Why I Believe In God!

I wrote this in response to a man who condemned belief in God.

As I dwelt on the magnificence of God I found myself humbled and in awe of the God I call "Father." Perhaps it will do the same for you.

Janice

Dear Friend,

As you know some of these issues are very dear to my heart and even though the letter had it's humorous side I take it very seriously, since I am what you criticize--namely, a believer in God. God does not need me to defend him, anymore than he needed the prophet Elijah to build an alter to Him in front of the prophets of Baal. However, because the person of God is someone I hold very dear, I feel it is my responsibility to answer some of your attacks on His name.

You stress how hard you've tried to believe in God. Belief does not result from our own effort based upon our desires, it begins by the compiling of facts from the world around us and using them to form a conclusion. I can try really hard to believe it will rain tomorrow; however, it won't change one iota whether it actually does. It will rain whether I believe or not. Likewise if there is a God He is there whether we believe or not. So the question is: "Is there a God"? If there isn't, there's no reason to waste time expounding in meaningless discussions. However, if in fact there is a God then we have to determine who He is, and what our relationship to Him is. Is He a far off distant Being who has no interest in the happenings of the world? A Being who allows war, disease, death and destruction? Or is He an ever present Presence? What we believe will not change who He is, but it will change who we are.

The evidence for God-

You have claimed to accept the sun as your god. The sun? Why such an inconsequential object like the sun? You'll find that the sun, though 861,800 miles in circumference, is 100 times smaller than the Pistol star, and miniscule compared to the Milky Way, the galaxy it sits in.

It takes 220 million years for the sun to go around the Milky Way galaxy once. The Milky Way's mass is estimated to be between 750 billion and one trillion solar masses. Its diameter is about 100,000 light years, (or in our units that equals 100,000 x 5.88 trillion miles) it contains at least 200 billion other stars besides the sun.... And the Milky Way is only one galaxy--a very tiny part of space. In 1999, using the Hubble Space telescope, it was estimated that there are as many as 125 BILLION galaxies in the universe. Some believe the number is closer to 500 billion. Talk about miniscule, it makes the Milky Way look miniscule, and the sun that people worship, but a speck of sand on the beach. What does this have to do with God?

If we turn from space into ourselves eventually we will get to our DNA--the recipe that makes me related to you. It's been proven that DNA is found in each of our body's cells, as well as in the cells of every other creature even as tiny as a bacteria. Did you know that bacteria have sex? They do, and they create new bacteria with their DNA. Yet the DNA itself consists of components that form its well known twisted-ladder like strand. When taken out of its chromosome and stretched out it extends farther than five feet. Imagine every cell in our body having 5' of material in it. If our DNA was stretched end to end it would be over 125 billion miles long. Whew! But that's not all. DNA processes over a 100 trillion times as much information as our most sophisticated storage devices. And it's all inside of 5'7" frame. Both our DNA and the Milky Way have at least two things in common, both are immensely large, and like everything else in creation both are evidence of design. If you have design it stands to reason that there is a Creator behind it all. A Creator that is bigger than the 125 Billion galaxies and yet still able to control 1 protein in a single DNA link. Yet people find it easier to believe in the process of evolution, that all of this wonder and magnificence came from nothing, than to believe that there is an intelligent designer. This, even after their own research has declared that "spontaneous generation" of life from inanimate matter cannot happen. Life must arise from pre-existing life. It reminds me of the story:

Two men talked among themselves and decided they did not need God anymore. So they went up on a mountain and called God. He came down, and they told
Him: "We have decided that we no longer need You at all."
God looked at them and said: "I think you Do need me."
The two men said: "Nope. We don't, and to prove it we are going to have a man-making contest."
God said: "Okay, fine by me."
One of the men bent over and picked up a fistful of dirt, at which point God stopped him and said: "No. Use your Own dirt."

Let's presume that what I believe is true, there is indeed a God. Why is the world so messed up? I don't pretend to have a mind that can even comprehend the vastness of space or the complexities of my DNA, therefore it also stands that I can't fathom the mind God without His help, and neither, I might add, can our great scientists. And this is where you see my faith. As a person without God I would be lost in time and space, not significant enough to acknowledge my own existence. But if I believe in a Holy Presence that created everything, it is to that Being I have to turn to with my questions. . .It is the Bible, God's Word, where I turn to for my answers. But not to believe, I already believe, but to try and understand.

God created a perfect world. What's more, He created a world where we could be in His presence; we could stand before the mind of the Creator of the universe. But like everything else in life He created a balance, and our ancestors, given a choice between all things good, and all things evil, chose all things evil. Nor were they any worse than us, as judged by how many times we chose to do the evil. It was disobedience that opened the Pandora's box of sin. I don't know why God allows evil to exist. I don't know why God created Satan and then allowed him to rebel. What I do know, and this from the scripture, is that all things happen for my good, and God will be glorified in it all. Again, I don't understand why or how, anymore than I understand a million other things about the world I live in.

How have we treated God through this? We have denied God's existence. We have refused His help. We have not acknowledged His brilliancy in Creation, instead giving the credit to mysterious bang, and we have taken the man that was made in His image and Glory and eagerly relate that image of the Glorious God to the animals we are supposed to subdue. We question God's motives, and we have turned away from the wonder of His holy Presence and replaced it with a life of evil and misery. In essence, we have rejected Him and everything about Him. We don't want Him in our life and we don't want Him in our world--until the terrible happens and we get skin cancer from basking in the sun. THEN we beg God for help. We pray for healing. We cry out to Him. We beg him to heal us, but we do nothing to acknowledged Him as Creator, nor to change our rebellious hearts. As one person said; "We want to sow our wild oats and then we pray for a crop failure." It is our rebellion against God and our desire for the presence of evil that allows the war, disease, death, destruction, hunger, etc. Yet God continues to show us His mercy. It is God that shows me how to live in a world that has rejected him, that has taken my heart which has rejected him and turned it back toward Him. He has redeemed me not from war and diseases, but from the rebellion in my own heart. Our life, be it 50 years or 90 years, is less than a speck in the consideration of all eternity. I'll deny myself now for an eternity spent glorying in His presence. You wonder, "You really look forward to that? No beer, no football, no smoking?" I can say with all the honesty of my heart that those desires compared with being with Him, is like asking if I'd rather own a piece of coal now or the Hope Diamond later. I will wait for the Hope diamond.

I agree that it's of no purpose to become a mindless religious robot. However, while you are seeing the world in turmoil I have hope. I know that in the end the good guy will stand. You see blight attacking good people. I see blight attacking bad people. It's like thieves stealing from thieves. The hearts that are decent are equally rebellious to the hearts of those that are wicked, and their actions are equally as bad. God has chosen to show mercy on them by allowing them to plant and harvest, by giving them more time to see the errors of their way. But God has chosen to show mercy on my by turning my rebellious heart into a heart that loves him.

Yours,

Janice LaQuiere

Footnotes:
"For centuries people accepted the "spontaneous generation" of life from inanimate matter. When this long-standing myth was finally dispelled in the mid 1800's it became clear that all life must arise from pre-existing life..." http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/7/concept/index.html
http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/planetarium/solarsystem/sun.html
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/021127a.html
http://www.reikiblessings.homestead.com/dna.html