Unanswered Questions
A few years ago, caught up in the evening rush hour I saw a bold inscription on a red London bus that said, “The fool says in his heart there is no God”. My heart did a double flip as I pondered the weight of that statement, a quote from the Bible. It had never meant much to me before, having been brought up in a culture where the majority of people believed in God. In the past few years however, I have been increasingly amazed at the number of atheists who don’t accept the existence of God. As if that wasn't enough, there are also the agnostics. The dictionary defines such as “ people who believe that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena;” “a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God”.
I guess everyone has a reason why they believe what they believe. Faith for me is literally a matter of life or death. My desire as much as possible is to get people round to my way of thinking.
Not so long ago, my husband and I had the privilege of working within a university campus reaching out to students who had a lot of unanswered questions. We used a study material called the Alpha Course. The first week, we went round the hostels posting breakfast invitations through the doors. The big day arrived, it was Cranfield village in late October 2015; cold and murky. I was both nervous and excited, I didn’t know what to expect. We had the chef prepare a full English breakfast for twenty people while we laid out the long dining table. We set up the screen, the projector and waited. We waited and waited and waited but no one turned up. Feeling quite crushed after two hours, we all sat down and had a hearty breakfast.
Three weeks down the line, a few people started trickling in. That first year, we had five Chinese students and one Polish guy. The Alpha Course isn’t strictly a Bible Study but rather a platform for discussion about the Christian faith. It dealt alot on the claims of Jesus Christ and posed the question, “Is there more to life than this?”
I’m not sure who was more amazed on that first day, the students or myself. For most of them, they had never heard about Jesus and didn’t quite know what to make of Him. They wondered why He said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Why is He the way? Where does He lead to? How is He the Truth? Aren’t there other truths out there? The Life? What life? It was all too new to the class. We had them watch a few video clips about the life of Jesus. They saw Him healing the sick, delivering the oppressed and feeding the hungry. One of them sitting beside me whispered into my ear, “Hennang, what does Jesus really want? Is He just a nice guy always doing good things? What does He really want? My eyes filled with tears as I listened to her. I hoped she was beginning to understand a little. I told her Jesus wanted to have a relationship with her.
The Bible says “for everyone has sinned, we all fall short of Gods glorious standards”. It also says that “the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It makes it clear that there are consequences for living a sinful life and it is death. The Bible has labeled everyone born into the world as a sinner. Our nature is a fallen one that continually struggles to do good. We usually end up doing the things we hate to do no matter how hard we try. Does that mean that when a person has a relationship with Jesus they will never die? Absolutely not! Everyone on earth will die one day but unfortunately that won’t be the end. After death, there will be a judgement on how we lived our lives on earth; on whether we accepted or rejected the free gift of Jesus. I explained that Jesus would never force Himself on anyone. She needed to invite him into her life to save her. Everyone had to make that decision for themself.
Liu stopped the class one day and asked if we had “empirical proof to support all we were saying”. He was very intellectual and needed to see, touch or taste before believing. Thankfully the Alpha Course curriculum was able to present some documented historical facts to back up some of the Biblical stories. We also explained that he needed faith to believe what the Bible was offering. We talked about prayer and how to talk to God through prayer. We challenged everyone that was having difficulty accepting what we were saying to simply pray and ask God to prove Himself. Prayer was simply talking honestly to God.
One of the greatest challenges we experienced in reaching intellectuals with the message of Jesus was their over brilliant minds. We were faced with the bing bang theory and the theory of evolution. Ofcourse it went right over my head. I wasn’t sure if they were separate theories or the same. I didn’t have a clue on how to handle the discourse. What do I know about science? I couldn’t even spell the word. I don’t know anything about how the ice melted fifteen million years ago, how the water content affected the surface area of the bone structure of early man and how a big loud explosion gave life to everything. That was definitely above my pay grade. My husband and son however enjoyed having those intellenctual discussions. I remember being described as the “feelings” person and the others as the “logical” ones.
During Alpha, the class was confronted by the love of God. It was the love of a Father who didn’t want anyone to be lost. He said, “I love you with an everlasting love”. Some of them were being plagued by fears. Some had been hurt terribly in relationships, by fathers who had abandoned them. Others were in abusive marriages, some were feeling like worthless failures. God kept repeatedly telling them “I love you with an everlasting love and I love you just the way you are. I will never turn away anyone who comes to me”.
An important question that was constantly asked during Alpha was how do we reach this God. The good news is that we dont have to do anything to reach Him. He is already waiting, arms wide open. Just ask Him in, speak to Him. He says “whosoever will, let him come”. It is still an open invitation.
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