A chat with a Pastor (part 1)

Close to my home here is a man meet on a few occasions. A friend of a friend.  He is friendly, approachable, and reasonable and in some sense this makes it all the more surprising to also know he is also a Pastor of a local church.

Recently, I have been in a discussion with him and thought I would use the material as a blog post (seeing as though original content is scarce here).  So what follows is a straight cut and paste of the discussion with the boring introduction removed (he posted a note that atheists not finding god being equivalent to a thief not finding a policeman).

I have removed any reference to other people’s name to protect their identity, and it would serve no purpose to reveal who they are in any case.

I was sitting at the gardens a few years ago and I was thinking about the bible verse that says God is evident in the natural world and I thought to myself that even though nature is awe inspiring it’s also for the most part oblivious to my presence. I can stand at the top of Mt Wellington and 100 years from now the mountain will still be there but I won’t be. I was thinking that there needed to be more to it than just nature because what nature told me was that God is awe inspiring but indifferent to mankind. As I was sitting on the bench looking around I felt rather alone even though I was surrounded by beauty. Then I had one of those moments where you look a little harder and I noticed something that had been there all along but I’d missed. Looking down between my feet I noticed that the ground was teeming with insects, they were everywhere. I wasn’t alone – I was surrounded by life. What had changed? My perspective had changed. The insects had been there all along but I hadn’t noticed them. God is awe inspiring but he’s also personable. I could list umpteen times that God has broken through into my world but as you stated above, we’re all different and we all need different evidence to believe.

I might ask what the ants were doing. My imagination has them fighting for survival, fending off predators, competing for food, dismembering the body of another lost life to drag back to the queen and the hungry pupae.

While that may be a pessimistic view, I think it’s also realistic. We are told either God made it like this from the start, or after the fall everything started killing each other (which makes me wonder how everything survived beforehand).

It nature beautiful? Yes. Brutal? Yes. Thrilling and uplifting? Yes. Terrifying? Yes Are all these aspects of God, or just the bits that make you feel nice? Why? What about the awful stuff, are they not ultimately the results of God’s actions?

Of course, these arguments are directed at the nature of a proposed god, and the arguments of design only support a creator, but that’s not the god you believe in, is it? You believe in a specific creator, who did specific things. Each of these claims require more evidence to support them. You can’t go from creative force to Jesus without supplying additional data.

Good points Andrew – nature points to a designer/creator but it doesn’t speak of a personable God except in the broadest of ways. There’s an interesting film out called Expelled. No Intelligence Allowed. Not sure if you can get it here in OZ but you can find it online. It helps to debunk some of the media hysteria and hype surrounding intelligent design which I think you’d appreciate. It would be good to get your take on it. From a Christians point of view I liked it.

Ben Stein’s movie? I have not watched it all, but it is full of fallacies and errors. Firstly, he talks about “Intelligent Design not being about religion” then goes on to say things like “scientists do not want God in the class room”, or scolds Richard Dawkins for proposing the possibility that aliens seeded life on Earth (an idea he does not hold to, but which is completely compatible with intelligent design).

Let me ask you – is intelligent design creationism? Does it have anything to do with the existence of a god? What predictions does it make that we can use to verify its accuracy? Disproving another theory does nothing to support your own.

Someone else sent me a few movies trying to convince me Yahweh is real, and I wish I had time to review all of them. Perhaps I should make the time?

There’s only so much that we can tell about God from nature – to really understand the nature and intent of God we need more – which is one of the reasons that Jesus came. “You want to know what God is like? Then Check me out, listen to me – I only do what he’s doing and say what I’ve heard him say.” Jesus’ words paraphrased. I Jesus we have the most complete picture of God in a form that humanity can understand.

We should all be like Jesus and do what he says? Should we sell everything we own and give it away (Mark 19:17-21, Luke 18:22, Luke 12:33, Luke 9:23, Luke 12:33)? Should I kill those who will not obey me (Luke 19:27)? Should I hate my family (Luke 14:26)? Should I sell my cloak and buy a sword (Luke 22:36)? Should I wonder into churches are trash them if they are making money (John 2:13-22)? Which of these should I be doing and why? If none, why?

On top of that I could give you my own personal story – my encounters with God that go way beyond coincidence. When I was at uni during my first year my big question about God was that if he was real then surely he should be able to break through into the natural world and effect it.

I am afraid your personal stories are just that. I cannot know what you know, feel what you feel, think how you think. I was not there, I do not know the circumstances, and I may have reacted differently. Revelations are by their very nature personal. Do I doubt you had an experience? No. Can I be assured it was what you say it was, and your conclusions are correct? No.

I remember one day leaving for uni and saying to God that it would be nice if someone came and asked me about Him rather than me having to instigate the conversation. I arrived early for my tutorial and as I was making my way to the room a girl from my class asked me if I could chat with her for a while. She said that she knew I was a christian but didn’t know if God was real but she said that she respected me and if I believed in God then there might be something in it. I was impressed :) as you can imagine – we had a good chat and that was the end of that. Two weekends later her boyfriend broke up with her (a mate of mine), she was devastated. I saw her on Monday at uni and feeling like a dork said if she wanted to talk I was there and that I would pray for her. She appreciated it.

The question that burns in my mind (and is unanswerable) is “what would have happened if you did not pray”? Would the girl in question have overcome her grief? Could she have moved on with her life without being contacted by god in some ethereal fashion? I think so.

That night I went to one of those all you can eat nights at the Pizza Hut with a whole bunch of people from our class and she came along. So did her ex boyfriend – awkward :) As I was driving home I prayed that God would fill her with his peace and that she’d know it was him.

The next day I didn’t see her to the last lecture of the day and she said she needed to talk to me at the end of the lecture. I freaked thinking that she was suicidal :) Didn’t pay much attention to the lecture.

We went outside and she said to me that she’d had the most amazing experience the night before. Lying in bed just before falling asleep she had seen Jesus standing beside her bed. She had then seen a bright light above her bed and as it got closer she’d felt a pressure in her chest which suddenly lifted and she was filled with an incredible peace. I don’t know who was more surprised, her or me. Here was a girl who didn’t know if God existed and she sees Jesus and experiences a peace so powerful that her mother noticed something was different the moment she came into the kitchen the next morning.

As for the girl apparition, again I cannot speak for her of what she experienced. To me it’s not much a surprise seeing as though she was undergoing trauma and she already had ideas of Jesus floating around in her head. How did she now it was Jesus? Was the vision real or a dream? The mind is an amazing think capable of producing all sort of illusions (although this is not the place to start a discussion about the veil of perception)

Whilst this story is great you can’t turn it on and off when you want. I’ve asked God to show himself to me and seen absolutely nothing but then at times when my thoughts have been a million miles away from God he’s broken through into my world in an unmistakeable way. The bible says that God is spirit which is different to what we see in the natural world. Communicating with our spirit is different to communicating with my physical senses. Just like a champion sprinter needs to learn how to move differently through water as opposed to land we need to realise that a relationship with God is different to our natural relationships. This fact alone can be very discouraging for many people until you start to realise what you’re dealing with. The apostle Paul said that we see things dimly as through a glass but there’s coming a day when we eave this plane and we will see things as clear as day.

Tell me, in what way do you know “in an unmistakeable way” that what you experience happens to be the god you believe in?

One thing that I’ve found to be true is that God isn’t phased by tough questions. I’m always asking questions – some I get answers to and some I’m still waiting on.

Before we start talking about our “spirit”, can I please ask you to define what it is and how we know it to be real? Then we might explore how it interacts with other possible entities in another realm and how we know those things.

(On to part 2)