Meet God (Before You Die)

By Robert C. Beasley

Come, and Meet God (Before You Die).

Our hearts long for an encounter with the Living God, not just to know that He exists. Jesus shows us exactly what God is like, and He is so much more seeking, loving, powerful, and closer than we could imagine.

In "Meet God (Before You Die)", Robert C. Beasley explores the mystery of God through modern science, accounts of atheists-turned-believers, and biblical scripture to inspire us to plumb the depths of intimacy with God and to explore the answer to the one true question we all want answered—What is God like?

Each of us will meet God when we die, but God comes to encounter you now (before you die), so that you can begin enjoying in this life the fullness of the life to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667898414

Book preview

BK90076971.jpg

© 2023 Robert C. Beasley

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66789-840-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66789-841-4

Contents

The Invitation

1. Questions

2. The Encounter

3. What is Your Name, God?

4. Pictures

5. Meet the Shocking, Extravagant God

The Meeting

Meet God, The Relentless Seeker

6. Turn Over the Sofa, Earl!

7. Why Am I So Thirsty?

8. A Friend of Sinners

9. Relentlessly Seeking Everyone

Meet God, the Reckless Lover

10. The Most Important Thing

11. The Strange, Central Theme

12. Pictures of Love

13. What Love Looks Like

14. What is God Saying to Us?

15. His Love Endures Forever

Meet God, the Reigning King

16. How Can God Be King When The World’s A Mess?

17. The Stronger Man

18. The Kingdom of God is Like...

19. How God Became King of the World

Meet God, the Restful Father

20. You Can Call Me Daddy

21. A Revolution in Understanding God

22. Where God Makes His Home

Meet God (Before you Die)

23. The Living in the Land of the Dying

The Invitation

Questions

I’ll bet you can’t go a day without asking a question. Try it—you can’t. Life is filled with questions. We handle thousands daily: "What am I going to wear? What am I going to do today? Where should we eat? Why does he do that? Why did he do that?"

Some questions make us laugh:

What color is a chameleon?

Why is it called afterlife when it’s really after death?

Who cut off Mickey’s tail?

Some questions, though, are not so funny:

Why did she have to die?

"Why did I get cancer?"

Why did he run out on her?

Why did this have to happen now?

Why is our way of life. We humans must know why. Life should make sense; the pieces should fit. So, we ask questions. Loren Eisley had it right: Mankind is the cosmic orphan, the only creature in the universe that asks Why?¹

Two questions are especially constant, like background noise in our daily life. Sooner or later, we have to look them in the eye—or realize they are staring at us. These are the two Big Questions we cosmic orphans must face sooner or later:

Is there a God?

What is he/she/it like?²

You would think we would ask these questions in that order: first, is there a God, and if so, then what is God like? This is rarely the case. Usually, we make up our minds about the First Question because we’ve already answered the Second Question. Let me explain: Have you ever said, if there is a God, how could he allow so much suffering and evil in the world?

Or How could a God let my child die?

How could a God….?

What we think about the Second Question (What is God like?) often dictates how we answer the First (Is there a God?).

The Second Question is the tricky one: What is God like? Our answer to the First Question doesn’t matter much unless there is some hopeful, meaningful answer to the Second Question. If God is just some Force (or the Universe) that is indifferent to us, or some great Thing that started everything up and abandons us, then so what? The writer Frederick Buechner imagines that if God were to prove himself by writing a message in the stars that says, I EXIST! that would be exciting and thrilling and might prove to most people that God exists. But after a while, if there was nothing more, we would start to ask So what? What difference does that make? As Buechner writes,

For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence.³

The two questions, Is there a God? and What is God like? are interrelated, and we humans refuse to ignore or separate them because both are so important. After centuries of Enlightenment thinking and industrial and technological progress, decades of post-modern deconstructing everything that we have been taught about life and God, we humans still cannot escape these haunting questions. There is something deep within us that longs for the transcendence reflected in our glorious, enormous, beautiful universe. Philosopher Charles Taylor expresses well our human angst. He calls our secular world restless at the barriers of the human soul, deeply cross-purposed because deep down in our souls, we feel that there must be meaning, some satisfying answer to Why? But having thrown off belief in God through what we have been told is logic and science, we have a deep hole that must be filled. There is the haunting sense that there is something more…Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably. Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief.⁴

