God Exists

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, it’s good to see you all here. Welcome to our worship service. I have a couple of announcements to mention before we begin.

Men’s group will be meeting tonight at 6:30. They’ll also be having a cookout next Sunday afternoon. All men are invited to attend.

During the month of October, we will be collecting items for the food pantry at Calvary. You can leave those in Randal’s Sunday school classroom, or you can made a monetary donation as well. Just mark your check and envelope food pantry, and we’ll make sure it gets where it needs to go.

Our church will also be providing dinner for the Love INC Loving Your Neighbor classes on Tuesday that 24th. Amy Campbell will be coordinating that. If you can provide some assistance, please see her after the service or give her a call.

I’ll ask you to please be in prayer for several of our church members who are going through some challenging times: the Brooks family in the passing of Jim’s father, Kitty Templeton in the passing of her brother, and please continue to keep Evelyn Howell in your prayers as well.

Della, do you have an announcement this morning?

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Holy Father we are so grateful to be able to gather in this place, in this town, to worship you. We’re thankful for another week filled with your blessings and protection, thankful for a day of rest to raise our voices to you. And we’re especially thankful that we have a heavenly father in you, one whose love never fails, whose patience never wanes, and whose protection is constant and clear. To you we cry, “Abba,” knowing that you will never reject us and never turn away. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Sermon

If you were with us last week, you’ll remember that we talked about worldviews, and how our worldview is the way we think about life, about others, and about ourselves. We also talked about the eight statements that make up the Christian worldview, and how only 9% of Christians — just 9% of the Christians in this country — actually believe in and live out a Christian worldview.

One reason why that number is so low is because a lot of Christians just aren’t taught the reasons for their faith. They’re pretty clear on what they believe, but not on why they should believe it. And in a culture that’s moving away from faith, knowing why you believe the things you do is hugely important.

So we’re going to spend a few weeks talking about what makes up a Christian worldview, and we’re going to start this morning with the most important part of that worldview: God is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe, and He still rules.

There is a God. That’s about as basic a truth as there is, isn’t it? You might be thinking that no one sitting in here is doubting if there’s really a God or not. Maybe that’s true. I hope that’s true. But as we’ll see in a little bit, even the strongest Christians struggle sometimes with doubt. So of that’s you, then I hope today’s sermon will help ease those doubts.

It’s an interesting point to make though that because of sin, no one can come to a belief in God on their own and under their own power. Before anyone can search and find God, God has to first draw them. Jesus says in John 6:44 that “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

In a sense, God draws everyone to Him by giving us plenty of reasons to believe He exists, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. But the first thing you have to know is that we don’t have the ability to come to know God. That’s why God has to draw us to Himself.

The second thing you have to know is that we can’t know everything about God. Even in eternity we won’t know everything about God, because He existed for an eternity before we were born, and we’ve talked about that.

Saint Anselm was an early church father, and he had pretty much the best definition of God. He wrote that God was “That than which nothing greater can be conceived.” In other words, God is the the greatest, best, wisest, most loving, most knowing, and most powerful being you can imagine, and then some. That’s why we can’t know Him completely.

But even though we can’t know everything about God, God has chosen to reveal parts of Himself that can be known because He loves us. The best and most complete way we can know God is through Christ, because Christ is God. And so we can know God through what Christ said and did and through how Christ lived.

The second way that God’s revealed Himself is through the way we know what Christ did and said and how he lived, which is the Bible. We’re going to talk more about the reasons you should believe what your Bible says in a couple weeks, but for now it’s enough to say that what we learn about God in scripture can’t be found anywhere else.

For example, in Isaiah 43:13 we learn that God is all-powerful: “There is none who can deliver from my hand; I work, and who can turn it back?”

In Proverbs 5:21, we learn that God knows everything there is to be known: “For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the Lord, and he ponders all his paths.”

In Psalm 139:8, we learn that God is everywhere: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!”

God is holy. God is good. God is love. God tells us all these things about Himself in the Bible.

And God is changeless. We often overlook that. God cannot change because God is already perfect in every way. We think about how God knows everything and is more powerful than everything and there isn’t a place where God cannot see, but have you ever thought about how important it is that God can’t change?

Remember what Anselm said: God is the greatest possible being. So if God could change in His purposes, or in His being, then that change would have to be for either the better or the worse, right?

But if He changed for the better, that would mean He wasn’t the greatest possible being when you first trusted Him. And if he changed for the worse, then He would be less than perfect, wouldn’t He?

If God can change in any way, then everything about our faith starts falling apart, and so does our understanding of everything about our lives. Thankfully, we have Hebrews 13:8: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. And we have Malachi 3:6: “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.”

The fact that God cannot change is one of the most important things about Him. It’s the reason why we can trust Him with everything and depend on every promise He makes.

