be feared – because it means I get to seek, and find what God has for me.
But some days, the original question – the great doubt, I call it now – comes. What if? I know it’s the enemy. Because he comes with shame. Shame that I even think such doubts. It’s like a sucker punch. He brings the doubt to mind, then shames me for it.
So on January 1st, after unearthing a box that had been languishing for 3 years in our attic from the move, I got a pack of my favorite resources together and started browsing. Little did I know God wanted to remind me of something I already knew, and challenge me with something new to seek. I read these things:
“Jesus Calling” – Jan 1 –
Come to me with a teachable spirit, eager to be changed. A close walk with me is a life of continual newness. Do not cling to old ways as you step into a new year. Instead seek my face with an open mind, knowing that your journey with Me involves being transformed by the renewing of your mind. As you focus your thoughts on Me, be aware that I am fully attentive to you. I see you with a steady eye, because My attention span is infinite! I know and understand you completely; My thoughts embrace you in everlasting love. I also know the plans I have for you: plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and future. Give yourself fully to this adventure of increasing attentiveness to my presence.
Okay then… what have you got for me, God? So I picked up another book…
“The Right Questions” –
Foreword; pg 16 -17
With Christians tangled in endless arguments over Genesis 1, Johnson redirected the debate along fruitful lines by jumping over Genesis and focusing on John 1:1, “in the beginning was the Word” – the logos – the Greek word for reason, intelligence, rationality, information. The great confrontation in science today is between those who say life can be explained without recourse to reason or intelligence, and those who say life embodies information – the Word – and must be explained as the product of an intelligent agent…
…In all cases where we know the source of information, like books and computer programs and musical scores, that source is an intelligent agent. It is logical to conclude that the source of information in living things is likewise intelligent.
Pg 62 -64
The most important Scripture about creation teaches us not about the historical details but about the meaning of creation. … “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God . All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”.
In the beginning was the Word – Is that true or false? Is it fact or pious platitude? I find that many intelligent people, even devout Christians are amazed to be asked such a question. They are taught to assume that “in the beginning was the Word” belongs to the category of religion, and so it is a kind of noncognitive utterance to which evaluative terms like ‘true’ and ‘false’ do not apply. …
…There is an unacknowledged creation story that is at the root of all secular learning which is the precise opposite of John 1:1 in every way. You will probably never hear this creation story told forthrightly at Harvard or Berkley, because to state its elements explicitly would be to reveal that it is merely one creation story and that it is possible to conceive of another. A foundational story is much more powerful when it is pervasively assumed, so that its elements are never evaluated and it appears to be an unavoidable implication of reason itself. The materialist story is the foundation of all education in all the departments at all the secular universities, but they do not spell it out. It is: “In the beginning were the particles and the impersonal laws of physics. And the particles somehow became complex living stuff; and the stuff imagined God; But then discovered evolution.”
That is the basic story of evolutionary naturalism, or scientific materialism. There was no “Word” – no intelligence or purpose – at the beginning. Only the laws and the particles existed, and these two things plus chance had to do all the creating. Without them nothing was made that has been made. The particles combined to become complex living stuff through a process of evolution that involved only chemical combinations governed by chance and natural law. God did not create man; it is the other way around. Having evolved from animals by a mindless natural process, but not having science to tell them what had happened, primitive human beings relied on their uninformed imagination to create God.
(The Right Questions is a book that I HIGHLY recommend to anyone wanting to understand how to logically and intellectually bring the “wedge of truth” into any atheistic, agnostic or evolutionary conversation.) Just those few paragraphs reminded me of the beautiful conciseness of the logic of our creation – and the existence of a force beyond our comprehension… but not so far beyond our comprehension that we can’t know Him… God.
I then picked up a new book, recommended by my Dad, “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus – A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity”, by Nabeel Qureshi. I read the first few pages:
Pg 21-22
I lay prostrate in a large Muslim prayer hall, broken before God. The edifice of my worldview, all I had ever known, had slowly been dismantled over the past few years. On this day, my world came crashing down. I lay in ruin, seeking Allah.
