Geoff Thomas

The sinful mind is hostile to God, says Paul in Romans 8:7. ‘Hostile to God? Not me,’ the decent-living people of our nation protest, ‘Perish the thought! Not me. We respect God,’ they say. But is the God they respect the God who gets close to them asking them to repent and change, to turn from their sins and love him with all their hearts? That God is one who can break into our lives and challenge us. Jesus Christ came to seek for us and save us, and men and women do not want to be saved. Then the buried hostility comes to the surface.

A woman hears a wolf whistle from a man on a building site and she blushes, smiles to herself and walks into a shop. The admirer seems to be no threat, just a distant wolf whistle. But if that man were to climb down the scaffolding, come looking for her and find her in a corner of the shop, if he should try to push her into a little room and close the door on them both, then she will lash out in her hostility and fear. So it is with people who are keeping God out of their lives. If the church talks nicely about ‘the God of love up there, away in the sky somewhere, and we are all searching for him…’ then the people listening will smile nicely and go home. But if we say that God is here now and is telling you to turn from your sins and believe on his Son Jesus Christ - right now - then, without the Holy Spirit, you are bound to defy this God. ‘I will not have this Lord rule over me,’ you say. Your hostility will show itself.

Preaching exclusively on the love of God doesn't draw out such defiance. Preaching the search for God doesn't make anyone disobedient, but the God who in love sent his Son to die in agony and bloodshed on the cross to reconcile himself to us, and now bids us come to him - such a God makes us resentful. He is an interfering Lord. The God whose Son rose from the dead and now tells his people to preach repentance from dead works and faith in Christ as man's only hope, will by that message create real defiance. Men will say courteous things about a god of their own imagination because he is a god they can always control, but confront them with the Sovereign Lord of the Bible and they will initially defy him.

As long as men are not being directly confronted with a true picture of God, they do not disobey him. They don't feel the natural enmity towards God that is in their hearts. However, the moment the church begins to tell them what God is really like, their rebellion comes to the surface. The God of the Bible is a forgotten God in our society. The weak and wishy-washy deity that is preached in most churches would never stir up any antagonism or reverence or holy love. This is why men can hate God while being deeply religious. Because men today love a god of their own imagination, there is neither deep faith nor visible antagonism in the churches today. It was not so when John the Baptist and the apostles of Jesus Christ preached to the men and women of the first century. Nor will it be when God blesses his word and revives his people today.

Dick Lucas came to Aberystwyth recently and he spoke of a visit he made to a private school where the pupils are preparing to become officers in one of the armed forces. He chose to speak to them for the allotted fifteen minutes at their chapel service on Genesis 3:8-9, They hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, 'Where are you?' He answered, 'I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid. So Dick Lucas looked at all these teenagers in their uniforms, and at the staff and headmaster, and he said to them, ‘Of course in our days we are always being told that it is actually man who is searching for God. That is what the BBC says and it is the opinion of the learned men, so we'd better change this passage in Genesis. It ought to read something like this, that man came walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and God hid from him, and man called out to God, "Where are you?" God answered, "I am hiding, and try as hard as you can you are not going to find me." And if this is true for the Old Testament then we will have to do the same for the New Testament too. So we must go to Luke 15 and the parable of the lost sheep and change it to the parable of the lost shepherd, and tell of the sheep who left the other ninety-nine sheep and went looking for the lost shepherd until he had found him.’ At that comment there was a hearty guffaw from one of the members of staff. ‘Exactly,’ said Dick Lucas, ‘The whole concept is utterly ridiculous. It is not men who search for God but the Good Shepherd who comes and searches for us.’

So it is with us. There is not one natural man who searches after God. Young people who say to me that they are seeking for God are talking through their hats. God is not hiding away in the corner of a building somewhere. He is not in a cave on Cader Idris and only a few over the centuries have ever been able to discover his whereabouts. God is not hiding from us; we are hiding from God. God comes and finds us every Sunday. He speaks to us and tells us clearly about himself and ourselves, and what we need to know and do. That is why people refuse to come to church - because the preaching of God's word is so direct, and people don't want to meet him. They are hiding from him. God is continually speaking to our minds and consciences, but we don't want to meet with him because it is so inconvenient to part with the sins that we love and dress ourselves in the holiness we hate. We are not seeking; we are disobedient.