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"What May Be Known About God is Plain!"
Believing and Wondering
We live in a world where "Truth" is seen as relative and holding a clear belief in God is viewed as suspicious. Still many cultural leaders live their lives wondering about the existence of the Creator and go to their grave with the suspicion that there just might be something in the Spiritual realm beyond. I read this excerpt from a book about Steve Jobs recently on a friends's Facebook post. It seemed relevant to Ekklesia's study in Romans.
"In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson recalls a scene near the end of Jobs's life that exemplifies the ambiguity of our secular age:
One sunny afternoon, when he wasn't feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. "I'm about fifty-fifty on believing in God," he said. "For most of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye." He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. "I like to think that something survives after you die," he said. "It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures." He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're gone." Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices."
From How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James K. A. Smith
Last week, Ekklesia explored in our teaching time Romans 1:18-32. The reading made it clear that the belief in God is a clear process of observation of our natural world that screams the very hand print of God. The problem is that our culture has been deluded where our "thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened." Romans 1:21 May we all seek to know our Creator and his son Jesus! May we listen to their words and pursue a personal relationship that gives hope and purpose of life.
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