"But without faith it is impossible to please him, for he that cometh to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." (Heb. 11:6.)

". . . that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, earth, the sea, and all things that are therein. Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless, he left not himself without witness in that he did good and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons filling our hearts with food and gladness." (Acts 14:15-17.)

Some continuously wrestle with the matter of the existence of God. If this issue is not firmly settled, we cannot make progress in our response to God. How committed will we be to a God that we are not sure exists? How ready will we be to obey Him?

If I understand the argument of unbelieving scientists, they reject God because they have established some parameters which rule out the existence of God from the very start. That is, in order to accept the reality of a being, he must be seen with the eye and heard with the ear and touched with the hands. In other words, he must be physical. The evidence demanded is empirical. Since the God of Scripture is a Spirit being, they have ruled out the possibility of God by their own narrowly drawn boundaries. Is this not what they wanted to do anyway? Are we serious about searching for answers concerning the existence of God?

Do we really expect God, One who created the world, to be a physical, temporary, weak, contingent creature found among men and the animal world?? Should we not expect someone greater than we? No one should think that one can put God in a box. Christians and atheists often try to do just that.

Christians can err in presenting simple solutions to complex problems. Life is very complex. We misrepresent our predicament if we say that there is a good God in heaven and everything is alright. C. S. Lewis called this "Christianity-and-water view." (The Case For Christianity, 431.) As a child, we might have believed that all things were bright and beautiful. God loves me and He will protect me. All is well; nothing sad and serious will ever happen to me. This, of course, leaves out the reality of evil, hell and the devil. Redemption implies that we are saved from something destructive. As we grow up, we learn that things are not quite so simple.

Things look simple, but they are not. A table looks simple enough to explain. But ask a scientist to tell you what a table is really made of---all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and transmits images to the brain. Just seeing a table lands us in mysteries and complications which are difficult to fully explain. Someone complains that I am making things too difficult. No, I am not making them difficult. That is just the way things are in life. If you really want to know about things in our world, you must be prepared for something difficult.

Evil, sin and tragedies are difficult issues. Life is not simple and easy to understand. One woman, who suffered terrible injuries in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, can testify that life is not always pretty and enjoyable. Susan Walton is a member of the North MacArthur church in Oklahoma City. When the bomb exploded April 19, 1995, she suffered many broken bones, a ruptured spleen, and nerve damage that left her crippled. She has undergone 20 surgeries. While she was in Denver testifying in the Timothy McVeigh trial, Susan received word that her Oklahoma City home had gone up in flames. She was a Christian who trusted in God, yet her life was broken and shattered by the evil act of one man. Then, to add insult to injury, her home was destroyed by a fire. (Gospel Advocate, September 2000, 21.)

Beware of simplistic answers to great questions. Reality is complex. Christianity addresses the difficult issues of life. It takes on sin, death, evil and Satan directly. Solutions are offered. Not easy, painless solutions. But satisfying and hopeful solutions. Great problems require sufficient means of solving them. Evolution does not offer any solutions to the great questions of life. Why am I here? How did the world come into being? Is there meaning to life? If a man dies, shall he live again? Atheism and evolution does not and cannot answer those questions. Evolution is an insult to the intelligence of man. I believe in God and that Christianity is the way to God, in part, because these great and complex questions are answered. No other philosophy or religion in the world comes anywhere near answering these questions.

A few days ago, an unbelieving scientist was discussing evolution and its complexities. Some things evolved this way; some another. He could not understand why. So, he just said, Evolution is smarter than we are, you know. Is that his answer to the great issues of life? Some principle or movement is behind our existence called evolution, and evolution is smarter than man?! This exalts evolution to the status of a god, and lowers man beneath the feet of this god. Evolution is not a sufficient answer to the complexities of our world. But God is.

Only the God of Scripture can stand above all that exists on earth and in our lives. Someone must be intelligent enough, strong enough, and good enough to be the sufficient answer to the questions of origin, purpose and complexity of our world.

Besides being complicated, reality is usually odd. It is not neat and obvious, not what you might expect. For example, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go around the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match---all at equal distances from each other, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go farther from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.

If we were designing the world, we probably would not have created a giraffe, or an alligator, or a spider, or a duckbill platypus. There are many strange things in our world.

