Seeking God

Last week we began a study of the Biblical Truths and first looked at the need to recognize God as the one true God who is the perfect, all-knowing Creator. Today I would like to continue to look at who God is and why we seek him.

Many of us began our searching for God as young children. We attended Sunday School class, perhaps some (especially those in Africa) studied him in primary school. I can imagine us as children being dropped off by our parents and running to the classroom, bursting inside and exclaiming to the teacher or our friends, “I’m here!” or at the very least, we arrived at school with an eagerness to learn and make our parents proud.

Now as adults, we often find our main tools for understanding God are still those we gained as children. This is in spite of the fact that many of us gained critical, analytical tools to study other disciplines as a young adult, but rarely do we apply our academic skills to our study of God. Granted, our study of God needs to be far more than an academic approach, but we must use that approach if we hope to understand God at a higher level. Too many of us fail to realize that our adult-level of faith leaves us un-inspired simply because we have neglected to find ways for our faith to grow at the same rate as the rest of our body and mind. We have become adults with our adult needs and desires, but our faith in and our understanding of God is still the same that we had as a child.

Though there is one thing that do still need from our childhood; we still need to understand that that energy that often brought us to burst into a room has now evolved into a restlessness that still brings us to seek for something to fill our hunger for More. Often that hunger for More is fed by our desire for success, a need to satisfy our appetites for sex, power, material pleasures gets fed worldly gains, and we fail to grasp that the what we as humans seek is not born of an earthly thirst, but was planted in us by God and can only filled by God. This, I believe, is why so many adults are unhappy and end up asking, “Is this all there is?”

The world tries feed this hunger by claiming our desire to feed our self is normal and can best filled by what our own human self can come up with; self-awareness, self-help books, self-appreciation, and more. We are applauded for our efforts to gain reason and led to believe that Man can do anything we put our minds to, often forgetting or denying the Creator and that He designed our searching minds.

As I teach about the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment periods I remind students that these periods were Man-oriented, and that it should be no surprise that just as the Ancient and Classical periods included the formation of all the major religions or belief systems, the modern age had the Reformation and Counter Reformation where we began to apply our new skills of reason to our understanding of God.

Today though, the Age of Science tells us that our desire to seek God is unreasonable. Few people realize that Mans first approaches to understand God and seek Truth were made by the same theologians and philosophers that developed the first principles of math and science. Our need to seek for answers cannot be met by man-made principles, but by the Designer that created us. Even today, if you go to a library you will discover that theology, or the “study of God’, is right next to the studies that today try to deny God’s presence. I think early man’s approach to understand God was far more accurate than many thinkers today. Granted, they too often failed to recognize who God is, which is why going back to our child-like need seek God and our fascination with God’s creation and love to ponder Jesus’ birth satisfies our hunger for More far better than any academic study.

May our eagerness to learn and our desire to seek God be merged into one effort and may we begin our search with the Bible where so many answers are found.