Is God Dead? (The Return to God)

 

Is God Dead? (The Return to God)

"The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems." 

— A. W. Tozer

Look at what we have become.

We told ourselves we had outgrown Him.

We called it progress. We called it enlightenment. We called it freedom. We stood over the grave we dug for God and congratulated ourselves for finally being brave enough to bury Him.

And then we inherited the world we made without Him.

Look at it.

We are more connected than any generation in human history, and lonelier than any generation in human history. We are more informed and less wise. More entertained and less joyful. More medicated and less at peace. We have every comfort our ancestors prayed for and none of the meaning they died with.

We built a world with everything in it except the one thing the soul was made for.

And now we are starving inside of our own abundance.

This is the part we do not want to say out loud.

We did not just walk away from God. We replaced Him. Deliberately. Enthusiastically. We tore Him down from the center of everything and we spent a hundred years auditioning replacements.

We put ourselves on the throne.

We worshiped our own image. We called it self-love, self-discovery, self-actualization, self-expression. We were promised that if we just looked deep enough within, we would find everything we had been missing.

So we looked.

And we found a mirror. And in the mirror the reflection of humanity.

And we worshiped it.

We worshiped pleasure.

We consumed everything we could reach. We sexualized childhood, monetized attention, turned intimacy into content and appetite into identity. We chased the next thing and the next thing and the next, faster and louder and emptier, until nothing thrilled us anymore and we called that being free.

We worshiped outrage.

We built entire identities out of what we hate. We turned strangers into enemies and enemies into purpose. We mistook the adrenaline of anger for the meaning we lost, and we tore each other apart looking for something to belong to.

We worshiped the machine.

We handed our minds to algorithms and our children to screens and our silence to a thousand glowing distractions, because silence had become unbearable. Silence exposes things. Silence asks questions we spent a fortune trying not to hear.

And every single one of these gods failed us.

Every one.

Because self makes a devastating god. It cannot forgive you. It cannot save you. It cannot carry the weight of its own existence, let alone yours.

Because pleasure makes a devastating god. It demands more every time and gives less every time, until it consumes the very person offering the sacrifice.

Because outrage makes a devastating god. It burns everything and warms no one.

None of them could bear the weight of a human soul. They were never meant to. And somewhere underneath all the noise, humanity is finally starting to feel the floor giving way.

Because here is what we did not count on.

The hunger did not die when God did.

We killed the object of our worship and kept the ache of it. We tore out the compass and kept the pull. We are a civilization still reaching, still grasping, still searching, and no longer able to remember what for.

That is the terror underneath this generation.

Not that people stopped believing in God.

That people cannot stop searching for Him, even while insisting He is not there.

You see it everywhere once you know to look. In the anxiety we cannot explain. In the emptiness that follows us home. In the way people bounce from lover to lover, purchase to purchase, cause to cause, chasing a satisfaction that stays one step ahead of them their entire lives.

We are the richest, freest, most powerful generation that has ever lived.

And we are drowning.

Because you cannot fill an eternal ache with temporary things. You cannot satisfy a hunger for the infinite with an endless buffet of the finite. You cannot cure the absence of God with more of everything He was never inside of.

And I think, quietly, beneath the pride and the noise and the exhaustion, humanity is beginning to suspect the truth it worked so hard to bury.

That the searching was never pointless.

That the ache was never a flaw.

That we did not evolve past God at all.

We just lost the way back.

Throughout Scripture, this is the oldest story there is. Humanity runs, and God waits. Humanity hides, and God calls.

Adam hides in the garden, and God walks through it asking, where are you?

Jonah runs to sea, and God is already in the storm.

The prodigal squanders everything chasing a life apart from his father, and one day finds himself starving in a field, feeding pigs, dreaming of home.

That is where humanity is standing right now.

In the field.

Surrounded by everything it wanted, hungrier than it has ever been, beginning to remember there was once a table it walked away from.

The son is not home yet.

But he has turned toward the road.

This is the return to God.