A Prevenient Witness

Just a short thought today.

The faith crises in my life, when they occur (seemingly less and less often, thanks to Him), are rarely about a specific attribute of God, or about Jesus' death or resurrection.

Instead I find myself tempted to doubtfully wonder, if I will wake up one day and realize that the entire Theistic viewpoint was a mental construct.

As an engineer by trade, living in a secular humanist society, that seems to be the most forceful attack on faith for me. It's not a question of the specifics; given the existence of God as He has declared Himself to be in His Word, the rest all follows naturally, and can be to some extent logically inferred. There is then merely the issue of living as we have been called to live, day by day.

In Taiwan, I was hit pretty hard on this front, living among literally millions of people for whom the pressing issue of Christ's identity and the nature of God (in the Biblical sense of GOD) was neither something to viciously attack or gratefully accept, but simply irrelevant.

Of course, I know my Redeemer, and even if I had sinfully accepted a lie for a time, He would have called me back. As it was, through the crucible of that time, my identity in Christ was established so firmly for me, that I doubt I will ever be hit so hard from that angle again.
My existence, as I see it, is bound up in this: that I am a child of God.

Take God away from my world view, and there is simply nothing left. He is the source and center of all that is, and I am incapable of viewing the world otherwise.

One thing that He has consistently used to strengthen my faith is the beauty of His creation.
It's hard for me to put my thoughts on it into words, but this world is very... contrived. It's not the kind of place that just happens, it's a very carefully constructed home for us.

Roaming through space, through regions devoid of life far too immense to imagine or even express metaphorically, we suddenly come to a planet perfectly located, angled, and situated for sustaining life. And not just life, but abundant, beautiful life, in a self-sustaining system of unbelievable intricacy and complexity.

Intelligent Design proponents are fond of using the "Watchmaker Theory" to express this thought, but to me, it's not so much like finding a wrist watch in the desert, as, say, New York City.

To imagine that even the basic laws of physics emerged from nothingness is totally absurd.
How can a law exist without a law-giver? We know of no example of order ever coming from disorder. Outside energy must be imposed on the system in order to impose order.

Even atheist physicists, while denying a personal God, must admit that the universe had an initiator of some kind. (the "uncaused cause") Of course, they are unwilling to pursue this further, else their atheism must be short-lived.

But when we look at the world, we do not see a cold, abstract force driving physics, but a personal, artistic touch. Every majestic picture the Hubble sends back is God leaving man "without excuse".

Every time I look out a window, my faith in God is strengthened. A tree alone is a testament to His glory, not to mention a sunrise. And yet people live under this unbelievable, ever-changing visual display we call "the sky", and never seem to notice it, or wonder why it's a thing we have.
To borrow a concept from Lewis, the sky is something you couldn't have imagined.

If the Mona Lisa suddenly appeared on your living room wall, you would no doubt be surprised.
And you would probably not accept this situation as normal, even if it continued for weeks.

That is how I feel about nature. I don't take it for granted, I am continually astonished by it. It, and so many other things. I walk around taking everything in, and wondering why I seem to be the only one surprised to find it there.

Perhaps this is why I sometimes feel as though there is some fundamental difference between myself and almost everyone I know, to the point that there have been times in my life where I felt I was less like a human and more like something sent in from the outside to observe.
Most people seem to have accepted the world they have found themselves in, as if it couldn't have been different. It could have. It could have been drastically different. The miracle is that it is exactly as it is, and I live in continual amazement of that fact.

God was under no requirements to make the world as beautiful as it is. It could have been a drab, flat, uninspiring place, as some small pockets of it are, and we would hardly be in a position to complain about that. But He made mountains, oceans, canyons, volcanoes, coral reefs, rain forests, deserts, billions of creatures in staggering complexity, each one a work of art, together composing the life on this perfectly oriented ball of rock that orbits the raging nuclear explosion in space we call the sun, because THAT IS THE KIND OF GOD HE IS.

-Joseph