Christians have a greater ability to appreciate beauty and the glory manifest in God’s creation than atheists do. We as Christians perceive a world which God made for his people to enjoy. We see a world made beautiful because our creator loves us. We see a clear purpose behind creation, for us to enjoy and to cause us to worship God.
But atheists have refused to worship God as He truly is. Yet they do worship a god. But it is an ugly excuse for a god. They have elevated the laws of science and the perceptions of fallible humans to a status that takes the place of God. Essentially, they have made a god who is more of a non-living force—no will, no purpose, no intention in its actions. God is reduced to pure randomness.
Because they have taken this position on God, they have limited their ability to enjoy God’s creation. It is a natural human instinct upon enjoying something to worship that person who had given that source of enjoyment. Atheists have deprived themselves of the luxury of having someone to worship for the enjoyment they get save a pathetic non-living natural force. To them, all the things that are of beauty in the world are just there and there was no one and nothing that gave it to them and no will or purpose that decided to love them enough to bless them.
But we as Christians see the world entirely differently than they do. We see beauty, and we enjoy things and we know that these things are reflections on the character of our God who loves to bless us. We get to worship Him as one who intentionally made the world for human beings to inhabit and enjoy and worship Him as the author of it all.
I think of the difference this way. Imagine one day you just happen to reach into your pocket and find a twenty dollar bill. I guess that’s pretty cool. That’s the way an atheist perceives the world. Now imagine that a dear friend of yours hands you a twenty dollar bill because they love you and want to bless you. That’s different. Technically speaking, it’s the same blessing that both examples enjoy. But the latter is more than the recipient of a lucky coincidence. The latter enjoys a gift and the dear love of a Giver who desired to bless them.
Now this example is unjustly scaled down to a size that I find manageable for my understanding of this concept. But we know that God’s love extends much further than giving us a twenty. We worship a God who wanted to bless us so much that He created a whole world full of beauty and His glory for us to enjoy—everything from the miniscule blades of grass that color the ground, to the greatness of the stars that show us how large the universe is. But still this isn’t quite yet the God we worship.
“For God so loved the world, the He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
This is a truly mysterious God that we worship. Why would He send His perfect Son to save us? God loves His son. And yet He still gave His Son as a sacrifice for us? One might even wonder that God loves us more than he loves His Son.
All these questions are mysteries to us. We can’t understand why God would want to bless His enemies as He has. All we know is that He has blessed us even while we were enemies, and for that we worship Him.
And yet while we enjoy such blessings and such gifts, yet there remain those who despise the giver and thus the gift is diminished. All these blessings they do not get to enjoy because they refuse to see God as a god with a clear will and desire to bless them.
Our hearts ought to ache for them to see God’s love for them. Because they don’t they miss out on the blessings of worshipping God in this world and in the next. We must ache for them to see God’s love and the blessings God has given us so that they can worship the Living God and give God the glory due his name.
