“God is dead! He remains dead! And we have killed him.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
For as many years as we have recorded history, there have been those who have attempted to proclaim the “death” of God. Some of the greatest philosophers have attempted to disprove God’s existence and have maintained that talk of God is irrelevant because God does not exist. How they can say that is beyond me, though.
How can one look around, see all the beauty in the world, and not come to the conclusion that someone much larger than ourselves had to create all of it? How can all of this come from a big bang? Even if it did, other philosophers would maintain, who created the material for the big bang? There has to be a God.
Yet, how we believe will be reflected in how we live. I remember when I was young being asked one day, “If you believe in God, why do you have to wear glasses? Why don’t you just ask God to make your eyes better? Can He do that?” My answer was along the line that I believed in God and believed that God could, if He wished, give me perfect eyesight. However, I also maintained that God gave the eye doctor the gifts that he had to get me glasses that would correct my eyesight. I don’t think that was the answer that was expected.
As I said, as we believe, so we live. If people do not believe in God, they tend to be all about themselves. They would not accept responsibility for others. They would not care about being kind to others. They would not care about others at all. If they believed that there was no God, then this world and the riches it contains would be all that they could ever attain and they would do everything that they could to secure its riches, even at the point of harming others.
Those who believe in God believe that mercy, justice, love, compassion and a whole host of other virtues not only make sense but, indeed, are expected to be lived. They live their lives caring for others, even going so far as to sacrifice their own lives, if need be, for another.
Each day of our lives, we tell the world that we believe God is not dead by how we live our lives. There are others we encounter who obviously believe that God does not exist. Maybe we could change their minds by showing them the love that God has for us — and them.
FAITH ACTION: By the manner in which you live your life today, proclaim that God, indeed, is very much alive and present among His people.