Clues of Someone Out There

Are there answers to our two haunting questions? One of my favorite thinkers is the late physicist, John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne was a physicist for 25 years, teaching at Cambridge, Stanford, Berkeley, and the CERN. Then, at the age of 47, he entered seminary and became a reverend in the Church of England. He wrote extensively on the close connection between science and theology. Polkinghorne suggests that if there is a God, one might expect we would be given some clues to the fact of God’s existence. These clues might come in two ways. The first would be moments of history in which God somehow revealed himself in some way. All the great religions testify to this—God acts to reveal himself. Then Polkinghorne suggests a second way that God might be glimpsed: through the character of the world God’s claimed to have made. And here science can help.⁵ Polkinghorne cautions that we mustn’t confuse science with religion, but some sort of nudge in a religious direction seems a reasonable thing to look for if there really is a God behind the scenes of the universe.⁶ If there is a God, whatever we can grasp of him would need to be consistent with what we can discern from the reality of the universe. And if there is a God, whatever we could know of him would also need to be consistent with who we are as humans, as creatures of this God. You might say that God must be real all the way throughout reality, from those vast reaches of the cosmos down to the intricacies of this earth and into the depths of the human heart. Polkinghorne is right: science does provide some clues.

The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

Many people think science has somehow disproved God. Just the opposite has occurred over the last 100 years! Science provides endless clues pointing to a God beyond the universe. Renowned physicist Paul Davies goes so far as to say, It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion, science offers a surer path to God than religion.⁷ The 20th century’s most famous atheist, Anthony Flew, actually changed his mind and became a believer in God on the basis of modern science. As he stated in his book There is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind:

I now believe the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God…Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science. Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.⁸

This shouldn’t be surprising. The ancient Hebrews proclaimed, The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands (Ps. 19:1). The apostle Paul appealed to creation itself as evidence of God: Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that humans are without excuse (Rom. 1:20). These ancient praises to God the Creator have been affirmed by recent scientific discoveries. The universe does provide clues to the existence, and even to the nature, of this God, which serve as invitations for us to think deeper and draw closer. Consider these remarkable clues.

The Universe Had a Beginning

The Bible begins with this affirmation: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1). Physicists now unanimously agree that the universe did have a beginning, when matter and energy in the smallest and densest proportions exploded in what is called the Big Bang. The universe is still expanding from that initial explosion. Everything in this vast universe, all the potentiality that finally has come to be, was contained within that first explosion! Physicist and Nobel prize winner Arno Penzias commented on the similarity of the Big Bang with the Genesis account: The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.⁹ As astrophysicists Robert Jastrow famously said, For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.¹⁰

The Universe is Filled with Information

We have known for at least a century that matter consists of energy. But what we have now come to understand over the last few decades is that matter and energy consists of information. Information fills the universe, from the farthest galaxy to the incredibly information-filled DNA structure of our bodies. As Polkinghorne writes, the universe, in its rational beauty and transparency, looks like a world shot through with signs of mind, and maybe it’s the ‘capital M’ Mind of God we are seeing.¹¹ Sir James Jeans put it this way: There is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.¹² Physicist George Wald writes, It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them, the universe begins to know itself.¹³ Or as Genesis proclaimed, God spoke the Word, and everything came into being.

The Universe is Finely Tuned for Humans: The Anthropic Principle

All the intricate organization and beauty of the universe seem to have one goal—us! Physicists have discovered that the various properties and forces of the universe, the arrangement of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe, and the complex chemistry of the universe are all extremely fine-tuned in such a way as to allow for carbon-based, human life to exist. We live in what physicists call the Goldilocks universe, where fundamental forces, matter, and energy are in just the right proportions and configurations to allow us humans to exist. In other words, if certain forces were ever so slightly different at infinitesimal levels, or if the sequencing of energy and matter at the beginning of the universe were in the minutest amount different, no life on our earth would exist. Scientists have described this fortuitist result the Anthropic Principle (from anthros, Greek for human). This was one of the most important discoveries for famed physicist and one-time atheist Fred Hoyle, who conceded that there must be a super-intellect behind the universe, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.¹⁴ Freeman Dyson, a colleague of Einstein, wrote, The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.¹⁵

The Universe is Free

The universe is orderly and reliable in so many ways, from the farthest flung stars down to the millions of cells that allow you to read this sentence. We don’t have to worry that the sun will come out tomorrow or that gravity will no longer keep us bound to the earth. Nature is reliable and orderly. And yet this orderly universe has another fascinating aspect: nature itself is unpredictable, even "free. This freedom appears at the minutest level, the quantum world. For centuries, scientists thought all matter consisted of the tiniest atoms containing neurons, protons, and electrons. But beginning in the early 20th century, physicists began to realize that atoms are made up of even smaller particles, which they call quarks, and these quarks are held together by gluons. This is the quantum world, and one of the greatest discoveries of the last century is that this subatomic world is extremely difficult to predict or measure. As Francis Collins, for years head of the Human Genome Project, writes, Nature exhibits a genuine unpredictability that looks, for all the world, like freedom…. The great shock of quantum mechanics was the discovery that identical electrons in identical atoms will ‘choose’ to do different things. The electrons appear to be acting freely, like children jumping downstairs."¹⁶ Indeed, not only at the minutest level, but all throughout creation nature is wild, free, creative, and open. The Mind behind the universe apparently intended this. As Polkinghorne notes, The natural gift of a loving God will be an independence granted to creation. I believe that the God who is both loving and faithful has given to creation the twin gifts of independence and reliability.¹⁷ Polkinghorne goes on to reflect that this characteristic of nature reflects the God who created nature: God acts with the open grain of nature and not against it. God interacts with creatures but does not overrule them, for they are allowed to be themselves and to make themselves.¹⁸

