Transcript: What do you tell an atheist who says he looked for God and God didn’t reveal himself to him, and generally, what do you make of the argument of non-resistant non-believers? I’m a little torn on it. On one end, I want to affirm a person’s genuine and sincere search; on the other end, I want to affirm that scripture tells me that men are without excuse. Romans 1 says, you know, that God’s attributes are clearly seen by creation—you can look around at creation and see his attributes—so people are without excuse if they don’t believe in God. I believe that. How do I affirm the sincerity and genuineness of individuals while at the same time being honest about the fact that they should believe in God? Well, I think I just affirm both. I go, “Look, I don’t doubt your sincerity; I do, however, think that you should see God in creation. You genuinely don’t, but that may be a result of a blindness that’s on your heart.”

Now, that is very offensive to people. I realize that a lot of non-believers would be like, “So, okay, so I’m spiritually blind, is what you’re saying?” Yes, there’s an aspect of your awareness of the realities around you that is not right. Of course, you think I’m blind too. You think I’m blind to how genuine and sincere and non-blind you are. And so it’s not like we’re off to a different base. What’s happening in this discussion, though, is we’re moving the discussion away from God’s actual existence onto a focus on the sincerity and the genuineness and the goodness of this person across from me who’s like, “I’m looking for God, and I’m not seeing him.” There are even people who go further, and they’re like, “I want to know God. I want to believe in God. I’m looking and searching and searching.”

But there are other sources of blindness that are not always internal; they can be somewhat external as well. And so what I mean here is, a person can have a blindness, like the ketchup bottle thing—you open the fridge, and you can’t find it. It’s right there, but you can’t see it. Something’s wrong with me; I don’t see it. That can be the case with my search for God. I may have a blindness, a bias, a blindness—wrong thinking. I keep running into the same evidence, and I disbelieve it for a bad reason, but I don’t see that as a bad reason. I think I’m just being clever and wise and smart. But there’s also an external blindness: Satan is a deceiver who deceives the world. Now, deceiving the world implies that there’s something external there that’s bringing a blindness onto people’s lives.

But then, does that mean that there are non-believers who genuinely want God, they just want to seek the Lord with all their hearts, and Satan’s blinding them? And so, here’s better than a non-resistant non-believer: they’re actually pursuing God, but they can’t find him because Satan’s blocking it. I think that the answer here biblically is, those who seek Him will find Him; at some point, God is going to reveal Himself to them, and they need to continue seeking Him. Non-Christians are not going to be satisfied with that, most likely. A lot of them anyways aren’t; they’re going to find it offensive. It shouldn’t be offensive to them; they believe people around the world are deceived about all kinds of things. There’s nothing surprising about thinking that I can be deceived about something too. If there is a real God, if Christianity is true, it’s at least encouraging to think that if I continue pursuing God, I will find Him. But there are biases that people have, and the same non-resistant non-believer goes, “Oh, I wish Christianity was true,” and then they’ll go, “But the Bible is atrocious, and if God exists, He has some explaining to do,” and you’re like, well, these are biases against the thing that you say you’re seeking.

