Jesus We Talk About Hubble’s View
Dear Thomas,
In your fourteenth question you state, “The Christian talks a lot about having a personal relationship with God. A lot of children have imaginary friends, and a lot of crazies think they have relationships with all kinds of people.
How is the Christian’s relationship with an unseen, inaudible God any different? The Hubble space telescope has never seen God, has never viewed heaven, and has never photographed anything that would indicate the existence of something more than the natural world and universe. If God is there, why is He so invisible?”
What would happen if the Hubble space telescope did see God? What would He look like? If we were to seek God’s dwelling place, where would we look in this endless, immeasurable universe?
If we did find it, what would His dwelling place be like? And what would happen to us if the ultimate reality of God were fully disclosed to all our senses?
It can be difficult to commit your life to an inaudible and invisible God. Yet the truth is that God doesn’t often reveal Himself to our physical senses. He does, however, reveal Himself to our soul—that is, to our mind, emotions, and will.
What we do observe is a creator designer ofall that is, creating with such magnificence and complexity that it boggles the mind. The beauty of all that exists in the earthly environment to the total beauty of the heavens and our earth as viewed from outer space must also include the absolute marvel of how conscious life works as well as all the intricate functions of human life and all other living things.
When God decided to populate the earth, He created two people to procreate after their own kind. It seems that when God decided to populate the heavens with new stars, He likewise set chemical, electrical, and physical cosmic forces at work to give birth to new heavenly bodies.
However, because we can t connect with God with our physical senses, many people have concluded there is nothing out there except what is observable by the naked eye or aided by a telescope.
Scientists have no explanation for why anything exists yet reason there must have been a time when nothing, not even time, existed.
Everything needs space to exist, but there is no explanation to tell us where space came from. Science can’t explain it because, from nothing, nothing comes.
But it is obvious to all of us that there is something. There is a whole lot of physical and living something. Telescopes search for and science works on the how or the process of being.
Science discovers how galaxies move and how suns come into being and go out of being, almost like the seasons of a plant. Science studies the formation of suns that populate the universe, just as it studies the procreation of all forms of life that have populated our earth.
In all this study of process, science leaves the why alone. But it is the way that takes us to the who of matter, space, time, and being.
If there is a who, why is He invisible? Again it goes back to our brokenness in a broken world the sin problem. An infinitely powerful and holy God who sustains all heavenly and earthly life systems knows He cannot expose Himself to humankind without that very exposure being destructive and thus unloving, much like a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24).
He is invisible and inaudible because He loves us and does not want to destroy our free relationship with Him by overwhelming us with the glory of His being.
God does not want any person to run and hide from Him because of His holy brilliance; therefore, He remains invisible except to man’s spirit, in his heart, in his mind’s eye.
He stays invisible except for the historical Jesus Christ, God incarnate, the true revelation of God (see John 14:9). He stays invisible except for the “Christ in us” through the indwelling holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16; Col. 1:27).
However, He does become visible through Scripture as we see His actions through the movement of history and in the lives of people in history.
He also becomes personally audible to us through that still, small voice or gentle whisper (1 Kings 19:12) as well as through the actions and writings of others, all letting us know of His presence.
After he witnessed Jesus’ death on the cross and heard of his reported resurrection, the disciple Thomas had trouble believing that Jesus Christ was actually alive.
Thomas’s personal witness and the evidence of Christ’s death were just too great for him. In order for Thomas to believe, Jesus had to allow him to touch His wounds.
Jesus lovingly remarked, “Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27). That visual and physical encounter with the risen Jesus made Thomas declare, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).
To that Jesus responded, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). Hebrews 11:3 says.
There are a lot of things that we believe exist though we have never seen them. We do that because of the evidence, both physical and experiential. We see dinosaur tracks in sandstone and believe these creatures existed long ago. We see a shadow and describe its reality.
