Wearing the shoes of a non-believer and making sense of their incredulity

To communicate well with people who don’t believe in God, we need to better imagine wearing their shoes. For example, think for a moment how odd it sounds to those who don’t think like believers, that we should give all the glory (for all the good things in life), to God alone. Moreover, that whatever happens (including the bad things), he should be praised and worshipped, and even that God demands that we do this! If a person was instructing us this way, we would refuse it (quite rightly and angrily so), and say that he or she was a megalomaniac, and that the best we could do is to laugh and mock him/her, or, more sympathetically, perhaps, to ensure he/she receives some kind of psychiatric help. But, of course, for believing Christians, we do believe this of Jesus (so compounding the oddness at least double-fold), because we also claim that he was God made a person (and see my post 7^th February 2014: ‘the utterly strange claim that God became a human being and so our friend’). Given all this, it should be no surprise to us that we are being ridiculed and viewed with incredulity. But don’t get touchy about such things; their mockery, if we think about it for a moment, makes a good deal of sense!

So why, then, do we encourage ourselves to praise him, worship him, and give all the glory back to him, so to God and to Christ Jesus? And, how can we justify all this to the ears of a non-believer? The short answer to the first question is that, contrary to what would happen ordinarily with a person, when we give the glory back to God and Christ (and so reflect attention away from ourselves) we become more liberated, and more released from ourselves (i.e. our tired, dull old selves which return again and again to the same old ruts and baggage – and also see Mathew 11:28-30). The short answer to the second question is that we cannot justify our worshipping and praising him – if by justification we mean presenting the non-believer with a knock-down reasoned argument which sweeps away all other explanations. What we can do, though, is fully acknowledge how odd indeed all this sounds, but also stress the importance of the ‘proof’ being in the eating of (rather than the justification of). In other words, our proof (if we want to call it that) is in our subjective experience of him, rather than in something objectively demonstrable, but that this experience is open to everyone, if we choose to accept it.

Finally, we might also say that if it is true that there is a God who was made a person in Jesus (in order to save us and liberate us from our old selves and baggage), then the rules we usually use, quite rightly, to assess the world, just cannot and do not apply. Why? Because we are not focussing on those rules which are properly applied to the created, rather we are focussing on the uncreated originator of all things good. So, we must turn our gaze toward him and give glory to him, as without this gaze we have no way of knowing and experiencing that our lives are only enriched by him, the source of all creation (and see John 1:1-17). 

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