God's explicit revelation, faith, and post-modernism

I found a blog I had written for another blog that I wanted to expand upon here...

Awhile back, I had a short conversation with some non-believing friends of mine about the apparent existence of God... or lack thereof. One of them e-mailed us all a link to a video on YouTube called "God Only SEEMS Non-Existent!" which sparked the conversation. The video essentially takes a satirical attitude towards Christianity in relation to the fact that God doesn't explicitly (see: blatantly, obviously) reveal Himself to mankind, thus "forcing" us to believe in Him through faith.



One of my friends said that he saw no benefit to mankind from God's explicit revelation, but that instead it would just confuse us all the more. I took his statement to the next level and suggested that if God explicitly revealed himself to mankind, it would only cause men to rebel against him even MORE and actually negatively affect His mission. And this is partly why:

We live in a postmodern society in which it's okay for every individual to believe whatever they want, and nobody else can suggest to them otherwise. We are driving towards utter relativism in which there can be no absolute truth, because any statement of the sort tends to result in the response: "Well that works for you, but that's not for me." And God be with anyone who attempts to suggest that individual is "wrong." People that do that are simply "arrogant."

The fact is, people generally don't like being forced to do, or believe, things. Admittedly, I am guilty of this at times. So think about it: What would happen if God came down from the heavens, appeared in the sky before the entire earth and said, "Behold, I am God! Worship me!" I think it would cause people to rebel and disobey Him even more than they might have in their ignorance of His existence, merely because they lose their right to choose what to believe in.

Maybe that's why God gave us freewill and the opportunity to choose, because ultimately it is better for us. Maybe faith is His gift to us to help us experience Him wholly based upon our view of His character and what He has done. As my friend asked, what benefit is it to us to believe in Him because of explicit revelation? Am I more blessed through a relationship with a God I know because He desired a relationship with me, or a God I know because He forced a relationship with me?

But this demanding of signs to "prove" God is nothing new. Post-modernism, which in reality isn't all that modern anyway, isn't the only cause for this sort of doubt. People have been challenging God to show signs of who He is since Jesus walked the earth. Matthew 12:38-40 says:
³⁸Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, "Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you." ³⁹But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. ⁴⁰For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." (The fact that even after Jesus was miraculously resurrected after three days, true to His statement here, the Pharisees still refused to acknowledge it, is another blog altogether. So now they received the sign they were promised and denied God anyway.)

And not so long after (Matthew 16:1-4), another group of religious "leaders" came to Jesus and ask for a sign AGAIN! This time, they are asking Jesus for a sign after he just miraculously fed 4,000 people! HELLO!? OPEN YOUR EYES! In Mark's recounting of this same event (Mark 8:11-13), it almost seems as if Jesus is exasperated with their blindness:
¹¹The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. ¹²And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, "Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation." ¹³And he left them, got into the boat again, and went to the other side."

Here are people who lived in the midst of the miracles Jesus was performing daily, and yet they still asked for God to prove Himself. How is this possible? I think the Pharisees/Sadducees/scribes cared less about Jesus legitimately proving Himself to be God, as they did about fitting Jesus/God into the prescribed box they had already created for Him. They didn't want a sign, they wanted their sign, the one that to them would mean God is who they think He should be. But you can't just fit God into a box of your own creation, and so when God didn't fit their mold, He was hidden in plain sight. That's the danger of making demands of God to do a certain thing, look a certain way, act a certain way. And yet here we are now 2,000 years later, still asking God to give us signs on Youtube...

As my friend, Josh, so astutely pointed out: "There was in fact a time when god revealed himself, did all kinds of crazy stuff like walking on water and raising the dead... and we killed him."

-Scott