Our Father: Pt III

III. The Confession
“Calling God ‘Father’ [is] not simply comfortable or reassuring. It [contains] the ultimate personal challenge.” When we declare that God is our father, we are declaring our desire to live under his Lordship. Under the authority of God.

Three times in the last two weeks I had the same conversation concerning atheists/atheism. In essence, atheism is the denial of the reality that one has a Father/Creator. On this subject I have to persist in one thing, namely, that I don’t believe in atheists. Atheism is a myth.

First of all, what most people mean when they say “I’m an atheist” is that they hate Christianity as they have seen it represented or God as they have heard him told. Second, the Bible states that God has “set eternity in our hearts”. This means at least two things:

1. That the things of this world cannot satisfy because they were never meant to. “You cannot have peace and happiness apart from God because it is not there, there is no such thing.” (CS Lewis)

2. God has given us all a spiritual GPS that points us to Him in times of trouble. However, much like any map, it does us no good unless we follow it.

What I am talking about here must not be confused with the conscience (which can be silenced and seared). This is something more deeply rooted than our DNA. And every one of us knows that He is there, even if we don’t know what to call upon Him, even if we are afraid or too defiant to call out to Him, or even if we call Him by another name. We know that He is there. This is intrinsic and inseparable from our humanity. It is evident in our desire to worship (i.e. sporting events, concerts, cars, movie stars) and in that longing for something unnamable and more massive than ourselves. As it has been well stated, “We’re all born remembering but few of us will know.”

Furthermore, the average “atheist” means by this that they are either belligerent because of a wrong they have suffered at the hands of the God they do not believe in, or they know that confessing Him will be just what I have said it means, that to embrace his Fatherhood means to submit to His will.

I recall a good friend of mine who for many years struggled with the reality of God from two of these points. Firstly, she desperately wrestled with the concept of a good Father in Heaven because she had lackluster examples here on earth. Her relationship with her father had been one of abuse and neglect and eventually abandonment. It is easy so see how hard it would be to see any father, earthly or otherwise as being capable of good after such experiences. Furthermore, she downright told myself and another friend who bore most of the brunt of debates that she was unwilling to accept a God that demanded her to obey him, she did not want anyone or anything telling her what to do, especially not God. After many discussions and much prayer, she made her peace with God and to this day is learning more and more about what a Father can do in a willing heart… He can change everything. He can heal everything. He can be everything you’d ever wanted but were afraid to ask.