Given all of that, it’s pretty obvious that not only is God real, He’s revealed enough of Himself through Jesus and the Bible for us to know Him, know our own sin, and know how God has overcome our sin so that we can spend eternity with Him.

But to people who aren’t Christians, the Bible isn’t proof enough for them to believe there’s a God. To them, it’s just an old book of fairy tales. And not even Jesus is enough, because what we know about Jesus is largely from that old book of fairy tales. So when it comes to the question of whether there’s a God or not, most people say that at best, we just can’t know for sure.

But in Romans 1, Paul says that’s completely wrong. Even without the Bible, there’s enough evidence for God’s existence that no one will ever be able to stand in front of God and say, “You didn’t do enough to show me You were real.”

So let’s take a look at some of that evidence. Turn with me to Romans chapter 1. We’re going to read verses 18-25:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,

23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,

25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

And this is God’s word.

It’s easy to look at the world today and feel depressed. So few things seem to be going right, and so many things seem to be going wrong, and we’re often left to wonder where God is and what God is doing.

According to the Bible, the reason why things always seem to be going wrong is sin — it’s the sin inside all of us leaking out in all the horrible things we do to each other. It’s the sin in us that’s stained the whole world so much that just a few chapters over in Romans 8:22, Paul says all of creation has been groaning for renewal since Adam and Eve sinned.

So what’s God doing in the midst of all this sinning that we do? Paul says in verse 18 that God is revealing His wrath “against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.”

We talked about wrath a couple weeks ago in connection to anger, didn’t we? When you’re wrathful to someone, you want revenge against something they’ve done.

Now, would God be a good God, a loving God, if He wanted revenge against someone? No, He wouldn’t. When the Bible talks about God’s wrath, it means God’s anger isn’t against anything He’s created — because He said it was all good — but against sin.

In verse 18, Paul lists two sins in particular: ungodliness and unrighteousness. Those two sins pretty much cover everything, because ungodliness is a failure to reverence God, and unrighteousness is a failure to reverence your fellow human beings who are made in God’s image. And Paul says our unrighteousness suppresses, or keeps down, the truth.

And what is that truth? Paul lays that out in verses 19 and 20:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Like we said, there are many things about God that we just can’t know. He’s so far beyond our comprehension that it’s useless to even imagine what He’s like. But Paul says there are some things about God that He’s allowed us to know, and those things are so plain and so obvious that no one has an excuse to not believe in Him, no one has an excuse for their sins against Him, and no one has an excuse to say God isn’t justified in punishing us for those sins.

So what are the plain and obvious ways that everyone can know that something beyond us, some higher power, exists? I’m glad you asked, because there are a lot of them. Today, though, I’m going to give you just three. We can know there is a God by creation, by nature, and by our deepest longings. Let’s take those one at a time.

First, we can know there is a God because of creation, and by creation I mean the moment our entire universe began.

William Lane Craig is a Christian philosopher and just about the smartest person in the world as far as I’m concerned. He has a great argument for this. Here’s how he states it in simple terms:

According to every bit of science that we know, everything that exists has to have a beginning. Whether it’s us or a tree or a mountain or a galaxy, something had to cause it to come into existence.

Well, the universe exists, doesn’t it? Obviously, because we’re here.

So the universe had to have a beginning too. That means something had to cause the universe to come into existence. Something had to create the universe.

But anything that could create the universe had to exist outside the universe. Right? You can’t create something that you’re already in.

And if that Creator’s outside of our universe, then He has to be outside of time. Which means that Creator has to be eternal. He has to be immensely powerful and wise. And we call that Creator God.

That’s a pretty good argument, isn’t it? But it gets better, because there’s proof of a God like that written inside those first seconds of creation.

I cannot disagree more with Christians who say that science is evil. That’s just not true at all. And you should never be afraid that science is going to discover something that disproves God, because that can’t happen.

Here’s what science can tell us: From the biggest galaxies to the smallest particles, everything exists because of very basic physical laws, and those laws are so precise that if they were off by even a fraction of a fraction, nothing would exist. No stars, no planets, and no life at all.

The force of gravity is one of those. If the force of gravity was changed by just 10 to the 60th parts, none of us would exist. And how big is that number, 10 to the 60th? It’s 10 followed by 60 zeroes. It’s a number that’s bigger than the amount of cells in your body. It’s more than the amount of seconds that have passed since time began. If just one of those huge amount of numbers was off by just a fraction, none of us would be here.

The same goes for how fast our universe is expanding. That number is 10 to the 120th parts, so twice the amount of seconds since time began: Ten followed by 120 zeroes. If just one of those numbers were off, we’d have no galaxies, no stars, no nothing.

