Living Life Now

Friday, June 23, 2006

Hmmmmm I haven't blogged for quite some time have I? April to be precise !!!
Oh well. I never wanted my blog to be just what I get up to each day, because quite frankly it wouldn't make for fascinating reading (uni, work, gym) !!
So I haven't blogged because firstly I was finishing my 1st year at uni (placement in school was fab !!), and secondly because I didn't have anything really worth writing down !!

BUT... I have now !!!!

I was brought up in an atheist family, and so when I was introduced to the Christian faith, I always (and still do to a certain extent), tried to find simple, almost scientific explanation for the existence of God and everything that goes with it !!!
I would question things like, "Where did God come from?", "Surely Darwin had a point?!", and the very common, "If God exists then why does he allow so much evil in the World?".

This is a big part of the human character in all of us, to try and rationalise everything, even the very thing, the very source, of Creation.
It's certainly a thing that I do, but over the last year in particular, since I was saved and allowed Christ into my life, I have begun to rely on that characteristic less and less. And the reason for this particular blog entry is to state something that has increasingly become more apparent to me, especially of late. That being, that God does not think, act or exist in the same way that humans do !!!!!

Now that may seem like a very obvious thing to say, and in a sense it is. But take for example something that Terry Virgo said at last year's Leadership Conference. He was talking about God being a jealous God, something which is commonplace in the Old Testament; now as humans, we think of jealousy being a bad thing, and certainly not something which we would associate God with. But as Terry said, the way we see jealousy, and the way God sees it are two completly different viewpoints. God has a righteous jealousy, the people of Israel were chasing after other gods, when THE God was the one who saved them. He had the right to be jealous.

Coming back to the "science" of Creation, I stumbled across a website, www.doesgodexist.org.
Because I do have this tendancy to rationalise everything, I found this an interesting little site. The writer (a Christian Scientist) attempts to explain that Science and Faith are companions, not enemies, and that science can answer a lot of questions. For example; atehists would say that there was no beginning, and that 'matter' has always been, we have always just been here, and that it all came together in one Big Bang. Science however would say that there had to be a beginning, because Space is getting bigger and bigger everyday, so going back in time, the universe had to have a starting point.

What I did like about this site was that it stresses that God cannot simply be explained away in scientific terms. It argues that we always tend to think about God in an anthropomorphic (like man) way, when questioning His validity. We ask questions like, "Where did He come from?", "Who created God?". These are very valid questions, especially if you consider I just said that everything had to have a beginning. However, because God is not 'like man', then he doesn't quite fit into that idea; doesgodexist.org argues that God is out side of time, he was there before the beginning and he will be there for eternity after the end, 'time is in His hands' as the song goes.

All this is very encouraging to me, as someone who has held back from giving themselves completely to the christian faith because of my atheist background, and the belief that science is always right. But now I realise that God cannot be explained in those terms. That's one thing I really like about God,He defies 'logic'.