…With my forehead pressed into the ground and heart pounding in my chest, my mind scrutinized each word my lips whispered into the musty carpet…
…subhana rabbi al-ala.
Glorified is my Lord, the Highest.
“Glorified is my Lord.. who is my Lord? Who are you Lord? Are you Allah, the God of my father and forefathers? Are you the God I have always worshiped? … You are Allah the God of Islam, aren’t You? Or are You?” I hesitated, fighting the blasphemy I was about to propose. But what if the blasphemy was the truth?
“Or are you Jesus?”
My heart froze, as if indignant at my mind for risking hell. “Allah, I would never say that a man became equal to you! Please forgive me and have mercy on me if that’s what I said, because that’s not what I mean. No man is equal to You. You are infinitely greater than all of creation. Everything bows down before You, Allah subhanahu wa’tala.”
“No, what I mean to say is that You, O Allah, are all powerful. Surely You can enter into creation if You choose. Did You enter into this world? Did you become a man? And was that man Jesus? OH Allah! The Bible couldn’t be right, could it?”
As if on parallel timelines, my lips continued to pray in sajda while my mind relentlessly fought with itself. The Arabic phrase was to be recited twice more before the sajda would be complete.
Sabhana rabbi al-ala.
Glorified is my Lord, the Highest.
“But how is it conceivable that Allah, the highest being of all, would enter in to this world? This world is filthy and sinful, no place for the One who deserves all glory and all praise. And how could I even begin to suggest that God, the magnificent and splendid Creator, would enter into this world through the birth canal of a girl? Audhu billah, that’s disgusting! To have to eat, to grow fatigued, and to sweat and spill blood and to be finally nailed to a cross. I cannot believe this. God deserves infinitely more. His majesty is far greater than this.
“But what if his majesty is not as important to him as his children are?”
Whoa! I could resonate with the struggle of doubt. Nabeel’s struggle was of a different topic, but here was a seeker, like me. I loved that. And I loved that line, “What if His majesty is not as important to Him as His children are?”
Pressing on, I grabbed “The Weight of Glory” by CS Lewis and read the chapter titled, “Is Theology Poetry”. It is far too much to dictate here. Suffice it to say, it is a superb articulation of the substance of Christianity, while maintaining that mystery, beauty and glory - in all its poetry - is intrinsic to what we believe. Without it, we are bland creatures, to say the least. The beauty, mystery and glory is in the deepest character of God. Glorified is my Lord, the Highest… Indeed! What a gift to me… God was making himself very real to me this morning. What do I do with all of this confirmation of the REALNESS - the deepness - of God? I picked up “Ruthless Trust”, by Brennan Manning and read in the very first chapter:
Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for the love of it. (!)
… Trust is that rare and priceless treasure that wins us the affection of our heavenly Father. For this it has both charm and fascination. Among his countless children, whom he so greatly loves and whom he heaps with tenderness and favors, there are few indeed, who truly trusting themselves to him, live as veritable children of God. There are as few who respond to his goodness by a trust at once filial and unshaken. And so it is that we welcomes with a love of predilection those souls, all too few in number, who in adversity as in joy, in tribulation and consolation, unfalteringly trust in his paternal love. Such souls truly delight and give immense pleasure to the heart of their heavenly Father. There is nothing he is not prepared to give them. “Ask of me half of my Kingdom”, he cries to the trusting soul, and “I will give it to you!”
I just sat on the couch and cried for the love of it all!
And thus, was a tapestry of truth woven into my being! These previously unconnected truths at once amalgamated into a beautiful continuity of His profound design of, love for and favor in me! How can I not seek everything He has for me? Last year I was called to seek healing – whatever it takes. And while that continues, this year, it is clear I am called to seek a ruthless trust… wherever it leads me. As Brennan Manning says, “it requires heroic courage to trust in the love of God no matter what happens to us.”
So – God… give me courage, because here we go!
Deep is calling unto deep. I am to seek him, trust Him, to His very depths.
