Is God real?

Nevertheless, by strange coincidence, fresh evidences are constantly accruing which go far to convince even the unwilling scientist of the presence of a Designer’s hand. Stones cry out! Nature speaks!

Creation should, indeed, speak, and its voice be heard. What is invisible in the Creator should be and is seen, and seen clearly, being understood by the things that are made—even His eternal power and Godhead—not, indeed, His grace, or truth, or love, but infinite power and design, so much so that people are left thus without excuse. (See Romans 1:20.) Creation declares the power of God. It does not reveal what He is in Himself—His nature—but to any, except those wilfully blind, it is evidence sufficient of the existence of a Creator-God!

That God exists and that He originated all things is assumed and stated. Unbelieving men may demand that proofs of His existence be produced, but nowhere in Scripture does God condescend to furnish such proofs. Were He to do so they would not be intelligible to the feeble minds of puny men. Moreover they are no more really needed than proofs that the sun exists and shines. That fact could only be doubted by a man who had neither sight nor feeling, and it is just because unbelieving men have neither sight nor feeling of a spiritual sort, that they doubt, or even deny, the existence of God.

That which proves there is a God, proves that we cannot know, nor conceive an idea of Him - i.e., that there must be a cause for what subsists. There is a God, because a thing cannot exist without a cause, but that is not God - it is, after all, only saying that we are finite. I must believe that He is. I am sure that there is a God, because I am sure that what exists, cannot exist without a cause, but what cannot exist without a cause is not God. The impossibility of conceiving existence without a cause (which proves there is a God) is the impossibility of conceiving Him who is that cause, and who exists without one.

320 We see, then, that as the Person of Christ was placed in the foreground as the first, the second main subject of the epistle is the righteousness of God revealed upon the principle of faith, so that it is for all, and to be received through faith, and thus appropriated by the soul. What made this righteousness necessary is the universal sinfulness of man, for the wrath of God has been revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who possess the truth in unrighteousness. With regard to the heathen, the apostle gives two reasons for this wrath. First, the testimony of creation (vers. 19, 20); and, secondly, that, knowing God, they did not wish to retain Him in their knowledge but preferred idolatry (v. 21-24). For the invisible things of Him are seen, that is, His eternal power and Godhead, perceived by the things that are made from the creation of the world; so that what can be known of God is manifested among them, and consequently they are without excuse (v. 20). This does not imply that they know God according to His nature, but that they should have known Him as Creator; unless one is blind, a Creator is seen in the creation.

28 Is not this true? But then there must be a revelation of God in some way, or I (deplorable condition!) remain in total ignorance of Him. I am not saying man is so, but that he must be so if there be no revelation of God. I believe conscience knows that there is a God — Mr. N.'s conscience, my conscience; but it wants something more than it knows: for conscience knows responsibility, and it knows sin — sin lying on itself — on him who has the conscience of it.

Argumentatively, it is an absurdity to make man's mind the measure of God.

I do not overstate the result. For granting that conscience may be much influenced by education, and therefore, putting aside for the moment the consideration of what is judged right or wrong, there plainly remains the existence in men of the power or capacity of discernment of these opposite qualities, even though things wrong may be put for right, and vice versa. As then the capacity to discern these essential qualities exists, the question undoubtedly is, Is there a standard of abstract right and wrong, of morals, by which our ideas derived from education or habit are to be tested? It will not do to say because, with the Spartans, what we call stealing was a virtue, or because the Corinthians deified what we know as lust, or because among savage people what we are taught to call murder is commended, that therefore theft and adultery and murder exist only as relative ideas in our minds. This is really, as I have said, to deny the existence of virtue or goodness, either in the abstract, or absolutely in God. Man's moral nature, except when degraded, scouts the absurdity, and demands as a necessity the existence of abstract moral virtue, and, not only so, but insists that there must also be a perfect and absolute measure of that in God Himself. And therefore conscience leads us directly to the fact of having to do with Him.

Would that those who disbelieve in the resurrection of the dead were similarly impressed by the mighty power of God, and receive the testimony of Scripture. Surely the sceptic is credulous and not the believer. The latter believes that great effects come from correspondingly great causes. The believer acknowledges that the wonders of creation come from the fiat of ALMIGHTY GOD. A sceptic, a man of culture and brains, sought to explain the universe as “a fortuitous concourse of atoms.” But where do the atoms come from, and where did life come from? If the believers were guilty of such brainless nonsense Christianity would perish in a night.

The woes of the human race are beyond the possibility of exaggeration, and seem to rise up at every turn as a witness against the notion of infinite goodness; for if God be all powerful, how is it that for so many millenniums His creature has been left in this corner of His creation to welter unpitied in his wretchedness? Can the Creator be indifferent to the woes of His creature? Who can tell us? Is there no voice from Him?

I am certain if there is no revelation from God, there is no God. But the whole universe around me bears witness to the reality of a Creator, and although the visible things do not contain the secret of the nature of Him who brought them into existence, there is enough of evidence borne by them, to convince every intelligent being that He, without whom a sparrow cannot fall to the ground, could not leave His poor creature without some ray of light as to how he stands with respect to His holy and righteous will.

To those who are interested in the discussion of the a priori and a posteriori arguments on this subject, the above Review may not be without its use so far as it goes, but for our part we are bound to confess the insufficiency of all these reasonings which can never go beyond a must be, and fail to reveal to us the Being after whom the mind of man, however cultivated, does but vainly grope and confess as "God unknown," apart from a divine revelation.

So this is where faith begins, whether for Enoch or for ourselves. It leads us to the knowledge that GOD IS, and this is something very different from the belief that there is a God. Even in these days of scepticism there are to be found multitudes who cannot satisfy their minds, in trying to account for the existence of all things, without postulating the existence of a God, of some sort and somewhere; but this is reason and not faith. Faith it is, and faith only, which puts us into the presence of the LIVING GOD, who knows, and sees, and acts, and makes Himself known, and even rewards those who diligently seek Him. In days when all thought of the living God was fading from the minds of men, Enoch by faith had the living God before him. He diligently sought Him, and consequently he found Him, and there began that remarkable walk with Him which continued for three hundred years.