Atheists sometimes ask Christians why God doesn’t just show Himself once and for all and be done with the ambiguity? If God would clearly and obviously reveal Himself to our senses, nobody could possibly refute His existence, and we’d all know once and for all that He is God and should be worshipped. It would provide scientists with the final proof they need and evolution would be finally overturned for good, and we’d all live happily ever after.
Who is hiding?
We find of course, that in the beginning God clearly revealed Himself to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. After eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Gen 3:8). The nature of the relationship between God and man up to this point seems to be one where God was more obvious than he is today. This suggests that the original nature of creation was such that man was created for a relationship with God.
But this incident in the garden tells us much more than just that man was made to have a relationship with God. We see in the passage above that it wasn’t that God hid Himself from man after Adam and Eve sinned, but that man hid from God. Why? Because when they ate of the fruit “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen 3:7). There was a profound innocence in the garden of Eden prior to this first sin. After it, however, it was clear something significant had changed. that change was essentially the birth of the human conscience and the awareness of personal guilt.
Personal guilt before a Holy God drives the guilty from the presence of God. Immediately this guilt separated man from God. Adam’s sin became his master – forcing him to do what he would not otherwise have done – run from God. And this has been the case ever since. Man continually looks for ways to avoid the presence of God.
But the story of Genesis doesn’t finish there. Not only did guilt drive man from God, but we see that God pursued man: “the Lord God called to the man and said to him ‘Where are you?’” (Gen 3:9). Just as man has been running from God ever since this time, God has been pursuing man from this time. The judgement pronounced after the first sin contains the first promise of the Messiah who would be revealed several millennia later (Gen 3:15).
So firstly, this tells us that we are created to commune with God, and that it is we, not Him who hides, and He who pursues us, not us who seek to know Him (Rom 3:10-11).
Gods interaction with man
When sin entered the world, the way God and man interacted changed forever. Increasingly, man considered knowing God to be a worthless pursuit, and God gave man over to his own desires, creating a cycle of increased sin and depravity. Effectively God gave man what he wanted – which was not Himself, but the satisfaction of the bodily desires and the gradual elimination of God from society. The important thing here is that God gave man over to this.
Gods purpose in creating the world, was not merely to commune with Man. It wasn’t that God was lonely. God had another purpose in mind when He created. We find hints of this purpose throughout scripture in passages such as Ps 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork”. The created order shows something of the creator, thus the greater purpose of creation is the demonstration, or declaration of God. For example, in the size of the universe we see the immensity of God, in the intricacies of life we see the incredible knowledge and wisdom of God to put everything together in such a way that it is all ultimately interdependent.
God revealing Himself
This purpose also extends to man. God created man to demonstrate something of Himself. God created all intelligent, self-conscious beings as a host by which to demonstrate Himself and a host to which to demonstrate Himself.
The host by which God demonstrates Himself is man – God demonstrates who He is through man. When we desire to have nothing to do with God, we sin. God justly gives us over to our sin as a form of judgement (Rom 1:18, 24-25, 26, 28). When our life is over, God judges us according to our deeds (Matt 16:27, Rev 20:12). This judgement demonstrates something about God. It demonstrates His righteousness, His justice, His wrath and His power and more (Rom 9:22).
Does God reveal anything about Himself by those who believe? Yes. Through those who believe Him and trust Jesus Christ as the bearer of our punishment for sin on the cross, God reveals His mercy, grace and kindness (Rom 9:23, Eph 2:7)
So regardless of whether we believe or not, He will be shown to be who He is, revealed fully through us. This revelation of the fullness of God is referred to as His “glory”. When Christians speak of the glory of God, they mean the revelation of the fullness of who He is. Thus God will be glorified by believers and unbelievers alike, although in two different ways.
So, why does God not reveal Himself?
God’s purpose is to be glorified through His creation. He provided man all that he could ever want in the garden of Eden and it was rejected. Since then man has continued to reject God. God continues to pursue man, calling him to repentance, seeking to save those who will hear. But this must be done with separation between God and man. God cannot bear sin – He despises it, but because of the work of Christ He is patient, saving some as they will turn to Him and waiting until that number is complete before implementing steps to eliminate sin forever from the earth. All this is to demonstrate the fullness of His character.
Because there must be a degree of separation between man and God, the daily experience of seeing God in the midst of a sin infested earth with our eyes cannot happen as it did in the garden of Eden when there was no sin. Instead, God has determined that man can only sense Him by faith – through spiritual sight. But, there will come a day when faith will give way to sight for all.
It is not God’s purpose to save everyone – part of His purpose is to demonstrate His justice, power and wrath as we have seen. So a mass demonstration that is effective enough to convince everyone of His reality is contrary to His purposes.
Even if God revealed Himself in some sort of international event, at best it would last only a generation or two. We see this clearly in the history of Israel. God took Israel from Egypt through a series of 10 miraculous events that showed the futility of the Egyptian pantheon of deities, the supremacy of God and His favor toward Israel. But within a couple of generations Israel had begun to drift away from God after whatever took their affections. Today, many question the historicity of any of the Biblical events. So if God showed Himself today, what difference would it ultimately make?
God’s purpose is to be glorified, by you and I, whether we believe or not. He has determined that we are to be saved by faith, not by empirical “proof”. And faith is in accordance with His grace (Rom 4:16).
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