LIE: God is irrelevant

Lie:      God is irrelevant.

Truth: God is relevant.

The greatest source of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips but deny him by their lifestyles. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable. — Brennan Manning

relevant — having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand. Synonyms: germane, material, pertinent.

This lie is often felt but seldom acknowledged.

The question burns: relevant or irrelevant to what? God is irrelevant to . . . me, my life, my finances, my job? or irrelevant to the world, that is, the one I live in: business, science, popular culture? In other words, how does God really matter, that is, as opposed to things we know that matter: health, family, age, technology, weather, government services, education, money, food? You get the idea.

But when we say (or subliminally think) that God is not relevant, or marginally relevant, to my life or the world around me, we’re making a couple of wrong assumptions:

1  Since we are purely physical beings (apparently the physical body is the only verifiable entity), the spiritual world, if it exists, does not affect us.

2  The spiritual world, if it exists, must be completely separate from and cannot co-exist with the physical/material world and so can safely be ignored. If it were important, it would be obvious.

Both of these assumptions are wrong headed and will ultimately lead us to conclude that God is irrelevant. Both fail to recognize the spiritual world that is right under our noses. So a key question that we must answer is:

What is the spiritual world?

To define it negatively, the spiritual world is the non-physical world, the non-corporeal world which includes realities like (considering only those human-level spiritual realities) thoughts, feelings, relationships, time, memories, languages, knowledge, and souls/selves/identities. (For now, we won’t include the angelic or divine realities since the existence of the spiritual world itself is in question.)

Some argue that each of these realities are actually part of the physical world, but to believe this they have to accept that human beings are purely sets of chemical processes, that is, that we ourselves are highly-evolved chemical processes. Our thoughts, our memories, they say, are simply electro-chemical signals; our consciousness is nothing more than brain patterning. But where that brain patterning originates is unclear.

Now, no one is saying that electro-chemical processes do not exist, but it’s another thing entirely to reduce and equate those processes TO the thoughts – the ‘thought,’ being stripped of all meaning, and being nothing more than, a chemical process. Proponents of this monism make no distinction. See also LIE: I am my brain.

The problem with this is, no one can actually behave or live, and we cannot treat people as though they were nothing more than, chemical processes. To do so would be monstrous to say the least. The very philosophers and scientists who espouse materialism communicate their ideas in words and languages, not in kind, that is, not in chemical codes, which, it turns out, actually do exist.

Quoting the Greek poet Epimenides, Paul said, “In him [God] we live and move and have our being.” We swim in a spiritual world that we cannot escape, even if we tried. All of us are spiritual beings, whether we realize it or not. We may be spiritually good or spiritually bad, but one cannot not be spiritual. Human beings are in part spiritual, that is, we all have a spiritual dimension. The physical and spiritual worlds overlap and intertwine at every level. God designed them that way. The final agony of their separation is what we call death.

Perhaps you’ve thought that ‘spiritual’ only had to do with ghosts or demons or the divine. Not so. We straddle two worlds, the physical and spiritual, and these two worlds impinge on each other in ways we cannot fully understand and they do so constantly, hand in glove, spirit in body.

Let’s put this question a little closer to home:

Are people relevant?

Of course they are, especially the people in our lives who we know well. We’re affected by their words and attitudes, their rules, expectations, their history, their ‘vibe’ – all non-material realities. In every way, people are relevant and actually much more so in spiritual ways. We relate to them primarily on whether and to what degree we trust them.

Trust (or mistrust) is deep and fundamental; it is the deepest factor in relationships. When we meet someone we instinctively ‘size them up.’ We put the person through a silent, instantaneous, unconscious, hundred-question filter: eye contact, smile, handshake, dress, haircut, fitness, cleanliness, appropriate facial expression, voice tone, loudness, expression, inflection, etc. We make these snap judgments – for good or bad – effortlessly and without thinking. ‘First impressions last.’ But why? Because we want to know if and to what degree we can trust them. Why? Basically because of security; we need and want to be safe. Basic trust is very relevant.

The question of whether we can be safe with God and Son Jesus, is the paramount question. God makes contact with us – he speaks, he demonstrates his love, his power, his truth constantly. It’s his world and he’s in charge of it, but we’re very good at ‘missing it.’ We misinterpret the signals and signs of God; our filters are clogged with wrong concepts, confusions, lies and half-truths.

So we arrange our lives to protect ourselves and God’s ‘intrusion’ by consigning him to an isolated, inaccessible and irrelevant realm – heaven. That way we can live our lives unaffected and undisturbed by his law, his power and his love. But we would be mistaken. In reality, there is no place to hide. He is everywhere, and his world, whether we realize it or not, affects us so deeply we can barely begin to describe it. God is the most relevant being, bar none.

See also the Introduction, Lies attacking the nature of God.