Why Bother?

Apologetics Series - 3

Scent of a Distant Flower
The Gospel and our Search for God

Dissatisfaction is a feature of our human condition. This message, the third in a series on ‘Christian Apologetics’, given at a an evening service in St. Albans Presbyterian Church, Palmerston North, New Zealand, on 4 February 1996, relates this sense of unfulfilment to our basic need for God.

Our Need for God

Human beings are created by God, for relationship with God. The Bible affirms that we are created in God’s image and likeness (Genesis1:26-27). Our humanity is designed to be fulfilled by God and in relationship with God.

This means that if we live our lives without God we will be fundamentally dissatisfied, unfulfilled. Nothing created, nothing in this world, nothing transitory, can fulfil this basic need for God with which we are created, and which constitutes our humanness.

Because we are created with this fundamental need for relationship with God, the basic longing or aspiration which rises from it does not cease to exist when people turn away from God. This thirst or quest for meaning and transcendence still exists when we turn away from God, for it is a fundamental feature of our humanity. But when redirected towards created things, it reaches out to objects which by their very nature cannot satisfy it. Finite things cannot satisfy an infinite thirst. We are created with a God-shaped mesh in our hearts, and anything less than God slips through the mesh, leaving us unsatisfied.

Unsatisfied Longing

This sense of unsatisfied longing is a characteristic of our fallen human condition. Though it is widely overlooked or suppressed in our contemporary success-oriented materialistic Western culture, it has been remarked on by thoughtful and honest people for centuries:

• The Greek philosopher Plato, in one of his dialogues, compares human beings to leaky jars, which are never totally filled (Gorgias, 3 b-d). We may pour many things into the container of our lives, but somehow we are never fully filled (which is the Old English derivation of the word ‘fulfil’). We are always partly empty, and experience a lack of fullness or happiness.

• The late fourth century Christian theologian, Augustine, who came to God after a long search in philosophy, rhetoric, sexual experience and religion, acknowledged to God in his autobiography, the world’s first: ‘You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you’ (Confessions, I.i.1).

A Point of Contact

The Christian message claims to fulfil this ultimate human longing, by offering the means for restoring our relationship with God. Alister McGrath, in his book Bridgebuilding: Effective Christian Apologetics (Leicester, InterVarsity Press, 1992, pp. 52-3), says this feeling of dissatisfaction is ‘one of the most important points of contact for gospel proclamation.’ In the first place, the gospel ‘interprets this vague and unshaped feeling, as a longing for God. Secondly, ‘it offers to fulfil it.’ McGrath says, ‘There is a sense of divine dissatisfaction . . . a dissatisfaction with all that is not God, which arises from God, and which ultimately leads to God.’

McGrath’s view is that this sense of unfulfilment is one of the best points of contact for presenting the Christian message to our contemporaries. Many people today live their lives in a sometimes hectic pursuit of satisfaction through pleasure, sexual encounters, money, work, educational qualifications, technology, computing, sport, entertainment, music, artistic achievement, or marginal experiences. It is my belief that there will be a growing sense of dissatisfaction as people discover that these things - some of them good in and of themselves - cannot satisfy the deepest need of our human spirit for transcendence and personal meaning. Like the television advertisements which are its symbols, our materialistic consumer culture offers us glittering dreams, but does not (and in the light of the human condition, cannot) deliver what it promises.

A good contemporary illustration of this condition of unfulfilledness is U2’s song, ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ (on their 1987 album, The Joshua Tree, © 1987 Blue Mountain Music & Chappell Music):

I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for
I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for
I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colours will bleed into one
But yes I’m still running

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

You know I believe it
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.

Our Search for God

The Biblical prophet Isaiah poetically describes a number of factors which lead people to seek for God:

• Thirst ‘Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters’ (Isaiah 55:1). Longing for water speaks of an inner dryness, an emptiness within, which cries out to be quenched. The Christian message tells us that this an eternal thirst that only God can fulfil. As Jesus said to a Samaritan woman by a well, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’ (John 4:14). In every person there is an infinite longing which Jesus, the Son of God, can fulfil.

• Dissatisfaction People ‘spend their money for what is not bread’, and ‘labour for that which does not satisfy’ (Isaiah 55:2). They squander their energies on things that cannot nourish them. They toil for things that do not bring satisfaction. They work for goals that do not fufil their aspirations. They live their lives pursuing activities that cannot bring them ultimate happiness.

• Searching ‘Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near’ (Isaiah 55:6). People search for meaning or purpose in life. But many are searching in the wrong places. They mean well, but go astray. They follow their own ideas, they go their own way. They end up lost and disillusioned. That is why the prophet calls people to redirect their search. ‘Let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord’ (Isaiah 55:7). We need to bring our misdirected thoughts and aspirations to God - to the one who knows better what is best for us, whose ‘thoughts are not our thoughts’ and whose ‘ways are not our ways’ (Isaiah 55:8-9).

• Guilt The prophet speaks of God’s mercy and pardon. ‘Let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon’ (Isaiah 55:7). Clearly implied here is something else that drives people to seek after God: a sense of guilt or moral failure. Guilt is an awareness that we have failed, not just to meet our personal goals in life, but to attain the moral perfection which we long for. Guilt is falling short of perfection, failing to attain God’s standard of holiness. ‘All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3:23).

The Gospel Offer

Isaiah 55 also sets out the basic elements in the Christian message that answer to these aspects of our searching:

• It is free ‘You that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.’ (Isaiah 55:1). The Gospel is a gift of God’s free, unmerited grace. It is not of works (Ephesians 2:8-9). It is not something we deserve, or can earn. It is God’s undeserved gift. It is something infinitely precious, but without price; something immensely costly, but given to us free.

• It is satisfying ‘Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.’ (Isaiah 55:2). Salvation is good. It is compared to rich food. It is pleasing and delightful. In God’s presence is fullness of joy. God’s eternal provision satisfies our basic hunger, quenches our deepest thirst. ‘My flesh is real food,’ says Jesus, and ‘my blood is real drink’ (John 6:55).

• It is enduring ‘Listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant.’ (Isaiah 55:3). Our feeling of unfulfilment is often because we have been let down or cheated by the transience of life’s experiences. By contrast, the Gospel can offer lasting fulfilment and satisfaction because it is based on God’s consistent character - his covenant faithfulness, his ‘steadfast, sure love,’ for his people (Isaiah 55:3). God’s promises are permanent, his love is loyal, his troth trustworthy, his salvation steadfast.

• It is abundant If we return to him, God ‘will abundantly pardon’ our wrongdoings and failures (Isaiah 55:7). There is no wrong that God cannot put right. There is no failure that he cannot forgive. There is no sin that besets us that he cannot save us from. He can ‘abundantly pardon’. The worst we can do he can outflank. However weighted against us the scales of justice may be, Christ’s saving work on the cross far outweighs it all and tips the scales in our favour.

• It is infinite ‘My thought are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ (Isaiah 55:8-9). You will never get bored with God. His mind is immeasurably greater than ours, his thoughts higher than our thoughts, his ways different from our ways. There is always more of God to be discovered, and delighted in. The contemplation of God is a perpetual discovery, and that is its delight (Vladimir Lossky, The Vision of God [London, Faith Press, 1963], pp. 36, 74). His mystery is more mysterious than any human mystery, his beauty more beautiful than any earthly beauty, his glory more glorious than any created splendour.