When I visited Russia in 1992, I would sometimes get a question (through my translator) like this: “God, God, God. You’re always talking about this God. What do you mean by God? Why believe in a God? I don’t see any God.”
One must be careful when answering this question, because often the questioner may have different reasons for asking it. One reason may be intellectual curiosity, one may be personal (a tragedy has occurred in the questioner’s life) or maybe a person may be out to just cause a commotion, a ruckus. One would answer this question differently depending on who is asking. But I’ll reply here to the intellectual.
Humans inherently have questions about our origin, our purpose and the question of “what is over that next hill” or “what’s in that next solar system?” We want to know who we are, both on a personal level and existentially. The question about God in its simplest form is often a question about us. It’s about ourselves. Who are we?
To briefly answer: You are more than just the sum total of your thoughts and actions. Like the band Tenth Avenue North tells us: “You are more than the choices that you’ve made, You are more than the sum of your past mistakes, You are more than the problems you create.” We are a product of God’s creative power. So God, first of all, is the transcendent Creator. The author not only of human life, but of all life.
The reason that it is often hard to recognize this is due to the very magnitude of the scale of the enterprise He is coordinating.
How can we know that statements like those above are true? Isn’t there a lot of evidence for just chaos all around? Just look at the world we live in! The circumstances around us seem to lead someone outside the Kingdom of God to believe that the world is just spiraling out of control.
This is the point where we address transcendence. And we need to address “definitions”:
For our purposes, we will make a clear distinction between Credence, “agreeing that some teaching is true” and Faith, “when your belief motivates the way you speak, act and think.”
God wants you to know Him. Not descriptions of Him. Not a religion based on stories about Him. No. He wants you to have Faith in Him.
Knowing God is a very personal, spiritual, true faith-experience. That is transcendence. This experience is not of this world. Sounds like we’re going to get into astronomy! Not yet.
First, how can we have this personal faith-experience?