As we said at the beginning, this service is especially for our overseas visitors today. But my talk not has a slightly different focus: it is especially for those for whom believing in God is still a puzzle and a problem. Let’s face it – for the majority of people in Cambridge today, whether local or international, that is probably the case. Some would prefer there not to be a God, and are hoping that they will never have to give any serious attention to Him. Others wonder if there just might be a God, and whether there is something more to life than just seventy years of physical existence on earth. And some would love to know if there is some way they could be sure about God one way or another.
One man who was an atheist – he didn’t believe there was a God – was walking alone through the forest. Suddenly a bear leaped before him, growling fiercely. Just before the bear attacked, the atheist cried out, “Oh God, save me!”
The earth stood still, the heavens opened and the atheist heard the voice of God. “Why should I help you, an atheist, after you have denied My existence for all these years?” Trembling, the atheist replied, “Well, I suppose that it would be a pretence for me to become a Christian now . . . I know! Why don’t You make the bear a Christian?”
There was a pause, then God agreed. There was a clap of thunder. The bear fell to its knees, clasped its paws together in prayer and then said, “For what I am about to receive, may the Lord make me truly thankful!”
But no – God does not reveal Himself to us in miraculous ways when we ask Him to or need Him to. In fact, the Bible takes God’s existence for granted – it assumes that there is a God – and it tells us of three different places where God is said to live, and so where we might hope to find Him.
1. “I live in a high and holy place.” (Isaiah 57:15)
The Bible speaks of a God Who is high and lofty, majestic and great beyond our human imagination. ‘For this is what the high and lofty One says – He who lives for ever, Whose Name is holy: “I live in a high and holy place . . .”’ (Isaiah 57:15a).
(a) High.
The Creator God is greater than human beings can grasp.
There was a time when people though that science would provide us with all the answers. There is an English nursery rhyme which goes:-
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are . . .
It had to be rewritten:-
Twinkle, twinkle, giant star,
I know exactly what you are –
An incandescent ball of gas
Condensing to a solid mass.
Twinkle, twinkle, giant star,
I need not wonder what you are,
For seen by spectroscopic ken
You’re helium and hydrogen.
But we do not have that sort of confidence in science any longer. We know that it can provide us with an explanation of how things work, but not of why. I always remember something a next-door neighbour said to me years ago, when I had been asked to call on him in the middle of the night because his wife has just died in the local hospital. She was a Christian. He was not. He said, “As a scientist, for me when something happens in a test-tube, it is fine, but when it is my own wife . . .” and he broke down in tears. Science cannot answer that question – why? – and it cannot explain God away. We have come to realise that, if there is a God at all, He must by definition lie beyond the range of the human mind. After all, He is Himself the Creator of that mind.
(b) Holy.
But, if God is unimaginably great, He is, according to the Bible, also utterly different from human beings. The Bible calls Him ‘holy’ (Isaiah 57:15), by which it means He is entirely and absolutely good. In the last resort, what makes the existence of God a problem for us is not that He is great and we are small, that He is infinite and we are finite, that He is spiritual and we are material, that He is invisible and we are visible; but what makes the existence of God a problem for us is that God is perfect goodness and I am not. It is my selfishness and sin that gives me a problem with the existence of God. If He lives in a high and holy place, then I know I am not able to come there to meet Him.
So our second point –
2. The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. (John 1:14)
Many religions and philosophies speak to us of a God (or a life-force) that lies behind and beyond the physical world that we experience with our senses. But the Bible tells us of a God Who became man and lived among us as a human being. So we are not asked to meet God as an idea, a philosophy, a life-force, a principle, a timeless energy process, but as a Person.
Imagine that I have a pet ant,
which I love very much and I want to tell it how much I love it. If I, as a human being wanted to communicate with my ant, I could provide it with a lovely environment and feed it drops of sugar-water, but the only way it could really get to know me would be if I became an ant and spoke to it as an ant – touched feelers with it, as it were, or however ants talk to one another. God has done that for us – touched feelers with us. The Word that was with God in the beginning, and was God, and through Him all things were made, that Word became flesh and was born on the first Christmas day as a little, tiny baby at Bethlehem. He grew up to be Man like no other man – not the wet, unreal figure with bright blazing eye and beautifully permed hair, wearing a sort of long white nightie, that we like to think of. No, the striking thing about this Man was that He had an ordinary appearance, such that we would not notice Him if He were here now among us, but an extraordinary life, and extraordinary teaching – extraordinarily self-centred teaching, in fact.
Every other great religious leader the world has ever seen has pointed away from himself – Gautama the Buddha to the Middle Way of Buddhism; Mohammed the Prophet to submission to the will of Allah and the Five Pillars of Islam; Confucius to the wisdom of the ancestors, Moses to the Torah of the Jews. But Jesus alone pointed to Himself, saying that He was the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that no one could come to God the Father except through Him.
