The Atheist And The God Who Loves Him

Tonight I drove past the house of an acquaintance where I know they hold a Christian prayer meeting. A bumper sticker on one of the cars caught my attention. “God doesn’t believe in atheists.” You could almost see an appended, “Nyah, nyah, nyah.”
Someone with a more fundamental understanding of Christianity would have recognized immediately that the sticker isn’t true. The Christian God DOES believe in atheists—just as he believes in the person with a badly mistaken theology, the criminal, the immoral, the dishonest and self-serving, the greedy and pitiless.
He not only believes in them, but the Bible says he desires them (“all men”) to be saved from the Hell they have prepared for themselves, both on earth and in the hereafter. To make this possible, the Gospel (that means “good news”) says that he loved the unlovable, the evil, the crooked, the morally sick so much that he bled and died for them.
The Bible, you see, works from the assumption that humans are by nature inclined to do what they know they really ought not to do. I once made that point to a secular college class by asking two questions.
One) How many of you—if you knew absolutely for certain that there would be no police on the road when you went home at ten o’clock tonight—would drive home at a safe and legal speed. There were no hands raised, but I got a lot of sheepish grins.
Two) How many of you think that if you had four three-year-olds and three toy trucks in one play area—that it would be wise or safe for an adult to leave the area even for a moment? Again, nods of under-standing.
(The other day I had a kid ask me why I thought there were so many wars. When you were three, I responded, and another three-year-old had a toy you wanted, what happened? A light dawned in his eyes. That, I went on, is why you have wars. We haven’t grown up a bit or become a whit more decent since we were three.)
Why is that so? Christian theology suggests that the human impulse NOT TO READ the directions—or to feel that it is unnecessary to follow them—when putting a bicycle or lawnmower together has been with us from the beginning.
God gave a few simple directions, and we chose not to follow them. The lawn mower didn’t run, and everything else was fouled up. Not only that but we would up hating the one who gave us the directions and proved right in the end. (Ever wind up being angry with your wife when you didn’t do it the way she suggested, and it didn’t work? The hatred between man and God got much worse.)
Set in our own stubbornness we were helpless to change things. So God took it upon himself to do the changing. That’s what the bloody death of Christ is all about. It took blood to pay the debt we had finally accumulated. God’s blood.
My wife has more than once observed, “Do you think I could not love my children when I risked my life and endured so much pain to bring them into the world?” That’s quite analogous to what God feels. He suffered and died to bring that atheist into a better world and better relationship with his Maker. How could he possibly not love him?
God is not a smart mouth about people he loves. (“I don’t believe in people like you, either—nyah, nyah, nayh.”) His people had best not dare to be either.
In the Apocalypse of John, Christ sends back messages to seven of his churches on earth. To five of the seven of his own churches, he has to say, “Repent”. When we refuse to love those he loves, that is precisely what a Christian is called upon to do.