I love theology. It is fun and inspiring to delve deep into the mystery of God. After all, God gave us a mind that we can use to know God's presence in our lives.
The other day in my freshman theology class, we began studying St. Thomas Aquinas' five proofs for the existence of God.
I gave this scenario: I have a friend who is an atheist. We are good friends and I care deeply for this person. Since I believe that having a relationship with God is a good thing, I want to share this with my friend and help him to move into belief. But my friend is resistant to belief in God. My friend wants me to prove that God exists.
Prove that God exists? Easy! Check out the Bible - it is full of the miraculous stories of God and God's great love.
"But I don't believe in your Bible," says my friend.
Ok. Well, look at the Church. It is a beautiful reminder of God's presence in the world.
"But I don't believe in your church," says my friend.
So my task, as with St. Thomas, is to show a reasonable argument that God could exist without the benefit of religion, the Scriptures, or the church. What do we have left? We have what all humans have, our minds and hearts. If God created us, then we should be able to reason our way to God with our minds.
St. Thomas Aquinas laid out five beautiful and effective arguments to show the reasonability of a God.
The first proof is the argument from motion. Basically, everything is in motion, from Earth around our sun, to the universe expanding, to the subatomic level of protons and electrons. Everything that is in motion must be set in motion by some force. It is sometimes called The Unmoved Mover.
What force so powerful could set our universe and all of creation into motion? We call that force God.
So I get this far in our explanation of the proof of the Unmoved Mover that we call God, and a student asks me a question. It turns out that this student is an atheist and is struggling to understand the idea of a God, but is caught off guard by this reasonable explanation. And then this student asks a crucial question.
"Mr. Patulot, I might be able to buy that nothing can cause itself, and that everything in motion must be set in motion by something and that something is what we call God, but if God is so powerful and created the entire universe, why would that God care about my personal sin?
What this student was asking was "why would God care about me?"
Now that is a great question.
If God is indeed real, and has the power to create the universe and set it in motion and create it in such a way that is so interconnected, complex, mysterious, and beautiful, why would that all powerful thing care about me?!
And yet, what the scriptures tell us is that God does care about us. Not just in a general way, but in a specific and personal way. God knows our names, knew us before we were born, knows the number of hairs on our heads. God cares about us so deeply and personally that He became one of us, suffered, and died for us. For me. For you.
That is the crazy part of the story and we believe it to be true. Yes, God is so amazing and powerful and created the universe and everything in it. And that same God that created our galaxy and placed each star in the sky loves each one of us individually. Loves us deeply. Longs to be with us.
A friend of mine once said that God paints the sky with beauty every morning in the hopes that we might notice it. It is God's pleasure to love us. That is our God - all powerful and ever close to us.
For God to care about us is like for me to care about an individual lego piece in a bin of my kid's legos. It is like me caring and naming each grain of sand on the beach, on every beach, on every ocean in the world. That kind of love is ludicrous.
That is God's love for us. For you and I.
We are insignificant in the light of the universe. We are less than specks of dust floating in space, and yet, we are the beloved of God. We are worth loving, and worth fighting for. We are worth painting the most beautiful portraits for. We are worth living and dying for.
God is the Unmoved Mover, the one who set the world into motion. And yet, I'd like to imagine that God is also a Moved Mover. God is moved by His love for us, because that is God's true nature. When we speak of God, we can imagine a creator and an unlimited power, but the truest idea of God is that of Love. God's love for us moves God's self to count our hairs and hold us in the palms of his hands. God's love moved God's self to become flesh like us, through Jesus, and share in our life, and redeem us so that we could live with Him forever.
Why would God love such an insignificant thing like me? Because that is who God is. And I am forever grateful for it.
AP
