ZA MAGAZINE // seek truth.

On September 30, 2008, comedian Bill Maher appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote his new documentary, “Religulous.” The interview is in two parts and is embedded below. It’s rough around the edges - to be expected by people in the world - but I wouldn’t have posted them here If I wasn’t going to use them to make a few points. They don’t get to the religious stuff until about two minutes into the first video, so feel free to fast forward a bit.

Obviously, I take issue with some of the finer points. Heck, I take issue with some of the bigger points. A lot of his arguments are flawed (religion caused all wars, science disproves God), and we could have a decent article which looks at them and debunks them. But that’s not the point that I feel like the Lord wants me to make, because Mr. Maher is just one man who we can use as a jumping-off point to make a few points about non-Christians at large.

We can’t understand God without God

This one feels a bit weird to talk about, because it puts me in the position where I could come off as arrogant. But truth is truth, and I’ve got God’s Word to back it.

1 Corinthians 2:14
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God. for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

In a previous article, I wrote about how we as Christians are able to understand God because we’ve been given His Spirit. This verse is kind of the converse to that statement - if you don’t have the Spirit of God inside of you, then you can’t truly understand God. If you can accept Paul’s logic in the previous few verses, which was something along the lines of “no one truly knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person; we have God’s Spirit; therefore, we can understand God’s thoughts,” then this makes sense.

I think this verse is interesting because Paul says that they don’t accept these words. It’s not that people don’t hear things; after all, Mr. Maher was able to give an account of the hypostatic union (Jesus being 100% man and 100% God) and Christ’s incarnation. Though it’s obviously skewed to be more humorous and to more clearly make his point, you can tell that he knows it. Jesus, when speaking to the Pharisees who were rejecting Him, said essentially the same thing.

John 8:47
Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.

In English, we tend to differentiate between hearing and listening, but I don’t get that sense in the Greek. The Analytical-Literal Translation makes a note that hearing means “pay attention to,” so this verse doesn’t nullify what I just said. But the nuance that I’d like for you to get out of this verse is that it implies that people are listening. That first part of the verse seems to be a promise to me; that is, if you belong to God, you WILL hear the words of God. This doesn’t mean that accepting Christ means there’s constantly a voice in your ear, but if you’re seeking after God and you’re listening to Him, He WILL speak. The Pharisees in the verse who rejected Jesus might have been seeking for their Messiah and the truths of God, but the greater point is that they weren’t of God. So we can listen, but we’re never going to find the truth unless we repent and turn to God. The apostle John said essentially the same thing:

1 John 1:6
If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

The context is that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness. Strong’s dictionary says that the word translated as fellowship is koinonia, which means “partnership, that is, (literally) participation, or (social) intercourse, or (pecuniary) benefaction: - (to) communicate, communion, distribution, fellowship.” So we’re definitely talking about a communication with God here; I think the definition of koinonia makes it clear.

This means that the verse is stating that if we are walking in darkness (that means sinning; I would interpret it as living a life of sin), then we are not communicating with God. If we think we are, then we’re lying to ourselves.

This doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect to hear from God, or else we’d all hear nothing but silence. But the level of sin in our lives and our tolerance of it will ultimately affect how well we hear from the Lord. God has given us commands, and there is no excuse to break them. If we do, he’s not going to be speaking to us as clearly, if at all.

By extension, we can’t understand the Bible truly if we’re living in sin. The Scriptures contain the words of God. So, God speaks to us, he communicates with us, he therefore participates in our lives or has social intercourse with us when we read his words. Therefore, we do not have this when we are walking about in the darkness.

What is the point of this section? To the Christian, it’s that when you listen to guys like Mr. Maher, or the best Islamic apologists, you have to realize that no matter how great their points are and how convincing their arguments might seem, the fact of the matter is that if you accept the Bible as truth, then you need to accept the truth that these men can’t understand God and therefore should have no impact on your faith. To the non-Christian, it’s that you can’t hear and understand God without God, and it’s sin that separates you.

We can’t find God without God

This point sounds similar, but it’s a nuance that’s important to understand. Unfortunately, I had to quote from an uncited line from Wikipedia, but my research of Mr. Maher and his use of Bellevue as a reference tells me that this would be an accurate portrayal of his views:

CALLER: “Hi. Well, my question is, the Lord spoke to me approximately three years ago, and if the Lord spoke to you [Maher], I was wondering if you’d become a believer.”

MAHER: “No, I’d check into Bellevue, which is what you should do…”

(Larry King Live, 8/11/2005)

This statement isn’t altogether unreasonable to hear from someone who doesn’t believe in God. You hear a voice, so you’re hearing voices and need psychiatric help. However, the catch here is that Mr. Maher doesn’t claim to be an atheist. He’s an agnostic, someone who believes that we can’t prove God exists. In the second part of the Daily Show interview, he says that he doesn’t like certainty, which is the reason that he doesn’t like atheism. He has a lot of questions, but when people have answers he feels like it’s impossible to be sure and it’s arrogant to claim to have the truth.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Mr. Maher claims to be open to the truth, but when a caller offers a scenario where proof would come to him, he would dismiss it as insanity. Realizing this really takes away credibility to his claim of open-mindedness in the Daily Show interview, when he muses about why God spoke through prophets instead of directly. If God came and spoke directly, he’d probably think he was hallucinating!

Two points come out of this. The lesser point (lesser to this article, anyways) is that people who don’t want to believe in God will take every bit of evidence and reject it. You could present all the evidence in the world, but believing is ultimately a step of faith. It’s not enough to know and understand the facts, you have to believe them.

But the greater and more relevant point is that you need God to accept God. Agnostics want proof that God exists, but they’re often unwilling to let God talk! They’ll reject the Bible and they’ll reject people speaking to them though the power of the Holy Spirit, as though they can find God apart from these things. But we can’t. The Bible makes this clear:

Romans 3:10-11
None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.

Without God, we’re dead in our sins, and we’re unable to seek after Him. Remember those verses from before? They all apply. We can’t understand God unless we get understanding from Him.

If you find yourself in an argument with a person who thinks like this, it helps to try and show them the futility of seeking God without help from God (pastors, teachers, the Bible, the Holy Spirit). There are a lot of analogies, but I’ll only pick one to make the point. Picture being a two-dimensional being. You were completely flat and lived in a completely flat world. How this works, I’m not quite sure, but go with it. Now, picture a three-dimensional person.

Wait, what?

If you’re two-dimensional, a three-dimensional person wouldn’t make sense to you. You have no concept of ‘depth,’ so you wouldn’t understand how a being can exist with it. If this 3D being were to try to enter the 2D world by placing three fingers on the flat 2D world, all the 2D people would see are three sets of fingerprints. They wouldn’t understand that there are fingers and a wrist behind it, because they’re in a world where depth does not exist.

You know how we can’t even understand time which some say is the 4th dimension? God is above time; He’s eternal.

The point is, if we can’t even understand time and God is above time, then there’s no way we can figure Him out. We need Him to reveal Himself to us, and He’s done that by Scripture and His Spirit.

Conclusion

This article was not meant to pick on Mr. Maher, for he is not the only man who speaks like this. I pray that he, and others, might overcome their distaste for certainty and answer the questions that they ask. Mr. Maher’s statement, “Religious people know so little about religion,” is a challenging statement that encourages me to learn more about the God whom I follow.

But we must remember that those outside of the faith can’t really tell us anything about God, and that they’ll never learn themselves until they humble themselves and take a step out in faith.

Grace and peace,
Brendan