Or how about this number. This is called the Penrose Number, named after a famous physicist. It’s the most important number to know. The odds that at the moment of creation, our universe had the exact ingredients to form life in the exact measure was 1 in 10 to the 123rd part, 10 followed by 123 zeroes. That number is larger than all the atoms in the universe. Those are the odds of our universe coming into existence with everything already in place to produce life — 1 in 10 followed by 123 zeroes. To put that number into perspective, you’d have better odds if you rolled a pair of dice and had them come up snake eyes 200 million times in a row, every day, for 41 days.

Now, tell me there isn’t a God.

To understand all of those numbers and physical laws requires a brain bigger than the one I have. So God makes it even simpler. Paul says in verse 19 that He makes Himself plain, and He does that in the natural things of this world.

In Psalm 19, verses 1-2, David writes this: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.”

Did you happen to see the mountains yesterday afternoon? I’ve been looking at those mountains for 51 years, I’ve never seen the mountains look like that. Or have you ever been at the beach at sunset and look out over the water? Have you ever been out in the woods or by a lake or a stream and just had this sudden overwhelming sense of how beautiful everything is? That feeling is God tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “Yeah, I made that. Think about how beautiful it all is, and then think about how much more beautiful its Creator has to be.”

When we look through a telescope at all those stars, we see the glory of God. When we look through a microscope at the tiniest cell, we see the intelligence of God. When we think about the fact that there’s 60,000 miles of blood vessels inside your body, we see the wisdom of God. Everything in nature cries out in praise of the One who made it all.

I’ll give you one last bit of evidence, and in a lot of ways it’s my own favorite because everyone’s experienced it at some point: Our deepest longings point to a Creator.

Here’s how that works. Every natural desire you have has something in this world that can satisfy that desire. You get hungry. Well, there’s such a thing as food to satisfy that hunger. You get thirsty, there’s such a thing as water to satisfy that thirst. But there are some desires in us that nothing on earth can satisfy.

We all desire peace inside. We all want joy that can’t be taken away. We all want to be completely safe. We all want our lives to go on forever. We all want to never feel pain.

But what in this world can give us any of those things? Nothing. So there has to be something more than this world to satisfy those desires.

C.S. Lewis said it best. He wrote, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Of course, people try to argue this point too. Some of them will say, “Well sure, I’m not happy. But I would be if I had ten million dollars.” Would you? Because that’s been tried for a few thousand years, and it hasn’t worked for anyone yet. Not even Solomon. You could gain the whole world, it still wouldn’t be enough to fill your heart.

God didn’t just write Himself into creation. He didn’t just write Himself into nature. He wrote Himself into the deepest part of every human heart too. And that is why in verse 20, Paul says none of us have an excuse to say, “There is no God.”

But plenty of people do still make excuses, don’t they? Why is it that for some people the truth of God is more real than anything in this world, but for others, it doesn’t seem like anything you try to tell them makes a difference? That’s what Paul talks about from verses 21-25.

Our God isn’t a God who just sits up in heaven and leaves things to take care of themselves. He is constantly chasing us, constantly trying to get our attention, constantly drawing us toward Him. But remember, we still have free will. It is still our decision whether to believe in God or not, so what happens when people don’t?

In verse 20, Paul says that since everything in creation points to a Creator, no one has an excuse to say they don’t believe in God, or that there isn’t enough evidence for them to believe in God. But these people still make excuses, all kinds of excuses. They don’t honor God as Creator in verse 21. They don’t give thanks for the wonders of creation, for their lives, for the way God works in and around them everyday, and for just who God is. None of their thinking is pointed toward heaven. It’s all pointed at themselves.

And so what happens is something like a spiritual downward progression starting at the end of verse 21 and going through verse 22. First, their thinking becomes bad. And then their hearts grow foolish, and then dark. So once your thinking is futile, your heart is darkened. And once your heart is darkened, in verse 22, a terrible thing happens — you think you’re wise, but you’re really a fool.

That’s the world we live in now. That’s the nation we live in now. Because as a society, the first thing we did was turn our backs on God. We stopped honoring Him. We stopped giving thanks to Him. And so our thinking became futile. Then our hearts were darkened. And now we’re becoming a nation of fools even though we keep saying we’re the smartest and wisest nation in the world.

That’s the path, because God will keep drawing us to Him, but at a certain point He’s going to say, “Okay then, have it your way.” That’s what happened to Pharaoh. His heart was hardened. If you look back to the plagues in Egypt, God keeps warning and warning Pharaoh through Moses to listen. For the first five plagues, Pharaoh hardens his own heart. It’s his own choice. It’s only starting with the sixth plague that God starts hardening Pharaoh’s heart, because at that point God says, “Fine. Here are the consequences of your decisions.”

That’s where we are now. God has given us evidence of His existence everywhere we look, whether it’s in the farthest galaxy or the deepest ocean or the nearest forest or our own beating hearts. But many of us still say, “There’s no God. And more than that, there’s no reason for a God.”

