The God-Shaped Hole

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."
~ The Confessions of St. Augustine


“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” 
~ Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII (425)



Deep down, every person with a moral conscience wants there to be a God—someone to give meaning to our existence, someone to reliably define goodness, truth and justice, someone higher than all of us to whom we can appeal when opinions and desires clash violently, year after year, century upon century, millennia upon millennia. Sure, in our weaker moments, when held captive by shame for immoral choices, we seek to hide from God, just as Adam and Eve did in the garden and as Jonah did when fleeing for Tarshish. We fear judgment, because the pain of shame is unbearable. 

But the God of the Bible, the God of the gospel has proven to us that we need not fear judgment if we humbly confess our wrongs to Him. The second person of the Trinity, Jesus the Messiah, rent heaven and came to earth to prove the nature and extent of God's love for sinners like you and me. He lived for 33 years in perfect obedience to His (and our) Father, telling the Truth to all who would listen, healing the oppressed, exalting the humble, humbling the proud, accepting abuse and ultimately death at the hands of wicked men, so that you and I and all of humanity, indeed all of creation, might be free forever. 

And God the Father, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, raised Jesus from the dead to prove that Jesus was who He had said and demonstrated that He was: God in the flesh. Ever since then, this message of Good News is being proclaimed and embodied all over the world. And one day, at a time only God knows, Jesus is coming again as God-in-the-Flesh, to quell mankind's rebellion against God once for all, to end all oppression, to heal all wounds, to completely restore every broken facet of creation, of existence, to its purest, truest and best state. 

All who have humbly confessed their own complicity in perpetuating the cycle of sin and sought forgiveness in Jesus will enter eternal life in an eternal world free of sin, pain, sadness, brokenness, shame, atrophy, and death. All who have rejected this offer will enter into an eternity without a single trace of the God of goodness, beauty, truth, justice, wisdom and righteousness. 

This is the Christian hope and vision of reality. This, I believe, provides the most comprehensive and coherent view of existence that has ever been offered. And it did not originate with the ideas of a mere human. A simple read of the Bible will show the open-minded reader that no one would make this kind of stuff up. 

I hope this to be a conversation starter, that perhaps someone who is yet to be convinced of the plausibility of the Christian Story might be nudged in the direction of honestly considering its plausibility. We may not be able to answer every theological question in this life, but we can rigorously assess and compare the various worldviews on offer to see which makes the most sense of existence as we know it. We need more dialogue of this sort. God knows we have the time for it, with all the time and resources we devote to entertainment. 

Who is with me?

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