All Men Are Really Seeking After God

By Ian Hamilton, Editor, The Banner of Truth Magazine

From the May 2020 Issue, issue #680

The human heart is a seeking heart. Because God has put eternity into our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), nothing that is ultimately temporal can satisfy who we are. The great Early Church Father Augustine beautifully captured this truth in his Confessions: “You made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts can find no rest till they find rest in you.” Even in man’s sin and rebellion he knows that God is, but he holds down that truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:19-20). Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch theologian, memorably (with accurate theology and powerful prose) expressed this truth in his book Our Reasonable Faith:

All men are really seeking after God… but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby, They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion: and He is to be found in the high and holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isaiah 57:15)… They seek Him and the same time they flee Him… In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of the moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature.

It is often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This is our world. One of the Bible’s most basic truths is that we live in a world that “lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). The most stark evidence of this is the spiritual blindness that afflicts everyone born into this world. Paul bluntly told the church in Corinth that the reason why the gospel is veiled to those who are perishing is because “the god of this world has blinded (their) minds… to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Satan is the gospel’s ultimate arch enemy. He actively seeks, moment by moment, to do all he can to keep lost, perishing men and women from “seeing” and embracing the Saviour who alone can rescue them from a lost eternity, reconcile them to God and give them a living hope (1 Peter 1:3).

One of Satan’s most powerful weapons is to beguile men and women with that which cannot satisfy. More money, time, and energy is spent on entertainment than anything else. Men and women everywhere are trying to fill the sense of the eternal that is indelibly engraved on their humanity (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but they are doing so with that which can never satisfy.

In this endless, elusive pursuit for fullness of life that is at the heart of the frenetic restlessness that marks so much of life in our modern, sophisticated, technologically brilliant, but morally vacuous world. The great tragedy of the age is that the Saviour who said, “I have come that you might have life in all its fullness” (john 10:30), is willfully ignored. You could hardly find a better illustration of what Hebrews 3:13calls the “deceitfulness of sin”. It is our sin, and behind our sin its master Satan that deceives us into thinking that God sent his Son to rob us of life, and not to give us life. Sin is not only wicked, it is deceitful. Sin promises you much but gives you nothing except present futility and eternal ruin.

This is one reason why throughout the Bible we read of the sovereign God pleading with his sin-blinded creatures to come to him and live. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). He holds out his hands all the day long (Romans 10:21 quoting Isaiah 65:2), lovingly inviting us to come to him for life. But, as Jesus said to his sin-deceived hearers, “You will not come to me that you might have life”.

What God used to bring me to put my trust alone in the Lord Jesus Christ, was seeing “life” in a fellow student in my high school. He faithfully witnessed to me about the Saviour, but it was not his words — it was his life that attracted me. He had “something” that I did not have. The impact the early Christians had on the ancient world was essentially twofold: They bore witness to Christ and preached his gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit; and they lived gospel transformed lives. if we are honest, do we not all know that as believers we live well below the “joy unspeakable” of our privileges? Do our families, neighbours, friends, flok at work, our fellow students at college, see the fulness of the life that Jesus promised to give to everyone who embraced him as Saviour and Lord?  We can bemoan the blindness of the unbelieving world around us, but what are we doing to disperse that blindness? Yes, our sin-blinded world needs to hear preaching in the power of the Holy Spirit. But no less it needs to see the power of the Holy Spirit in transformed lives. Is this not what our Lord himself teaches us in Matthew 5:16: “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

Christians are light bearers. The Light of the world indwells us by his Spirit. I have often thought (uncomfortably) about J.I. Packer’s definition of evangelism: “Evangelism is a Christian being a Christian in the world”. No doubt we could add to what Packer says. What surely cannot be denied, however, is that he is saying something that all of us need to take to heart. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

“We have no Scriptural evidence that we serve the Lord at all, any further than we find a habitual desire and aim to serve him wholly. He is gracious to our imperfections and weakness; yet he requires all the heart, and will not be served by halves, nor accept what is performed by a divided heart.”

 Letter of John Newton, March 1773