How Can We Find God?

“I am really trying to find God. How do I know when I have found him? I started searching about four years ago, and I’m still not sure if God knows I exist. Any insight would be helpful. Thanks.”

Thank you for your honest question about finding God. You have been persistent in your search. Let’s see if we can give you some insights.

First of all, here is a promise from God Himself: “If you look for Me in earnest, you will find Me when you seek Me. I will be found by you” (Jeremiah 29: 13-14).

Sometimes people wonder why God hasn’t revealed Himself more directly than He has. We can’t explain that except to say that many things about God are mysteries. If we could figure everything out about God, would He still be God or merely some human invention?

Here’s what God says about Himself: “My thoughts are completely different from yours,’ says the Lord. ‘And My ways are far beyond anything you can imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55: 8 – 9).

So, we have to realize and accept the fact that God is very different from us, and we can’t know Him like we might know another human being. Yet we can know God, and we can know about Him by accessing the clear and definitive clues He has left for us.

These clues are objective; they are testable. In fact, as you study Christianity and compare it to other religions, you will find that it is the only “testable” religion. It can be tested according to history, archaeology, science, and reason. (You can’t test everything, of course, but you can test enough to give you a high degree of certainty that Christianity is true.)

But don’t forget about the element of faith. God wants you to put your faith and trust in His promise to reveal Himself to you. As almighty God of the universe, He could make His existence and presence painfully obvious to everyone, and He could force our allegiance and worship. Or He could buy our love and loyalty by blessing us with health and prosperity as long as we obeyed him. But that is not how God operates. He wants our obedience and worship to be motivated by a reverential love for Him. We voluntarily believe what we have not yet seen.

Even Christians in New Testament times had to believe in things they couldn’t see. The apostle Paul explained, “so we don’t look at the troubles we can see right now; rather, we look forward to what we have not yet seen. For the troubles we see will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4: 18). He later added, “we live by believing and not by seeing” (2 Corinthians 5: 7).

We are accustomed to living in a world where we believe something only after we have seen it. With Christianity, we will see after we have first believed. When the apostle Thomas had a hard time with this, Jesus Himself said, “blessed are those who haven’t seen me and believe anyway” (John 20: 29).

We know that God is aware of our existence; He already loves you. He is anxious to reveal Himself to you.

Where Did God Come From?

“Where did God come from? If you say He always was and always will be, you’re not really answering the question.”

Where did God come from? Is an excellent and difficult question. The answer is based on both logic and faith.

First, the logic. Everything that exists must have a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. But does that mean that God has a cause? No, if God had a cause, He would not be God. By definition, God is uncaused because an endless string of causes would be impossible. At some point a first cause must have gotten all the other causes going. The best explanation for the first cause is God, who by definition is uncaused.

This rule applies to the universe itself. Science now believes that the universe has a beginning, sometimes referred to as The Big Bang. The question is, where did The Big Bang come from? The only logical answer is that it was initiated by the first cause.

So, what or who is the first cause? This is where faith comes in. You could simply believe that the first cause is an impersonal entity that is completely detached from the universe, or you could believe that the first cause is personal and has communicated with the created world in some way. No one can scientifically prove that the first cause is personal and communicative, but God has given us evidence. It’s up to you to investigate.

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Reference

Bible Answers 101 by Bruce Bickel & Stan Jantz