The Universe is For Our Enjoyment and Understanding

The universe is not only filled with information and intricately ordered, but we as humans also have an intelligent mind that is able to appreciate and find enjoyment in the wonder, order, and beauty of it. Einstein is often quoted as saying The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is so comprehensible. Polkinghorne wrote, science is privileged to explore a universe that is both rationally transparent and rationally beautiful in its deep and accessible order. It does not seem sufficient to treat this as a happy accident. Scientists frequently speak of the experience of wonder as the reward for all the weary labor involved in it.¹⁹ There is no intrinsic reason that we would enjoy the taste of chocolate, get emotional over a beautiful sunset, or tremble at the sight of a newborn child. Why does nature compel us in this way, almost like an invitation to something more, something beyond ourselves? The apostle Paul had an answer: That we might feel after God and find him, though he is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:27).

The Universe is Massively Huge Beyond Comprehension

There is one last thing we must remember about the universe, and this colors all our understanding of God: our universe is massively huge beyond comprehension. The universe contains over 200 billion galaxies! Galaxies! Each galaxy contains on average 200 billion stars each, and most of those stars are larger than our sun. That means the universe contains approximately 40 billion trillion stars! Can you imagine that? You can’t! We simply can’t wrap our minds around that, and here is where science stops and can’t tell us much more. If there is a Creator behind this vast universe, he would of necessity have to be bigger than our universe. Can you imagine? We can’t! God is INCONCEIVABLE! Our minds simply cannot comprehend God.

How Can We Know What We Cannot Comprehend?

Our minds cannot comprehend God, and that is why science can only take us so far. Science can and does provide evidence for the existence of God. But science can only go so far in answering the real question we want to know: What is God like? How in the world can we ever know God, ever come to know what he is like? How can we know what we cannot comprehend?

We can only know anything about God if he were the one to initiate the contact, if he were to disclose himself in some way. The invitation would have to come from him. Not only would the contact need to come from him, but we also can’t know this bigger than the universe God in any immediate sort of way, as if we were on the same level as God. So how in the world could he reveal himself in a way that we could possibly understand him? God would somehow have to adapt himself to us if we were to have any chance of understanding him. God would have to make the first move, and he would have to limit himself, making knowledge of himself accessible in ways we could understand. As the ancients used to say, Knowledge of God begins with God. As an early Christian said, No one can know God unless God himself is the Teacher, that is to say, without God, God is not to be known.²⁰ So if God is the one who must initiate contact and make himself accessible, how in the world does he do that? Does he do that?

The answer is yes, but not by God writing messages in the stars saying, I EXIST! Curiously, the Bible never tries to prove God’s existence. The theologian Karl Barth said, "Note well: in the whole of the Bible of the Old and New Testaments not the slightest attempt is ever made to prove God."²¹ To attempt to do so is ridiculous because it would involve an imperfect creature (us) trying to prove a Perfect Being. God is INCONCEIVABLE, meaning our concepts, our frames of reference, and our minds cannot conceive of the greatness of God. The Bible doesn’t try to prove the existence of God. Instead, the Bible is a story book of God encountering humans, of God meeting us. In the Bible, God shows up; God reveals himself; God comes to meet us. He doesn’t come to give us facts about himself. He comes to reveal himself so that we might know him in the same way a man and a woman know each other through intimate union. There is nothing impersonal about God; we are encountered by God in a personal way. He begins to know us, and we begin to know him. In the process, we begin to truly know ourselves too. When speaking of how God is known, the Bible seldom speaks of insight or illumination or demonstration; rather it says that God appeared, did something, showed himself, or spoke to someone, as in the beginning of the book of Hosea: ‘The word of God came to Hosea’ (Hos. 1:1). Accordingly, the way to God begins not with arguments or proofs but with discernment and faith, the ability to see what is disclosed in events and the readiness to trust the words of those who testify to them.²² Barth expressed it this way:

In the Bible, God’s name is named, not as philosophers do it—as the name of a timeless Being, surpassing the world, alien and supreme, but as the name of the living, acting, working Subject who makes Himself known. The Bible tells the story of God; it narrates His deeds and the history of this God in the highest, as it takes place on earth in the human sphere. The Bible proclaims the significance and importance of this working and acting, this story of God, and in this way, it proves God’s existence, describes His