I’ve done the unthinkable the last few months, I have attempted to remove my private experience of God, or what I think is God and simply chalked it up to human emotions attaching to the ultimate ideal to find a sort of comfort.  God the benevolent lover lends to human need this is for certain.  The experience was miserable and perhaps a bit foolish but it gave me something I could not other wise of experienced, that I might call a bit of compassion toward the unbeliever.  A generic theism if I were honest was as far as I could take it, like the God who is absent.  I have believed in Jesus Christ since I was a small child with unwavering faith in Him, at times my practice was a young man that believed in God  but my efforts at living a christian life were sadly laughable.

So I found myself scrambling in my intellect to hold on.  No need to cover all the Thomistic arguments for the existence of a creator this was not troubling me, but a personal God that could be believed in without a special encounter or personal revelation, as person God to little old me.  Two major points gave me light the first a bit dimmer than the second on my rational way back to my Christian faith.  For my readers I am not saying I left my faith in any way, I wanted to know I would reasonably conclude the truth of Christianity apart from what I call or know God as presence, Father , Son, and Holy Spirit.

I see in creation a great deal about the person of God.  He cares about life, in fact everything is alive, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, secondly it would seem everything else on this planet seems to serve the purpose of supporting living things whether its seed bearing fruit or the waters of the earth, the air to breath and the earth under my feet.  So I can observe from creation a Creator that cares for and provides for His creatures.  This same creator discloses a bit about Himself to us in this.

He loves life and loves to sustain it, that He is deeply interested in and supportive of the material world. That He is social because we humans are social beings, that we long for relationships with one another beyond mere biological desires, this we might call love.

If one would simply take these observations one could reasonably conclude that God is personal, loving, caring, and interested in His creation.  If this is true which I believe it is with the evidence afforded to us one could conclude that this being would disclose Himself to his creatures, or at least the ones that had the faculty of intellect to know Him.  So of all the faiths in the world which of these qualities do we find most present in the different faiths of the world? One I think stands out far beyond all the rest, taking my simple observations of nature and humanity to the place of divine goodness. That being of course Christianity. In Christianity we find a God that becomes apart of His own creation. To provide for His creatures the means of salvation in the now and in eternity, a full disclosure of the God of love to man.  This observation still left me in a place of private faith to believe which I still felt was not enough to put my intellect at rest. The second left me in a more concrete place of intellectual certainty.

A King and His Kingdom, this I find so fantastic that the evidence is beyond unbelief. The ancient world spoke of one to come , the promised one, the chosen one. A myriad of mystics foretold the arrival of this man.  The requirements numbered in the hundreds, just to name a few, He would be born of a virgin, he would be a suffering servant, He would be Jewish, born of the house of King David, His Kingdom would never end, He would call the none Jewish peoples of the earth to Himself , He would bring peace, His arrival would birth a new era to humanity.  These are what I would call the big idea prophecies , their are many specific prophecies that deal with many particulars.

This argument could be called the certainty of the fantastic.  Only one man has moved millions, only one man has crossed every single cultural boundary that crosses generation after generation in spite of Him having a very particular cultural background that is alien to almost all the population.  Only one man has been so universality loved by the human race, He is the most celebrated human being for centuries, man idols come and go with the rising and falling of nations but He transcends nations and calls an allegiance that trumps the body politic in any civilization.  He is a King , in fact the King of Kings and His reign shall endure forever.