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"Proof of God" in a Nutshell
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(Summary of My Initial "Epiphany")
John Erickson
[During a discussion with a friend about the ability of man to comprehend the reality of God, I attempted to make the little bit that I know of it as digestible as possible. These are a few points that arose during that conversation.]
Life has a missing component to it.
We assess life by what we see: birth, a span of life, death...
...and everything follows some version of that pattern.
But the Human Condition is such that we feel a sense of "endlessness" which conflicts with what we see in the limited existence before us.
Our consciousness operates within a context of sensing its "ongoing" nature. We may express it in terms of doing such‑and‑such "for posterity," our children, the future of the planet, etc. — but it's actually an expression of our sense that, somehow, we will be "present" during that future event.
Why, then, would we feel "eternal" if we evolved from a life force which never had an eternal characteristic? If life's nature is fundamentally temporary, why would one of its species conceive of a "self-permanence" which exists nowhere in nature's species‑generating cauldron of evolutionary production?
That's the mismatch between man's spirit and his physical being — our "Existential Crisis."
The Missing Component is:
This life was created as an eternal existence.
The eternal "fuel" from the Lifeforce was cut off in the Genesis account of the Fall of Man.
When man made an allegiance with the "anti-Lifeforce," man's connection to eternal life was severed. (Recall that Adam was given stewardship over the earth [Genesis 1:28] so that the curse affected all over which he had authority: the earth and the life upon it).
It required an intervention to reconnect man to eternal life. No labor of man nor intricate theorem produced by his creative mind could produce this missing component. We were helplessly on our own.
The Divine Intervention of the Messiah and his sacrifice on the behalf of fallen man was the required dynamic to interject into man's condition to restore the Full Dimension of life: the reestablishment of Eternal Existence as a fundamental characteristic of life.
This was how I rationalized the state of existence when its purposelessness overwhelmed my thoughts years ago. Everything else in life became an irrelevancy. I found no value in Christianity at that time because of the inability of any clergy or lay people to provide a plausible (to me) basis for their belief system.
Over the years I examined life in the context of this "missing component" viewpoint, and overlaid it onto the Biblical description of creation and the present state of man.
When I "bypassed" the people who made up the veneer of Christianity I encountered in those lean first days of studying the Word, I could see the meaning behind the texts upon which it is based. It was at that point God revealed "just enough" insight to provide the proof I sought.
"What is impossible with man is possible with God."
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