Some time back we saw that creation points us to the Creator (e.g. Ps.19:1; Rom.1:20). Also, we all have God’s law written upon our hearts (Rom.2:14-16). Finally, Christ points us more directly to God as He is God in the flesh (John 1:1, 14; Col.2:9). Yet there are other pointers to God in our day to day lives. N. T. Wright rightly does not claim them as proofs, but has called them ‘echoes of a voice’. Earlier, Peter Berger wrote of ‘a rumour of angels’. Years ago I read of a hardened atheist who was converted when his baby daughter was born. Nothing in his atheism could explain the little baby or his feelings towards her. There are hints everywhere of God’s existence and presence.
The first one is spirituality. This is a buzz word these days and even the average pagan may not feel unduly threatened by it. Looking up one’s star signs can be deemed ‘spiritual’. It is, of course, an affront to God but it does indicate a desire within us to know something of a world beyond our own which can yet inform our own. Hardened atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris have to believe that all religions are absolutely and thoroughly wrong at their core, but the most ardent evangelical can believe that there are at least some glimmers of truth even in the most abject forms of superstition. Augustine in his Confessions says that when he joined the dualistic cult of Manichaeism, nothing could entirely captivate him unless the name of Christ were in it. The missionary bishop and martyr, John Coleridge Patteson, contended that ‘There is an element of faith in superstition; we must fasten on that, and not rudely destroy the superstition, lest with it we destroy the principle of faith in things and beings unseen.’ This can be abused, as can anything, but in itself it is surely correct.
Beauty is another pointer to God. The local garbage dump may be more useful than the local botanical garden, but the latter is far more attractive. Beauty may achieve little, but a beautiful painting or a beautiful sunset are just simply, well, beautiful. There can be a vain beauty which ensnares us, and which confronts us every day from Hollywood and its satellites. Yet Scripture says that God has ‘made everything beautiful in its time’ (Eccles.3:11). The Psalmist even wanted to behold the beauty of the Lord (Psalm 27:4), which no doubt provides part of the inspiration for John Monsell’s exhortation for us to ‘Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.’
Relationships are another pointer to God. God declares that it is generally not good for man to be alone (Gen.2:18). Allan Bloom says of the lover: ‘He knows that he is not self-sufficient. The lover is the clearest expression of man’s natural imperfection and his quest for perfection.’ Loneliness is one of the most difficult things in life that people face. When Jeremiah said: ‘I sat alone, because Your hand was upon me, for You had filled me in indignation’ (Jer.15:16b), he was in part lamenting his condition. Where did this desire for love and friendship – even what Dr Johnson inelegantly called our ‘Clubbableness’ – come from? It is written into our DNA by God Himself. Strange, perhaps, that we live in days when the demand for absolute equality has coincided with the collapse of much sense of community.
Other pointers are freedom, justice, and joy. When we come across these things, as concepts enshrined in words or enacted in the lives of people, we see something of God. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, grabs the consciousness of all who hear it, even if they cannot grasp its role in the scheme of the whole biblical revelation. W. H. Auden was an atheistic communist when he met Charles Williams, and recorded that he felt ‘for the first time in my life … in the presence of personal sanctity’. There is a longing in us which is something like hunger, which leaves an ache until it is filled. Then we find what Bach wrote of: ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Christ is thus the subject of Isaac Watts’ hymn, ‘Joy to the World’. All else is the shadows; Christ alone is the reality.
With warmest regards in Christ,
– Peter Barnes