Someone Is at the Door

This is the third entry in a four-part series, Ways to Know God. You can read from the beginning here.

Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” — John 14:8-9

Philip had walked with Jesus for three years. He had watched Him feed thousands from a boy’s lunch, restore sight to men born blind, call a dead man out of a tomb by name. Three years of evidence. And then, at the last supper, he looked across the table and asked the oldest question in the world.

“Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.”

He still did not know.

Philip’s question is not a failure of attention. It is the honest confession of a man who has followed a trail of evidence and arrived at the edge of what evidence can do. He has seen the miracles. He believes Jesus is from God. But the Father — the invisible One behind everything, the One the soul has been aching for, the One the stars have been pointing toward — that One he has not seen. And he wants to.

Show us the Father, and it is enough.

This is every human being who has ever stood before a night sky and felt the ache and not known its name. It is the scientist reaching for the chaplain after returning from the far side of the moon. It is the psalmist panting at the water’s edge. It is the most honest prayer a person can pray: I know something is there. I want to know who.

In the first two entries of this series we looked at general revelation: the longing of the soul, the testimony of creation. Both are real. Both point genuinely toward God. And both face the same wall.

Imagine standing outside a door and hearing someone knock. You know immediately that a person is there. You can even make inferences: the knock is firm, perhaps confident, perhaps urgent. But you cannot know who it is until the door opens. And the door can only be opened from the inside.

This is the limit of general revelation. It tells you Someone is there. It cannot tell you who.

Antony Flew spent fifty years as the world’s most prominent atheist philosopher. Then the evidence changed his mind. The complexity of DNA, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life — it had accumulated beyond what he could continue to dismiss. He concluded that a creator must exist, and he wrote a book about it.