Searching for God

He sat at his new computer, considering how to best phrase his question.

He was Indian and, you could say, a minority within a minority. That is, he was part of the barely 2 percent of people classified as Christians in India’s Hindu-dominated culture. In addition, after years of studying his Bible and finding within it many contradictions to what he had always believed, he was also growing more and more distant from even those of his own faith.

While his faith in religions had been shaken, his faith in God remained firm, but … where was He? What did God want him to know, to do?

Finally, not knowing where else to go, he typed into the Internet search engine this simple question: “Where are you, God?”

Before you start searching

It’s a common question, a great question, one many people ask for many different reasons. It’s a search often triggered by times of trouble, when we are looking for help or encouragement. Sometimes it springs from doubt, when we’re needing assurance God really exists, really cares.

It may come from intellectual curiosity, trying to comprehend big questions, such as the purpose for our existence. Even unbelievers and cynics pose the question, “Where is God when there is so much evil and suffering?” trying to cast doubt on whether He exists or cares.

What about you? Are you searching for God?

If so, two big questions need to be settled before you embark on your search. One involves critical understanding about God and His history with humanity. And the answer to the second question will determine whether you have any chance of finding Him.

Question 1: Can you find God if He’s hiding?

Is God hard to find because He’s playing some great cosmic game of hide-and-seek with us? In a way, yes—He tells us, in fact, that He is hiding—but it’s certainly no game.

Multiple prophets, speaking to God’s chosen people Israel, told them He had gone into hiding. “Truly You are God, who hide Yourself,” Isaiah said. They were facing huge troubles, so why would God do that?

The people “shall go to seek the LORD, but they will not find Him,” Hosea wrote, explaining, “He has withdrawn Himself from them.” Yet another prophet, Micah, said, “Then they will cry to the LORD, but He will not hear them; He will even hide His face from them at that time.”

Why would God hide and not show Himself to those searching for Him?

Micah answered that question, summarizing the fractured relationship humanity in general has had with God since creation: “Because they have been evil in their deeds” (Micah 3:4).

Look at it from God’s point of view. A consistent lesson in the Bible is the dismal track record we humans have in our relationship with Him. You can understand if God is more than a little skeptical when it comes to our saying we want to know Him.

Who hid first?

It started with Adam and Eve. God created them, communicated with them, taught them, loved them, warned them about the danger of taking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—yet they coldly ignored Him and followed after Satan.

And what did they do when “they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden”? “Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God” (Genesis 3:8, emphasis added throughout).

Who hid first? Not God!

He offered, time and again, to reconnect with His children. When Israel cried out to Him in their bondage, He answered, “Here I am,” delivered them from slavery, gave them a home and promised to bless them in every way. What He justifiably expected in return was their respect and obedience. But for over 800 years Israel and Judah repeatedly rejected God, seeking Him only to bail them out of trouble.

Later God revealed Himself even more directly, sending His Son in the flesh into a very religious culture. But He met with continual resistance and hostility from people who only wanted to relate to God on their terms, not His. Ironically, the people who were most stubborn and unwilling to listen were the religious leaders!

Jesus labeled them hypocrites because “‘this people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men” (Mark 7:6-8).

Sad to say, ever since He gave that stinging indictment, the trend has worsened! We should not be surprised because it was Jesus Himself who also warned, “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many” (Matthew 24:5, King James Version)!

You can’t find God in the dark

Note Christ’s emphasis—not a few, but many will come. Many will be deceived by people using His name, claiming to represent Him! Religious deception, He said, would stand as a major sign of the end of the age! Look around, as the man in India did, at all of the contradictory and often contentious churches of Christianity today and ask yourself, “Was His prophecy true?”

No one wants to think, or be told, they are deceived. These words still shock and offend people today as much as they did then. But God’s Word makes it clear that basically the whole world today lies in spiritual darkness, blinded to Him and His truth. No one wants to think, or be told, they are deceived. These words still shock and offend people today as much as they did then. But God’s Word makes it clear that basically the whole world today lies in spiritual darkness, blinded to Him and His truth.

Why? Again, Jesus Himself gave the hard truth in John 3:19: “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” He continued in the next verse, “For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.”