C. S. Lewis, a former atheists, wrote that this is one of the reasons he believed in Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of religion we had always expected, we might feel that we were making it up. It is not a fairy tale where princes and princesses live. It does not promote pleasure, selfishness, materialism, the flesh. It denies this world and preaches self-denial. It admits the reality of sin and death.

The solution to this problem through God coming to earth and living as a man is an oddity. (1 Cor. 1.) No one was really prepared for it, even though the prophets spoke plainly concerning just that very thing. (Isaiah 53.) The Muslims, to this day, deny strongly that God could or would do such a thing. What? God becoming a man? Impossible, they claim. But what man must do is back up and allow God to be God. Could God come to earth and live as a man if He wanted to do so?? Yes, there is nothing contrary in that, or impossible for God to do.

Another oddity is one religion for all men. How is such possible? We have different cultures, languages, histories? How can there be one religion for all? This is such an oddity that most people of the world has not yet grasped the greatness of it. Paul preached, "And (God) hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." (Acts 17:26.) Remember the seven ones of Paul in Ephesians 4 (one God, Lord, Spirit, faith, hope, body, and baptism)? There is one Kingdom into which people of all nations may enter. Jesus is the universal Savior and Prophet. He is not just a Jew and a man. He is much more. His character is such that every person in the world should partake of it. It would make no sense at all to say that about any other person or prophet. Should we all be like Buddha? Mohammed? Moses? It makes sense that we should all be like Jesus, because that means we should be like God.

I am using the word, wonderful, here in the sense of awe, greatness, and mystery of life. There are things in our world that go beyond human explanation and reasoning. Our solar system is not the only one in this world. There are many others. The infinity of space is mind-boggling. Eternality is beyond our understanding. We use human words to refer to the nature of God, but He is greater than all our words. Paul said that God "is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us." (Eph. 3:20.)

The recent work on the human chromosomes and mapping the DNA of human cells is a good example of such things that are wonderful. Years ago, David wrote, "I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." (Psalm 139:14.) Recently, Monday, June 26, 2000, the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain called a joint news conference announcing the completion of the work on human genome. They declared that scientists had deciphered the genetic code contained in the human genome. What they found out about the human gene is indeed wonderful. It fills us with wonder.

Not long ago, in the mid 1800s, Ernst Haeckel, Charles Darwin’s chief supporter, said that the human cell was relatively simple. He wrote that it contained merely "homogeneous globules of plasm that were composed chiefly of carbon with an admixture of hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. These component parts properly united produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nursed man. With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled, and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in." (Reason & Revelation, August 2000, 60.) This simplistic explanation is now totally rejected as insufficient to explain the human cell and genes.

Do you know how much information is stored in our human cells? The late astronomer, Carl Sagan, observed that the information stored in a simple cell is comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Dr. Sagan estimated that if a person were to count every letter in every word in every book of the world’s largest library (approx. 10 million volumes), the number would be equivalent to the information stored in the one cell. This figure is for one cell, not all the cells of a body put together. There is nothing simple about it.

The reason this print-out of the genetic code is so voluminous is that it stores, edits, transmits and regulates all the functions of the entire body. One interesting piece of information that came from the study of the genome is that the genetic code is universal. All scientists acknowledge this as being true. Matt Ridley, in his 1999 book, Genome, wrote, "Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one. The genetic code, bar few tiny local aberrations . . . is the same in every creature. We all use exactly the same language." (Reason & Revelation, August 2000, 62.) It is like everyone in the world using a personal computer and every computer using the same operating system. (Bill Gates would love that idea!) It speaks the same language. It does not produce the same things---there are many different kinds of plants, animals and many variations in human beings. But the genetic code is the same. It is the genetic code that ensures living things reproduce faithfully after their own kind. The principles of genetics state that they should so reproduce. The Bible states this right after the creation of the world---that each thing created would reproduce after its own kind.

"One cannot avoid being awed at the sheer density of information contained in such a miniaturized space. When one considers that the information required to construct a man, elephant, frog, or an orchid was compressed into two minuscule reproductive cells, one can only be astounded. Only a sub-human could not be astounded." (Wilder-Smith, Reason & Revelation, August 2000, 62.)

Evolution is not a sufficient explanation for such a process as the genetic code. Only Someone with infinite intelligence could have stored so much information in such a small space. It took intelligence to decipher the genetic code and to learn as much as man has. If so, imagine how much more intelligence was required to create such! This is why I believe in God.