Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Social sciences may be able to tell us what human life is but not what it ought to be.

“The ideals of freedom . . . of conscience, human rights and democracy [are] the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. . . . To this day there is no alternative to it.”

These texts also reveal a God whose presence is violently traumatic and lethal yet compelling and attractive at the same time.

Strict secularism holds that people are only physical entities without souls, that when loved ones die they simply cease to exist, that sensations of love and beauty are just neurological-chemical events, that there is no right or wrong outside of what we in our minds determine and choose. Those positions are at the very least deeply counterintuitive for nearly all people, and large swaths of humanity will continue to simply reject them as impossible to believe.

To state that there is no God or that there is a God, then, necessarily entails faith. And so the declaration that science is the only arbiter of truth is not itself a scientific finding. It is a belief.

Contemporary secularity, then, is not the absence of faith, but is instead based on a whole set of beliefs, including a number of highly contestable assumptions about the nature of proof and rationality itself.30

Nietzsche’s point is this. If you say you don’t believe in God but you do believe in the rights of every person and the requirement to care for all the weak and the poor, then you are still holding on to Christian beliefs, whether you will admit it or not.

Gawande goes on to ask “why simply existing—why being merely housed and fed and safe and alive—seems empty and meaningless to us. What more is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile? The answer . . . is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.”

We need “devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable.”

Think of how much less brutal and unjust to minorities many societies are today compared with even one hundred years ago. In so many ways human life has been transformed, and yet though we are unimaginably wealthier and more comfortable than our ancestors, no one is arguing that we are significantly happier than they were. We are struggling and seeking happiness in essentially the same ways our forebears did and doing a worse job of it, if we use the rise of depression and suicide as an indicator.

what makes you a human being and not an animal is that you want joy, meaning, and fulfillment.

Augustine taught that we are most fundamentally shaped not as much by what we believe, or think, or even do, but by what we love. “For when we ask whether somebody is a good person, we are not asking what he believes or hopes for, but what he loves.”

Here, then, is the message. Don’t love anything less; instead learn to love God more, and you will love other things with far more satisfaction. You won’t overprotect them, you won’t overexpect things from them. You won’t be constantly furious with them for not being what you hoped.

Don’t stifle passionate love for anything; rather, redirect your greatest love toward God by loving him with your whole heart and loving him for himself, not just for what he can give you.45 Then, and only then, does the contentment start to come.

There is, then, not just one thing called “freedom” that we either have or do not have. At the level of lived life there are numerous freedoms, and no one can have them all.

Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others. It is not the absence of constraints but it is choosing the right constraints and the right freedoms to lose.

All this means that Christians, like someone newly in love, are enabled to see the will of God not as a crushing, confining burden but as a list of God’s loves and hates by which we can please him and come to be like him. To have the law “written on our hearts” means that we are freely doing what we most want to do. We are loving our redeemer through following his will.34

I am therefore the only Lord and master who, if you find me, will satisfy you, and, if you fail me, will forgive you.”

Christianity is the only religion that claims God gave up his freedom so we could experience the ultimate freedom—from evil and death itself. Therefore, you can trust him. He sacrificed his independence for you, so you can sacrifice yours for him. And when you do, you will find that it is the ultimate, infinitely liberating constraint. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed”

What matters is not what society says about me, nor what I think of myself, but what God does.

here we see the richness, complexity, and startling distinctiveness of the Christian approach to identity. Paul can say, “God judges me,” not with alarm but with confidence. Why? Because unlike either traditional or secular culture, a Christian’s identity is not achieved but received. When we ask God the Father to accept us, adopt us, unite with us, not on the basis of our performance and moral efforts but because of Christ’s, we receive a relationship with God that is a gift. It

what we believe about our future completely controls how we are experiencing our present. We are irreducibly hope-based creatures.

Death was not part of God’s original design. We were not created to age, weaken, fade, and die. We were not created for love relationships that end in death. Death is an intrusion, a result of sin and our human race’s turning away from God. Our sense even now that we were made to last, that we were made for love without parting, is a memory trace of our divine origins.

Ironically, then, there is an agreement that modern science is completely insufficient to explain the existence of the world. Whatever brought it about must have been something extranatural or supernatural. So even those who think they are denying this argument for a supernatural divinity are still supporting it.

Jesus’s influence does not lie mainly in the past. Today a greater percentage of the world’s population than ever before is Christian, and Christianity adds to its ranks over fifty thousand persons a day, or just under nineteen million new people a year.3 Even in its beginnings, the movement of Jesus followers spread out in all directions outward from its Middle Eastern origins, not only to Europe but also to North Africa, to Turkey and Armenia, to Persia and India. “Christianity was a world religion long before it was a European one.”4 And today again, as we saw in chapter 7, Christianity is the religion that is most equally distributed across the continents of the world.

He offers them all they want—meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, hope, and justice—but calls them to repent and seek their all in him.