So, yes, humanity struggles along in the darkness of deception, because of choices—both ours and God’s.

Paul, in Romans 1:21, summed up humanity’s choice: “Because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

“They did not like to retain God in their knowledge,” so God “gave them over” or “gave them up” to do whatever they chose to do (verses 24, 28).

So, yes, God has allowed the darkness of deception to settle in and, in effect, hide Him from humanity.

But that doesn’t mean God has given up on us. His promises remain that Christ is going to return, that His truth will be made clear, that humanity is not lost eternally, that God will be known. Please read our booklets From Holidays to Holy Days: God’s Plan for You and The Mystery of the Kingdom to understand the full scope of God’s work of salvation.

Between now and then, though, can God be found by anyone? The answer is yes, if …

Our part and God’s part in the search

Paul stated to the Greek philosophers in Athens that God had made “from one blood every nation of men … so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26-27).

God wants us to find Him, but for thousands of years He has seen billions of people offering Him lip service only. Are you one of the rare people willing to truly “seek the Lord,” to genuinely “grope for Him and find Him”—really wanting to know Him and His way and, unlike most, willing to obey Him? That’s your part of the search.

But God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son also have Their parts to play, without which our search is futile. They must draw and reveal.

Think deeply about Jesus’ statement, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws [leads, impels] him” (John 6:44).

Couple that with what we read in Matthew 11:27: “No one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.”

Few today seem to grasp what He was saying! No one, He says several times, can come to Christ or know God unless God chooses to draw him or Christ reveals the Father to him!

Okay, let’s say God does “call” you—another term used in the Bible to refer to God’s drawing a person. What happens then?

That depends on the answer to the second big question. The first question we have examined is, “Can you find God if He’s hiding?” The second question is just as important: “Can God find you if you’re hiding?”

Hiding from the truth: an example

Thrusting a Bible toward his brother, the man threw down the challenge: “I want you to show me in here exactly where it says that we are to worship on Saturday instead of Sunday!”

The conversation at the family gathering had grown heated. One person, particularly offended that one of his kin abandoned the family’s faith, had zeroed in on the Sabbath-or-Sunday doctrine, aiming to prove him wrong and return him to the fold.

“I can do that, but first answer this,” his brother calmly countered. “If I prove from the Bible that the seventh-day Sabbath is the day God made holy, will you change your worship from Sunday to Saturday?”

As a dozen witnesses looked on, the man stared hard at him for several seconds, then angrily blurted out, “Oh, forget about it—I can’t reason with you!” Turning on his heels, he walked away.

Or, to put it a different way, he went into hiding. He hid his eyes from seeing the truth of the Bible, from seeing the knowledge of God.

Above we saw from the Bible that, yes, God does hide from humans, but for good reason. It’s because His children, beginning with Adam and Eve, have continually hidden from Him!

That leads to the second critically important question for anyone who says he or she is searching for God.

Question 2: Can God find you if you’re hiding?

The true story of the family argument is one of someone hiding from truth that could have come to light. Perhaps it was pride at work—it’s common for us to fear embarrassment over being proven wrong.

Maybe it was subconsciously hiding from the commitment to change that the truth would require.

God has seen so much pride and stubbornness from humanity, but rarely meekness and submissiveness toward Him and His Word. The proud young man who came to Jesus asking what he had to do to obtain eternal life fell victim to that fear when Jesus revealed a spiritual weakness that he would have to change. “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me,” Jesus said. “But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Matthew 19:21-22).

He, too, went into hiding from God.

Adam and Eve hid from God, conjuring up the excuse that they feared Him because they were naked.

In the Isaiah 53:3 prophecy of Jesus Christ’s first coming, it says, “And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.”

When He did appear on earth, He told a group of the most religious people of the day, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40).

In other words, even when we humans say we desire to know God, we easily find ways to hide from Him, His truth, His authority over our lives. We hate to admit it, but it is a common trait of human nature!

“Where are you God?” is a great question to ask. But understand, God is also wondering, “Where are you?”

Here are three essential things He will be looking for to see if we really want to find Him.

