“If ye be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:1-3)
God is the architect of one of the most unlikely of creations…the delicate balance of belief and unbelief in our current environment.
Balancing belief and unbelief in our world, so that one does not overpower the other…is one of the great spiritual engineering feats in all of human history…yet one we do not normally recognize or attribute to God.
The delicate balance of belief and unbelief is also surprisingly calibrated…landing midway in the rare zone of falling just beyond the reach of human inventive imagination and contrivance…but also falling just short of the demarcation line of fully revealing its supernatural origin, along with the carefully hidden requirement for periodic, fine-tuned adjustments.
The most unlikely of creations, because most of us would assume that the God of the Bible…a personal God we can get to know intimately through a journey of faith (Jer. 31:34)…would take every opportunity to tip-the-scale in favor of belief over unbelief…in terms of factually persuasive, irrefutable evidence in nature and through divine revelation…in favor of belief in His existence.
But this is not the case within the human decision-making zone of belief and unbelief.
The delicate balance of belief and unbelief…the ability to freely engage with God in a fully-scripted adventure of dynamic faith having the risk, from our perspective, of possible success or failure in-the-moment…or to freely push God away in skeptical unbelief to entirely go our own way…is a true masterpiece of creative ingenuity precisely because of its balanced neutrality in this area of unforced belief or unbelief.
For example, on Monday or Tuesday of the first week after His crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus Christ could have added to His already busy agenda to openly walk down Main Street in Jerusalem and right into the Temple sanctuary, in clear view of everyone (Lk. 24:13-32; 36-43; Jn. 20:19-20), validating forever thereafter…without any doubt…His claim to be the divine Son of God. Like Thomas (Jn. 20:26-28), people could touch his hands and the wound in His side…and believe based on the factual evidence (Jn. 20:29).
But then the delicate balance of belief and unbelief would also immediately disappear…forever thereafter. Recognition of Jesus Christ as “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6) would not be an open option that could go in either of the two opposing directions of belief and unbelief…but instead would be a strictly obvious fact like the daily occurrence of the rising sun, or that two-plus-two equals four.
This balance of belief and unbelief offers compelling evidence for the divine origin of the biblical message of redemptive salvation by grace through faith, because the mere existence of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…that is the prerequisite foundation for the exercise of faith…is so transparently neutral…so free of the taint of coercive human bias weighted in favor of one direction or the other…that it could never be mistaken as the imperfect conceptual product of human literary invention.
The delicate balance of belief and unbelief in our current environment has a supernatural origin…because a humanistic explanation for its creative ingenuity…and its functionally balanced longevity over time…is nonsensical.
The existence of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…of willfully entering into a risked-filled adventure of biblical faith wherein God displaces our ways with His higher ways…opposed to pushing God away and going our own way according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…is a transcendent reality that could only come from the divinely imaginative mind of God…way beyond the initial set-up capacity of humans to invent, adjust, and sustain over its 4,200 year history beginning with Abraham.
From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity.
If you have Kindle and are interested…my book Inspirational Thoughts for Christians is a free Kindle ebook on Amazon Thursday 1/10 and Friday 1/11.
The Cross in the Christian Life 