We know we had a great-great-great-grandfather, though we never met him. We get letters from loved ones, and although we only see words on paper, we experience their love and care. We hear the voices of friends on the telephone and know that these friends are alive and well or hurting and in need.
We know the sun will come up tomorrow because it always has. We smell smoke in the air and know a fire is burning somewhere. We recognize by smell the presence of a skunk in the woods without ever seeing it.
We also know of the reality of Jesus Christ in the lives of people everywhere because of their testimonies and the experiential evidence of changed lives. Things do not have to be seen in order to be known.
God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the indwelling Holy Spirit desire to be known. Yet as mentioned previously, they do not want to destroy us in our current state of sin in the process of becoming known to us.
Since He remains invisible, what does God look like? “God is love,” says 1 John 4:8, and that love is expressed in the glory of the heavens above and in the earth below.
It is also profoundly expressed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and His life of relationships. His ultimate expression of love began in the garden of Gethsemane when He said,
That love is profoundly on exhibit in the resurrection of Jesus, where in His glorified state He allowed us to glimpse our own future glorified state. That divine love can also be seen in the love expressed between husband and wife or mother and child in acts of self-sacrifice, in kind deeds done without ulterior motives, in acts of reconciliation, and in offering and receiving forgiveness.
To see and know God doesn’t require eyes. Nor does it require a sense of hearing, taste, touch, or smell. Rather, to see God requires seeing Him through love beyond external sensual means or beyond the purely intellectual level.
God can and must be seen at the level of a person’s inner spirituality, that enlivened spirit within, which affects the mind, the emotions, and the will the very soul of a man.
Knowing and experiencing God at this intellectual, emotional, and experiential level is the seeing that brings meaning, purpose, healing, belonging, and the means to loving.
To experience and know God is to see and know love as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. To experience and know God is to recognize His Spirit within and to listen not with our ears but with our hearts and souls (mind, emotions, and will).
To experience and know God is to respond to His promptings and follow His leading along the path of love, irrespective of the behavior of the broken world around us.
To experience and know God is to recognize that He loves both you and me as individuals, each of us unique in our creation. To experience and know God allows us the freedom to love Him back. This experiencing and knowing is the seeing of the invisible.
There is a very real danger in not seeing. The quality of life here and now, as well as our eternal destiny, depends on it. Staying blind to the experiential knowledge of God can spell disaster at the final judgment, to say nothing about our sense of being, wholeness, and feeling of oneness with God in this life.
Only at the second coming of Jesus Christ will God be fully revealed to our physical senses (1 Thess. 4:16—17). Only at the final judgment will God fully reveal Himself to those who rejected Him in spirit and truth, those who became God-rejecters and God-haters and with their self-sufficient arrogance felt no need for God (Rom. 1:28-32; Rev. 21:8).
The love expressed in the moral laws of God is what supports life everlasting. The principle of life rooted in love gives sustaining energy to everlasting life. As. I have said and quoted so many times, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). He governs His universe on the principles of love. How else could it be? And who would want to live forever under any other form of governance?
God is indeed invisible to the Hubble telescope, but He is not invisible to those who have found Him in their relationship with Jesus Christ through the activity of the Holy Spirit. This is not an external, visual seeing but an internal seeing.
It is a seeing that transcends the eyes, a seeing that seems like foolishness to those who refuse to open themselves to the working of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:14). In Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit, God opens the eyes of the heart and mind in all those who believe by faith. These are those who have seen and understood the evidence, hear His voice, and follow.
They are the ones who feel the touch of His presence and constant care throughout all the events of life. They are those who get a foretaste of the things that will be as they experience His love and walk in His presence. And they are the ones who smell the sweet fragrance of a life of loving through the power of His Spirit that dwells within them.
If God’s invisibility seems difficult to surmount, all we need to do is to ask God to reveal Himself. As Scripture so clearly says, “Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt. 7:7-8). Jesus Himself made this promise, and that is what He so desperately wants to do to reveal Himself to all of us. Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, lived and died for that very cause. He did it for you!
Your friend,
Matt