But we all still worship something, don’t we? That’s another evidence of God, by the way. Scientists are starting to discover that religion is actually built into us, into our DNA. We’re born with a desire to worship, and that desire is going to be fulfilled in some way or another. No matter who we are, we worship something. You don’t have a choice in that. The only choice you have is in what you worship.

But too many do what Paul says in verse 23 — they exchange the glory of the immortal God, the Creator, the ultimate source of every good thing, for things that will never satisfy them, never fill them, and never save them. And because by their own free choice they exchange the truth of God for a lie that there is no God in verse 25, God gives them up in verse 24. God removes the restraints that His love and grace put on them, and allows them to just go about their lives as they see fit.

That’s how we have the world we have today. An atheist will say, “Well if there’s a God, and that God wants everyone to know Him, then why doesn’t He just put a giant sign in the sky?”

But would that work? We live in a time when so much can be faked that we’re not sure what’s true and what’s a lie. If God made a sign in the sky, how many people would believe it? How many people would say, “Well that’s just a fake, or that’s just an alignment of the stars. That’s not God, that’s natural.”

Remember the parable of the rich man and Lazarus? The rich man is sent to hell, and he begs Abraham to send Lazarus back to warn his family that there’s a whole lot more to this world than we can see and hear and touch? Remember what Abraham says? “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

For a lot of people, nothing will make them believe there’s a God. That’s because even though they say they’re being rational or scientific or realistic, they’re not. They cry out for proof but they don’t want proof deep down. Deep down they don’t want there to be a God because they don’t want to be held accountable for the lives they live and the choices they make. For 99% of people, atheism is not a head problem. It’s a heart problem.

The truth is God has written clues about Himself everywhere we look. But they’re clues, not proof. And that bugs us, doesn’t it? Until you realize that God’s not interested in proof. He’s interested in faith. God will give you just enough to say, “Yes, it has to be Him.” But then you still have to take that step of faith toward Him. That’s how He wants it, because faith means a relationship. And in the end that’s why He’s written Himself into those first moments of creation, and into the fundamental laws of our universe, and into nature, and into your deepest desires. Because the maker of it all wants a relationship . . . with . . . you.

Your own personal proof for God is in your own life. In the experiences you’ve had with Him, in those dark times He pulled you out of, in all the small moments of your most boring day when He gave you just a little glimpse of who He is.

But those doubts still come, don’t they? Even to us, even to the faithful. And that’s where I want to finish out this sermon. Because it helps to understand why there are some who say there isn’t a God even though there’s so much evidence for Him, but it helps us more to understand why sometimes we have our own doubts. And we all do. Those doubts come when we watch the news and wonder what in the world God is doing, or when something terrible happens in our lives and we wonder where in the world God is.

I want you to listen to me now. Somebody needs to hear this today. We all know there’s a God. And we all know God has a plan. But sometimes that plan makes absolutely no sense to us, doesn’t it? Do you know why? Because we’re just given pieces of it. Tiny little pieces here and there.

Sometimes we can look back into our past and see how God worked things out. But we can hardly ever see how that plan is unfolding in the present, and of course we can’t see how that plan will work out in the future at all, because the future hasn’t happened yet.

Most of the time when you start doubting God’s existence, it’s because what you’re really doubting is God’s plan. You can’t understand what He’s doing or why He’s doing it, and so you start wondering if God’s even there. And that’s okay. You’re not supposed to understand it.

But sometimes that’s the problem. Because as a believer, you start doubting when you get so focused on trying to figure out God’s plan that you stop looking at God. Don’t do that, because you’re not able to know hardly anything about what that plan is. Focus instead on God, because you’re able to know a great deal about who He is.

You know Him from prayer. You know Him from His word. You know Him from church. You know Him from your own experience. All of those tell you that God is infinitely powerful — every moment of your life, every moment of history, is being guided and controlled by Him. God is infinitely good — everything He does in your life is for your benefit; sometimes not immediately, but always eternally. God is infinitely loving — He’s promised never to leave you or forsake you. And God is always trustworthy — He always keeps His every word.

You know a whole lot more about God than you do about God’s plan, whether it’s for your life or for this world. So don’t trust in a plan that you can’t know, trust in a Planner who you can know. Because that’s going to lead you past all your doubts to an unshakable faith.

And if you’re ready to take that step of faith today, I invite you down here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father in this world all of us are given to doubt. We don’t see as You see, we only are given glimpses of shadows. We don’t know as You know, but live our lives in ignorance of what truly is and truly matters. And yet You are a God who is not afraid of our doubts. In fact You welcome them, because when we doubt but truly search for You, You will always meet us, always encourage us, and always strengthen our knowledge of You. We pray that You continue to show us more and more of You every day, and we thank You that in every breath, every star, every blade of grass, You shout out your presence and truth. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.