I paused to chat with residents while walking along the road near a village on Carriacou Island. As I listened to their experiences in Hurricane Beryl, a lone vehicle approached and stopped. The driver expressed gratitude for the help coming to the devastated island. “Do you know why we do this?” I asked. “Tell me,” he said. “So we can tell you that God loves you!”
His friendly retort was direct. “I don’t believe in God.” I smiled and said, “He still loves you even if you don’t believe it.” At that point, he began a brief defense. “I’m a decent person and I wouldn’t kill anybody. I don’t know about you. You might kill me for all I know.” His argument was the familiar “I don’t need God to be good.” He quickly began preparing to drive away. “I hope we are parting as friends,” I offered. “Of course,” he said as he drove away.
As the sound of his vehicle faded behind us, one of the island residents waved his hand from the ocean to the sky, then to the land saying, “How could anyone see all this and say there is no God?” Indeed.
Sure, non-believers can be decent, caring people. In fact, I met some who were providing disaster relief on the island. But saying you can be good without God is to use the language of God to reason against His existence. If an unreasoning, material world produced us, how then do we have the ability to reason about good and evil? Noted atheist Richard Dawkins made that contradiction when he said the universe has “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” C.S. Lewis had already explained the flawed logic. “(God) is the source from which all your reasoning power comes… When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”
When my new friend made his case for unbelief, he misunderstood the gospel of Jesus Christ. None of us are morally perfect, which separates us from a holy God. Jesus’ invitation to anyone is to “deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me… Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt. 16:24-25). To trust Jesus for forgiveness of sin is to follow him into a new life. The result of belief is not just to make flawed people better, but to make dead people alive. Forever.
There’s hope for anyone who seeks truth. “Help my unbelief,” a doubting man begged Jesus. That simple prayer may well lead you to find faith and new life from the God who loves you, whether you believe it or not.