Why isn’t God more obvious?

Why does God make it so hard to believe in Him? After all, being omnipotent, surely God would have the means to reveal Himself in a way that is capable of convincing everyone that He exists. God could tear open the sky in a cosmic version of peek-a-boo. He could appear on live television to answer the questions of late-night comedians. God could even stamp “Made by God” as a birthmark on the base of our feet. But since God doesn’t reveal Himself in these crystal-clear ways, and because our prayers sometimes feel as though they are posted to a non-existent address, too often doubters and believers alike are tempted to think that God either isn’t there or that He doesn’t care.

So why isn’t God more obvious? 

GOD HAS GIVEN SOME GOOD REASONS TO BELIEVE IN HIM

One way to approach this question is to explore whether God is perhaps more obvious than we think. The Christian story makes the claim that God has not left Himself without testimony (Acts 14:17). There are, in fact, various lines of credible evidence that are employed by Christian thinkers to advance roughly two dozen (or so) arguments for the existence of God.

For starters, the Christian story claims that nature speaks about God (Psalm 119:1-2; Romans 1:20). There is a subjective sense in which we all experience this reality, especially when the beauty of a sunrise or the wonder of the starry host at night provoke a sense of awe. But for those who want greater degrees of objectivity and evidence, this claim is one that welcomes investigation through the telescopes and microscopes of scientific study.

Over the past century, science has unearthed some groundbreaking discoveries about our universe. In searching back to our origins we now know that our universe had an absolute beginning in the finite past, and that the initial features of our cosmos were precisely calibrated to allow for intelligent life. These discoveries, among a host of others, give off the unmistakable appearance of design in nature and have served to undergird two relatively strong arguments for God’s existence (the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Fine-Tuning Argument). So nature itself serves up some solid reasons to believe in God.

Second, given how the Christian story claims that human beings are made in the image of God, perhaps the best evidence for God’s existence is sitting in your chair. We human beings are uniquely rational, conscious, social, moral, and spiritual creatures. Our strong grasp on justice and hunger for love are deep features of our existence, and the challenge thrown down to godless descriptions of reality is to see if they can explain these treasures without impoverishing them. When it comes to the Christian story, where human beings are the intentional creation of an eternal mind, these features seem to find a natural home that eludes the secular thinker, which is why they are coopted by Christian thinkers into well-worn arguments for God’s existence (Argument from Reason, Argument from Consciousness, Argument from Love, Argument from Desire, and the Moral Argument). 

Finally, the Christian story claims that God has made Himself known in history by writing Himself into the story with the incarnation of Jesus. There we see the coming together of the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, where God predicted key events surround Jesus’ life hundreds of years in advance, with the obvious ministry of miracles surrounding Jesus’ life, which culminates in his own resurrection from the dead, that together speak volumes about the existence of God (Argument from Fulfilled Prophecy and Argument from Miracles). 

All of this to say that Christianity is not scant on evidence. Nowhere does God encourage a blind faith. And yet still, despite the reasonably strong cumulative case for God, many who have studied these arguments remain relatively unconvinced. So why has God left room for doubt? 

Because the Bible says plainly that God does indeed hide Himself (Isaiah 45:17). King David, a believer in God, speaks of this experience when he cries out, “Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1). So the Christian story gives us permission to ask these raw questions about the supposed absence of God from our experience.

So why does God hide? 

GOD SEEMS HIDDEN BECAUSE WE’RE THE ONES HIDING

Perhaps one reason God may not seem obvious has to do with whether or not we want God to exist. Long before God ever seemed hidden to us the Christian story records that it was humanity who first started hiding from God. That in response to their own evil, Adam and Eve hid behind fig leaves and fern bushes, preferring to hide in darkness rather than step into the light of God’s reality.

There are a bunch of potential psychological motivations for not wanting God to exist. Perhaps we prefer to remain in the dark because we think God will cramp our moral style. Maybe something in our past provokes us to feel guilty or ashamed, and so we don’t like the idea of giving an account before God. Or perhaps we have such a distorted view of God that we rightly revolt against the existence of a monster. 

So what if God seems hidden from us or not obvious because we are the ones who have turned our hearts away, and so become blinded to the reality of His existence (Romans 1:18; 2 Corinthians 4:4). Our motivated reasoning is always something we need to keep tabs on to ensure we aren’t setting the bar of evidence unreasonably high.

GOD HIDES TO BRING ABOUT HIS ENDGAME

When it comes to explaining the hiddenness of God, though, the Christian story also offers a host of greater good arguments as to why God may choose to reveal Himself in the manner He has chosen, and they all have to with God’s ultimate endgame. 

As a marvel fan, undoubtedly the best film in the Avengers series was Infinity Wars (spoiler alert). There, in a fascinating series of events, Dr Strange (Benedict Cumberpatch), who possesses the power of the time-stone to look through all possible futures based on the interactions of creaturely decisions, surveys some 14 million potential outcomes in their war with Thanos. As he discusses what he saw with Ironman, Dr Strange reveals that in only 1 of those possible futures do the Avengers ultimately win, before doing the unthinkable and giving up the time-stone to Thanos, before himself being snapped out of existence. 

The next five years are devastating for the remaining Avengers before they finally discover a way to manipulate events until in the final Endgame everyone is resurrected to defeat the armies of Thanos in a stunning reversal of reality. What is so curious about the entire storyline is that being the only one who could see through the corridors of time, Dr Strange could neither tell anyone what needed to happen nor could he even be present, in order for the final Endgame to play out as needed.

So what if God hides to bring about His own endgame?

God alone is in a position to see the end from the beginning, and so He alone is able to know, incorporating our free decisions, when and how He needs to reveal Himself in order for us to ultimately arrive at the right future. 

Which is, what?

Well according to the Christian story, for those who believe in Jesus, our future is to rule and reign with Jesus for all eternity. To experience deep and meaningful relationships—to love God and love others — and to participate in our meaningful role as gardeners and governors of God’s future world. 

And so, what if God carefully curates the kind of His presence that He gives to us in order to achieve that end? What if the kind of presence we desire is not the kind of presence we require? What if God’s seeming hiddenness actually opens us up to become better lovers by having to go seeking after Him? What if God coming humbly in Jesus, rather than tearing open the sky, helps us to love God for the right kind of reasons rather than simply being overwhelmed by the raw intensity of His presence? What if God seemingly being absent opens the door for us to develop mature agency so that we have all the requisite skills for us to become gardeners and governors alongside Jesus in the new creation?

JESUS KNOWS WHAT GOD’S HIDDENNESS FEELS LIKE

In the shadow of divine hiddenness, though, the ultimate reason to believe that God is there and that He does care is undoubtedly Jesus. At the heart of the Christian story is the claim that Jesus is the invisible God made visible. Jesus is the hidden God made obvious. 

What the Christian story offers through the stories about Jesus is the evidence that God is good despite the seemingly unanswered prayers and the divine distance. When Jesus prayed to avoid agony in the garden of Gethsemane, Heaven was silent in response. And when Jesus suffered on the cross and the skies went dark He felt God’s absence, prompting Him to cry out the familiar words of an ancient psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). 

Despite our perception of those events, though, and Jesus deep sense of divine distance, God was not absent. “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Just like in Marvel, God was simply setting up for the great reversal, where through Christ’s death and resurrection God was bringing about an Endgame that was better than we could ever have dared to imagine.