• We hide from God when we are not wholehearted and deeply humble.

“But on this one will I look,” God tells us, “On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word” (Isaiah 66:2). God has seen so much pride and stubbornness from humanity, but rarely meekness and submissiveness toward Him and His Word.

We find a great lesson about this in the story of Judah’s captivity. For many centuries they played around in their relationship with God, repeatedly crying out to Him in times of trouble, promising to follow Him, only to go straight back into the same sinful practices. Finally, to their shock, God ended their game, allowing Babylon to destroy Jerusalem and take them captive.

But in His mercy He sent Jeremiah with a message that after 70 years their plight would end. Notice His admonition, though, in Jeremiah 29:13: “And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.”

Hundreds of years before that, David explained the same principle to his son Solomon. He instructed him, “Know the God of your father, and serve Him with a loyal heart and with a willing mind; for the LORD searches all hearts and understands all the intent of the thoughts” (1 Chronicles 28:9). God reiterated this in Jeremiah: “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings” (17:10).

Back to David’s counsel to Solomon—David assured him, “If you seek Him, He will be found by you; but if you forsake Him, He will cast you off forever.”

God is clear: If you search for Him with all of your heart, with a deeply humble approach of trembling at His Word, you can find Him.

• We hide from God when we change or misinterpret what He tells us to do in order to fit our own desires.

Both biblical and historical records show people have always done this. In His time, Jesus confronted the Pharisees with a quote from Isaiah, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Mark 7:6-7).

He continued, “For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men,” and “all too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition.”

Finally, He concluded, they were “making the word of God of no effect through your tradition which you have handed down” (verses 8-9, 13).

Nearly 2,000 years later, human traditions have pervaded the various Christian religions more than ever.

If you are willing to recognize and discard “the traditions of men,” and instead live by God’s pure Word, you can find Him.

• We hide from God when we are not willing to do what He tells us.

When being tested by Satan, Jesus countered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God’” (Luke 4:4).

Searching for God includes searching ourselves. Lamentations 3:40 says, “Let us search out and examine our ways, and turn back to the LORD.” As God reveals Himself through His Word, the test for us is whether we are willing to “turn back to the LORD” and live by “every word of God.”

This is where many people have stumbled in their search for God—they want to pick and choose what they are willing to do.

Remember Jesus’ statement that He was the light that came into the world, but that humans tend to love darkness rather than light? He was so right! However, in that same conversation, found in John 3:19-21, He offers a wonderful promise—and a big test: “But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”

God wants us to find Him, to come to the light! In fact the goodness of God leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). But the test for us is always whether or not we will do the truth. Are we willing to act upon the truth that He reveals, to follow and obey Him, even if it means completely changing our way of life? Our deeds, He says, will clearly show Him the answer!

Coming to the light is actually a lifelong process of steadily learning more and more about the mind and ways of God. The Holy Spirit—which works with people who are responding to God and which resides in those who have repented of their sins and been baptized—continually “searches all things, yes, the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10). But God gives His Spirit only “to those who obey Him” (Acts 5:32).

If you show God that you will indeed do the truth—conduct your life according to the understanding He shows you in His Word—you can find Him.

Where are you?

Someday all humanity will discover that God was hiding in plain sight—but we couldn’t find Him if we were hiding our eyes from Him. Proverbs 2:1-5 gives us the critical keys for successfully searching for God:

“My son, if you receive my words, and treasure my commands within you, so that you incline your ear to wisdom, and apply your heart to understanding; yes, if you cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding, if you seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures; then you will understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God.”

Finding God

What happened to the man in India described at the beginning of this article, who typed into the Internet search engine the question, “Where are you, God?”

Well, he prepared his heart according to those criteria! He sincerely, wholeheartedly and humbly searched God’s Word; he rejected the reasoning and traditions of men and accepted only what he read in the Bible; and, most important, he was willing to change his life to follow what God showed him to be true.

There is no greater quest for each of us than to seek the answer to “God, where are you?” And there is no greater test for each of us than when God says, “I’m right here, revealed in My Word—but where are you?”

Take the next step by studying our guided Journey “Knowing God.”