Where I live, we are less than twenty-four hours from a major ice storm that is predicted to shut down our area for days. Roads will become impassible; power lines may come down. Everyone is stocking up on food and preparing for the worst. Since most of us remember the “Great Texas Freeze” of 2021, we’re reliving the pain of those terrible days in advance.
Our situation is by no means unique: this system could end up affecting more than two hundred million people in the US.
It’s an odd thing, really, our collective impotence in the face of nature. You and I live in the most technologically advanced age in human history. The slab of glass in my pocket can access the world’s store of information gathered across human history; these words I am typing on my laptop will soon be transmitted to hundreds of thousands of people in every nation on earth. My home is more climate-controlled and electronically equipped than any home I have ever owned.
And yet a winter storm I can neither forestall nor shorten will dominate my life for the next few days.
Is my religion a placebo effect?
Think how people felt in earlier eras, when there were no sophisticated meteorological instruments to predict the weather and no electricity to light and heat their homes. No wonder every civilization known to history has worshiped some type of deity or deities.
When you’re facing forces you cannot defeat, it only makes sense to call for help from forces greater than yourself. If worshiping a god of rain and storms can protect you and your family from the weather, this becomes a “why not?” proposition. If such worship seems to correlate over time with better outcomes, you’ll likely codify your religious beliefs into religious practices.
I have personally seen some of the altars built by Greeks and Romans across their empires to their pantheons of gods. I’ve met tribal people in Southeast Asia who worship the elemental spirits they believe inhabit and control their natural environment.
And I prayed this morning to my God, asking him not only to guide what I am writing today but to protect my family as the ice storm approaches our area.
Recent literature has documented the positive outcomes from religious practices for mental health, social stability, and overall wellness. But these outcomes are natural, not supernatural. They can be seen as a kind of placebo effect; the consequences of wish fulfillment and practices that produce benefits by virtue of the activities themselves rather than the supposed deities being worshiped.
And there’s the matter of negative outcomes. It would be one thing if religious practices always led to positive results. If people were healed every time we prayed for healing or storms were diminished every time we asked God for such protection, a skeptic would be more likely to believe that an actual God was at work. But I have prayed for healing that did not come and protection that never arrived. So have you.
The fact that I believe in Jesus doesn’t prove Christianity to be true any more than a Muslim’s or a Hindu’s beliefs persuade me to adopt Islam or Hinduism.
So I’ll continue to pray for divine protection as the ice storm approaches, but with the knowledge that my prayers may not be answered as I wish and that many in our post-Christian culture see my religious beliefs as outdated superstition akin to someone praying to Zeus.
Proving you should have children
At this point, my career-long study of Christian apologetics can be helpful. I can cite remarkable evidence from history, archaeology, science, and logic for the existence of God, the veracity of Scripture, the historical existence and resurrection of Jesus, and the continuing activity of the Creator in his creation.
But a post-truth culture will likely listen to all of that and retort, “That’s just your truth.” If all truth is personal and subjective, even objective evidence for Christianity becomes subjective as well. And even a professional apologist such as myself must admit that no faith commitment can be compelled through reason.
All relationships require a commitment that transcends the evidence and becomes self-validating. You could not prove scientifically or rationally that you should go to a school until you attend its classes, or that you should get married until you get married, or that you should have children until you have children. You could not prove that reading this article is worth your time until you read it. You examine the evidence, to be sure, but then you must make a decision that proves itself by experience.
Herein lies my point today.
Making God a “spare tire” in my car
Unlike every other religion and worldview known to human history, Christianity offers the proposition that the God we worship can and will inhabit our bodies and lives.
Jesus is not just at the “right hand” of the Father (Ephesians 1:20) akin to Zeus atop Mt. Olympus—he is also living by his Spirit in every person who trusts him as Lord (1 Corinthians 3:16). He is not just “with” us “to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20)—he is also “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). As Paul testified, Christ “lives in me” (Galatians 2:20) and we are “filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).
Here’s the problem: When I relate to Jesus as transactionally as the Greeks prayed to their gods, giving him what I think he wants so he will give me what I want, I miss the essence of the uniqueness of the Christian faith. When I make him primarily a “weather god” in the face of an ice storm, or a “healing god” in the face of a health crisis, or a “wisdom god” in the face of a perplexing decision, I make him a means to my ends—a genie in my bottle, a parachute in my plane, or a spare tire in my car.
This is not the heart of Christianity. The beauty of our faith is that we can experience the God of the universe personally and intimately. We can know the joy and peace of his presence. We can walk with our Father through the “valley of the shadow of death” into whatever lies on its other side (Psalm 23:4). We can know that he is “with” us as we “pass through the waters” (Isaiah 43:2) because we are in his hand and he is in our heart (John 10:29).
We can pray for his help, to be sure. In fact, he encourages us to do so (Matthew 7:7; James 4:2). But at a level far higher and deeper than any transaction, we can experience life and life eternal in a conscious, abiding experience of his presence in the depths of our being, no matter what circumstances life brings us today (cf. John 15:1–11).
“The greatest human achievement”
I cannot know what “ice storm” you are facing today. But I do know that your Father wants to redeem it by using it to draw you closer to himself. Not just for what he can do for you, but for who he can be in you.
St. Augustine, the greatest theologian after Paul, observed:
“To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him the greatest human achievement.”
What will you do to experience this “romance” today?
Quote for the day:
“Nothing in or of this world measures up to the simple pleasure of experiencing the presence of God.” —A. W. Tozer
Our latest website resources:
Denison Forum
DAILY DEVOTIONS, NEWS AND INFORMATION 