You

Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.

You are you. You are unique. No one has the same genes, upbringing, education, career, family history, and so on. You are important to God. So important that Jesus, His Son, was also born and died for you.

Perhaps you don't realize how important your life is in the eyes of God. Perhaps you don't believe in God or you feel like God is far away. This may be because you never notice anything of God. You notice so little of God that you sometimes, or even regularly, wonder if God even exists. The seeming total absence of God can even completely convince people that there is no God.

God is not absent. The fact that He is not visible doesn't mean He doesn't exist. Just as the invisibility of electricity or radiation doesn't mean they don't exist. Your reaction to this might be: yes, but we notice the effects of electricity and radiation. Electricity keeps my lights on and allows me to use my PC, TV, and other devices. My constant internet connection proves the presence of radiation. But what effect does the existence of the invisible God have?

 

How do you perceive God's existence? In everything you perceive with your senses. What you feel, smell, taste, see, and hear. The sun, the moon, the stars, the flora, the fauna, the earth, the sea, the air, the laws of nature, everything. The functioning of the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, the nervous system, the immune system, and all other mechanisms in every body, down to the microscopic, are in His hand. God is also present in what you feel inside: joy, courage, love, peace, but also sadness, fear, anger, and the feelings of shame, remorse, and guilt for a wrong action. Every fraction of time, creation in all its fullness is sustained by God. However, God is not equal to creation. He transcends his creation and continually brings it forth from his infinite Being.

You are important to God. You may be one person out of approximately 7.5 billion people on a small planet orbiting one of the 500 billion stars in one of the 100 billion galaxies. But your size does not determine your importance. Just as someone twice as heavy or twice as tall is not twice as important, a star or galaxy a trillion times as large is not a trillion times as important. You can marvel at the enormous size of the universe. That wonder resides in your mind. The universe therefore derives the relevance of its enormous dimensions from your mind and your imagination. Without humanity, no one would be able to marvel at the universe, and the size of the universe would mean nothing to anyone.

 

Humans are made in God's image and likeness. Humans give meaning to everything in creation. This makes humanity so important to God that He is willing to sacrifice everything for humanity. Humans are, in a sense, miniatures of God Himself. That's why God could come to earth as a Man and live among us, experiencing the same things as we do, with feelings He already knew as God, but which He now shared with us as a Man. As God who became Man, He wants to enter into a relationship with all people. And everyone who enters into this relationship with Him will share eternity with Him. Because He became Man, He can share with every person the life He possessed in eternity as God. This demonstrates that He places an enormous value on every person. Including you.

 

'Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed'

These were Jesus' words to Thomas, who didn't believe the other disciples when they brought him the message of Jesus' resurrection. It shows us that the contrast of believing versus seeing is not in the Bible. According to Jesus, the seeing, even the feeling inside Jesus' wounds, did not take away the necessity of believing. Jesus says there are two ways of believing: believing through seeing and believing without seeing. And the latter form of faith clearly has his preference. The combination of believing with seeing is also mentioned in the first visit of John at the tomb of Jesus after the resurrection, where is stated: 'He saw and believed' (John 20:8).

 

Seeing does not take away the necessity of believing. This becomes very clear when we look at the reactions of most of the Jews to the works Jesus performed and to the resurrection. The Jewish people all had access to the same facts that the disciples were witnessing. But they chose not to believe. Therefore, believing is not something that automatically follows 'seeing'. Believing is a matter of choice. People can chose to be selective in accepting incoming information. They can choose not to believe their eyes once they see something. They can choose not to believe their memory once they have witnessed something. They can choose to twist what they saw. They can choose for a certain interpretation of what they saw, an interpretation that suits theid preconceived opinion or outlook.

 

Instead of falling on his knees, Thomas could have chosen to run away from the scene of the resurrected Jesus. He could even have decided to escape, never to return, out of a feeling of guilt or horror or self-pity. But Thomas chose to be overwhelmed with awe for his resurrected Master and to bow down and to utter the words 'my Lord and my God'. That same choice will be held out to the world that will witness God's great works of the endtime. People can acknowledge their failure to recognize the great Creator in the beauty and the teleologic construct of the universe. Or they can disregard the evidence of God's astonishing interventions and jump to superstitious explanations of 'extraterrestrials' - the narrative that is constantly kept in reserve for future events in order to deceive the public. For those unwilling to believe, this will suit their interest in continuing their usual way of living - far from God and adapted to modern godless society. The willfully disbelieving won't spend a thought on questions like why the deceased Christians would be the only ones that were resurrected or how extraterrestrials would have come into existence or why the extraterrestrial story would suddenly be acknowledged by the authorities once million of Christians have vanished. They will swallow any story that will become mainstream once God's prophetic deeds will disrupt humanity. It is as with Jesus' words to Philip in the upper room, shortly before his sufferings: 'Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.'

 

According to Jesus, evidence is no substitute for believing. Evidence might make believing more easy. But even in the sight of overwhelming evidence, faith is still a necessity. Evidence however increases accountability. That was the exact warning of Jesus for the Jews of his days, who were bombarded by evidence:

'The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the people of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom; and now something greater than Solomon is here.  The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and now something greater than Jonah is here.' (Luke 11:31,32)

 

What will you do in the light of overwhelming evidence of God's existence and of the soon return of Jesus Christ?