“But I think my biases are well established.” Of course you do; everybody does. That’s the nature of the kind of self-deception and biases that we all can experience. I know this is really offensive to people. I get that, and I try to avoid that offense if possible, but it shouldn’t actually be offensive. It’s just an analysis of if Christianity is true, then your non-belief is not merely a result of the evidence; it’s also a result of a spiritual battle that’s going on, a result of your own biases against God and against truly following Him. And one thing you can ask is, would you, if you came to believe right now that Christianity was true, would you worship God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Would you love God? Would you embrace Christianity? Would you be able to sing worship songs to the Lord because of His love and goodness? And if the answer is like, “Oh, well, I don’t know,” then you see that, yeah, so there’s a bias that’s there that’s being revealed in that moment. At any rate, I think this is all more encouraging than a lot of people think it is, because it would mean that if you do seek God, you can find Him. Continue seeking the Lord, continue seeking after God, continue praying, “Lord, search my heart, God, see my biases, see whatever I have going on, God.” Maybe you have to pray this way: “God, if you’re real—because I just don’t know what to think—then help me see through my own issues, help me seek and find you, help me work through these biases, help open my eyes.” And keep pursuing and seeking God. But here’s the weird thing: people are psychologically complex, and we justify things so fast. It could be—I’m not saying this is the case, but it’s possible, right? You guys know humans; you know you—it’s possible you could pray that prayer purely as a way of justifying yourself. “Well, I spent three months going to church, praying, doing worship songs, and asking God to reveal Himself to me.” But maybe the reason why you did this was as a way of validating yourself, not as a way of pursuing God. We are just complicated people. All I can encourage people to do is keep seeking the Lord, pursue God—don’t just do it so you can tell a story to other people about how “I’m a non-resistant non-believer, look at my story about how I…” and you know, maybe validating myself was my goal there. God knows our hearts.

Another aspect is, well, let’s think about what happens when there’s a rebellion. Like think about even anarchists. Even anarchists have leaders; well, even if they don’t want them, they get them anyway, because when there’s a rebellion, you break away from the proper order and the proper authority. There will always, it seems, rise up some authority within the group, and it’s usually the biggest, the strongest, the smartest, the people who are best at controlling others. It seems that Satan is the one who initiated the breakaway. That’s why it’s called the devil and his angels in Revelation. He’s the one who is sort of coordinating and organizing the rebellion against God. He is, it seems, the first one of the angelic host to break away from God. So you’ve got him as, in the spiritual world, the leader of the opposition, and then in the human world, the representative of the opposition. So yeah, it just seems like it’s natural out of that environment where he’s ruling these fallen leaders, fallen angels, and then he’s also active in the space where God is not sovereign over people’s lives, and so he swoops in. The Bible describes it kind of like he’s the puppet master of the world, so that he’s the prince of the power of the air. The whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. It doesn’t exactly say that people are like Satanists, like they’re happily and openly trying to obey and follow Satan, but rather they’re under his sway because they’re not under the sway of God. I think that in that environment, it’s only natural that Satan becomes the preeminent one among the rebellion.

Why did God allow him to reign? This is connected to a bigger question of why does God allow any rebellion against him of any kind. I think you’d have to trace it back. If I said, “Oh yeah, let’s say God didn’t allow Satan to reign,” well, he’s still allowing massive rebellion against him, and so we really don’t talk about Satan more, but we still have the same problem: scattered rebellion that maybe is leaderless that is still against God. Why does God allow rebellion against him, though? It seems to me that this is all part of a larger plan. My personal opinion here, because this is my personal opinion, you do not need to agree with me to be a Christian or to be a Bible-believing Christian, is that it’s all part of a larger story that God is telling that involves giving humankind free will and even angelic beings free will in choosing to follow him. So that when we’re in eternity, all those who follow God were not only made by him but have also chosen him so that they follow him in love. By allowing people to choose love, and to let love be the unity of heaven and the unity of eternity, is love. For that to be the case, choice had to be involved, and so allowing a rebellion at all is allowing love at all. I think that’s a big part of it.

Anyway, there’s probably more that can be said on that, Jackie. Other reasons: God will also—Romans tells us he’ll show his glory even in how he judges the sin that’s there. It’ll teach us things, like we will see with our own eyes as we zoom out and look at the story of creation to ultimate consummation, from the garden to heaven and earth meeting in Revelation. When we see all this from hindsight, we’ll look back and see how God was right, man was wrong, Satan was wrong, rebellion against him is bad, is evil, how dark sin is, how punished it is, how good the righteousness of God and the goodness of God are. So we’re learning all these things we’ll carry with us into eternity. Those things are valuable too, and God himself will be glorified even in those who rebel.

See original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvcaU6mHnqY