Undeniable

As I read the bible, there is an overwhelming theme that jumps out at me. That of God making Himself undeniable to people. In this day and age much of our doubt, and by that I mean society as a whole, stems from the lack of the physical presence of God. Many of us feel God. His presence is a sixth sense kind of feeling that we can’t put on paper or measure on a scale, but many don’t see God or hear God.

God still makes Himself undeniable, but we have become so ingrained to doubt, that we miss the obvious. We want a burning bush that talks to us. We want a sea to split in half so that we can drive our car on the floor of the ocean. Most people think that an event like this would show God as undeniable. But in the macrocosmic view, we miss the microcosmic reality that God is in the small as much as the big. He is in the single blood cell. He is in a flower pedal. He is in a single drop of water that can join with trillions more to become a stream. There is a bloodstream of intensity that spans the overt and strikes down to the seemingly mundane. Each of the billions of cells that course through your bloodstream are a piece of the intense God. For if everything came from God, then everything is of God, and therefore YOU are of God, made of physical little microscopic pieces that are of the Creator. Microscopic bursts of the one who is all intensity. The one who is love, is in you. He makes Himself undeniable in the complexity of the physical.

Strip yourself naked and try to make a coyote from what you have on you. Try to sculpt a mountain, try to build a living tree that can suck water out of the ground. Try to love all of creation from the inanimate to the highly intellectual. There is only one who can. You see, we are woefully inadequate when trying to play God. We have nothing that even remotely compares, and yet we are of him.

I stand in awe of the complexity of God. It is like trying to fathom the universe. Our minds cannot wrap themselves around infinity. We need borders, but God is without border. We cannot do anything but stand here scratching our heads as we attempt to comprehend God. And yet that is the one who made you. That is the one whose desire is to be with you and in you. When we stand in awe of this creator-God, he must be undeniable. Only the stubborn, who have decided to ignore him, can outwardly deny him. But through those hearts runs the blood from the intense one, keeping them alive through his intense desire to be seen.

In Acts 8 there is this story that I love. Phillip, a guy who witnessed Jesus, is audibly told by an angel of the Lord to go down a certain road. And the cool thing here is that he obeyed. Now I could stop here with this lesson of God talking and Phillip obeying, but because Phillip obeyed, not only did God make Himself undeniable to Phillip, he made Himself undeniable to another.

Phillip runs across the Treasurer of Ethiopia on this road. Picture an angel telling you to go walk down some road in Washington, DC, where you happen upon the Secretary of the Treasury and get to go for a ride in his limo. This is no insignificant story. This treasurer is reading scriptures out loud as Phillip runs along side the chariot and finally invites Phillip along for a ride so that Phillip can explain the scripture to him. It was no accident that the scripture that the treasurer needed explained was a prophesy telling about Jesus’ death.

And so now God has put Phillip on this road, so that God can make Himself undeniable to this man. God is putting Phillip in front of the man who controls the purse strings for Ethiopia. Again, we could stop here, as God has put Phillip in the treasurer’s path to tell him about Christ, but we would miss more of God’s intensity.

The treasurer asks Phillip to baptize him in some water that they come upon, and so Phillip does. Now here is the cool part of this story. The miraculous has already happened. God has sent a messenger to a messenger, who is then sent to one seeking. The heart part of this story is done as the treasurer is baptized as one who really understands Jesus, but as he comes out of the water, he finds Himself standing alone, and Phillip finds Himself in a city farther to the North. It doesn’t leave room for Phillip to have travelled there, it says that God’s Spirit “caught Phillip away”.

Are we so thick headed that a talking angel, a perfectly timed meeting, an explanation of the fulfillment of prophesy, a heart change, and a physical show of loyalty are not enough? How often in our lives do ten things point to God, but we need eleven? The treasurer finds Himself standing alone and Phillip finds Himself in a different town. God has pulled off what Star Trek could only dream. A teleportation, the final comical nail of convincing evidence of God’s hand in this already fantastic story. There had to have been others around, like the chariot driver and the attendants of the treasurer. Was this act for them? The treasurer could tell them what God had done in his heart, but a disappearing man is a homerun.

I think God had this incredible sense of humor. I can just see him snickering as he snatched Phillip away and plopped him down in a different town and sat back to watch everyone’s reaction. This had to blow Phillip’s mind. It had to blow everyone’s mind. It blows my mind.

I have always had this dream of teleporting. Wouldn’t it be nice to leave work at lunch and pipe yourself to the top of a peak in the Rocky Mountains? It would absolutely alter my disposition to get that change of scenery even for a half hour. I don’t think the technology of this possibility would ever cease to amaze me. I’d take my wife for a romantic dinner in Barcelona and then retire to a cabin in the Smokey Mountains where we would sit by a fire. We would wake up to go have pastries in a French hotel and then go for a hike in the most remote corner of New Zealand. This would truly be a marvel of modern technology, but it would not be new. God must delight in blowing our doors off.