So, God became a Man. He says to us, “We humans…”, not “You humans…”.
In 1873, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Damien, at his own request, was place on a Pacific island leper colony. Leprosy is an awful disease and they had no cure for it in the nineteenth century, so they put lepers away in settlements on islands, where they could not infect others. There Father Damien lived among the six hundred lepers, bandaging their wounds, building their houses, and burying them when they died. His friends noticed a gradual change in the letters he wrote to them from that leper colony: he stopped referring to ‘these lepers’, and began to speak of ‘we lepers’. He had in fact caught the disease. He became helpless and he died and was buried on that island. He was following in the footsteps of his Lord. God did that. But Father Damien died to no purpose. Jesus came to die.
If we read the story of His life in the four Gospels in the Bible, we discover that about a third of their length is given over to describing how He died. It was not seen as a dreadful defeat, a horrible and ghastly end to a wonderful life. Instead it was seen as the goal and the triumph of that life.
How could this be?
Let me read again the whole of the verse from the prophet Isaiah with which we began – Isaiah 57:15 – ‘This is what the high and lofty One says – He would lives for ever, Whose Name is holy: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.”’ So there is another place where the Bible tells us God lives – we have seen that God lives in a high and holy place; and that He came and lived among us in the person of His Son, Jesus; but He can also live in the heart of an individual human being.
3. . . . so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. (Ephesians 3:17)
What distinguishes human beings from the rest of the animal creation, according to the Bible, is not greater intelligence, nor the ability to speak to each other, nor personality. It is the fact that we can know about God and relate to God. It is what is meant by the spirit or soul. And the Bible claims that, because of what Jesus Christ did for us in His death, we can each know God for ourselves. He can become real for each one of us. This does not come about by nature. (There may be some of us here today who are like I was for twenty years of my life. God was a theory for me, but He was not real. For Him to become real, I had to accept that He was not yet real, that Christ did not dwell in my heart through faith – in fact, that I was cut off from Him, and that something needed to happen for Him to become real for me.)
So, how is it possible that God could come to live in my heart?
I have to accept that there is a God who made me and who loves me,
but that for my part I have lived my life as if there was no God, paying no attention to His will for me, and just doing what I want to please myself. The Bible calls it sin:
God sent His Son, Jesus, to live as a human being on earth to show us what God is life, so that we can see His perfection in human form:
But Jesus did not just live and teach to show us what God is like. He died on the cross to take the punishment, the separation from God, that my sin has caused me:
He died in my place so that I might be forgiven and relate to God,
and He rose again from the dead, so that He may now live in my heart by faith;
so that, as He experienced my death (my punishment and separation from God), so I can experience His life (His living, real relationship with God). Invisibly Jesus is present in the heart of every believer in this gathering now. You may have no sense of the reality of Jesus, but He may be right beside you where you are sitting, through His Spirit dwelling in the heart of a believer.
That is how human sin is dealt with. That is how Jesus is entirely different from every other religious leader the world has ever seen. He alone deals with sin and brings us back into a relationship with God.
Do you remember what it was like to take an exam? (I know this will be more vivid for some of us than for others.) But please imagine the most important exam of your life, when you were bent over the desk, poring over the exam paper, sweating with anxiety, as your heart fluttered and you knew that everything depended on how you did in the next hour or so. Imagine that scene. It is the most important exam you have ever taken in your life. Your whole future depends on it. And then the examiner, the invigilator, walks along the row of desks and stops behind yours. You think to yourself, “Why has he stopped there? It is not as if I am cheating at the moment!” Then he taps you on the shoulder and he says, “Excuse me, is your name Mark Ashton?” and you say, “Yes”. “You don’t need to take this exam.” “Yes, I do,” you say, “It is the most important exam of my life and I have to pass it.” “No, you don’t,” he says. “See – I have your name written down here on this list of those who have already passed, with credit. You do not have to take this exam. You can walk out of the exam hall now.”
It is like that with our lives. Very many of us have a sense that we ought to be better than we are, and that, if there is a God at all, then we have got to try to be better people in order to have a relationship with Him. We are, as it were, bent over our exam desks, trying desperately to pass an exam in good behaviour and good intentions. Then Jesus come to us, and taps us on the shoulder, and says, “You know, you do not have to take this exam. I have already passed it in your place.” He does not show us a list with our name on it. But He shows us His hands with the prints of the nails in them, and He says, “You can get up now and walk out of the exam hall into the freedom of a real and living relationship with God, Who sent Me to die in your place on the cross for your sins.”
If you would like to do that, to come to know God today, that is all you have to do:
Admit that God is not real to you at the moment, because your sin has cut you off from Him. You can’t come to the high and holy place.
Accept that Jesus died for your sins when He became flesh and made His dwelling among us.
Ask that by His Spirit Christ may dwell in your heart through faith.
That is all it takes to start the Christian life.