The biggest problem with God – a fathomless mystery. 

We are about to paddle our canoes onto a fathomless mystery where we will peer into the deep and dark mist of eternity. As spectators to history, we can see serious problems with the way God does things sometimes. As we stand on the sidelines of history, we see things that cause us to scratch our heads and ask “Why?” We see events in the lives of others or even our own life and we are left with the same incessant lingering, “why?” 

Albert Einstein once asked, “Is the universe a friendly place” because the world does not explain itself. Faith is a willingness to trust God with the future no matter what. An analysis of the Universe declares it to have two faces. We get mixed messages from nature. There seems to be insurrectionary forces in our lives. We live in a world where weeds grow themselves, but our gardens do not bring forth wheat, tomatoes or corn. It also appears as if the natural world is on the verge of collapse.  

We have a prophetic panorama of this world’s history that dimly outlines its destiny. But when it comes to all else, we are like an ant in the kitchen, preoccupied with a search for the morsel and totally unaware of the surrounding architecture and technology. Because we are so small, we cannot understand more than a speck of God’s ways. This is because we lack the perspective to see the “kitchen” as God sees it. So, we live our lives of the obscurity in the valley between the snow-clad mountain peaks of two eternities. In the end we are all but the slaves of life, and we drag our shackles with us from day to day while life, like water, runs through our fingers.  

We are merely cosmic Robinson Caruso’s with amnesia, shipwrecked but standing on the sands before an infinite ocean asking questions like, “Who am I? Where did I come from? and how did I get here? The world is like a giant cosmic shipwreck and we are like a sailor with amnesia, washed ashore and now walking the beach, searching the shore for meaning.  How did I get here and what are all these things strewn on the beach?  Where did they come from? They appear as relics of a civilization that is gone and that I can barely remember. 

One by one I pick up items on shore and try and make meaning of them. A compass, coins, clothes, weapons, furniture, and wreckage. I walk up and down the sand, looking at the infinite ocean. “Where am I, who am I, and how did I get here?” The sight of the infinite sea ignites passion within me. Unseen distant voices call me; unseen distant fingers beckon me. Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3:11 said, “He has put eternity in my heart.” As we wander the shores of eternity there is one question that never goes away, and for many people it is the biggest Question. They don’t care about the abstract Question of whether there is a God or not, they refuse to trust or believe in a God who allows history and life to proceed as it has. Because of this it is imperative that we see the Biblical insight that gives us the big picture.