Why doesn't Jesus just come down and tell me He's God more directly

After I was baptized, my Uncle, still being a Hindu, had sat me down for a few hours to debate several topics with me like evolution and rituals. One of the exchanges that stood out was this:

Uncle: “Why doesn’t Jesus just come down and tell me that He’s God?”

Me: “What do you think He’s doing with me sitting right in front of you telling you that He is?”

Uncle: “It’s not the same, I’d believe Him if He was more clear.”

This is a sentiment I find a lot of non-religious people sharing. While my Uncle is a Hindu, he is neither devoted nor religious, merely participating in hinduism as a way to maintain a shared culture amongst his family, nation, and upbringing. He holds a belief like many other non-theists: God has not done enough for us to have faith. And by extension of this: all those who have faith in God are doing so mistakenly or foolishly or with wilfull ignorance to satisfy their anxieties of the unknown.

There is certainly some credence to a sentiment like this. People who hold steadfast in Islamism, Hinduism, or Buddhism are either mistaken, foolish, or wilfully ignorant in my eyes. Given the lack of evidence for these gods and a bounty of evidence for Christ, it too confuses me why anyone could stake eternity on them.

However, there is a difference between following a non-Christian religion and following no religion, like my Uncle displays through action. This difference is that the religious in general are choosing to be satisfied in spite of “more” evidence and the non-theists are not satisfied yet (satisfaction could be reached, but has a low likelihood). There maybe something wholly incredulous about staking eternity onto something when you as an individual have to “choose” when you will be satisfied. It sounds arbitrary. Some people can be satisfied with Christ’s divinity after hearing one sermon, some after one hundred. Some need hours of time with a pastor hashing out theological problems and so-called contradictions. Some need only to be raised in it for a genuine faith that lasts a lifetime. Some need only to repent near the end of their pilgrimage on earth. Each Christian has a different, individualistic, and seemingly arbitrary threshold for believing in Christ. Likewise, each muslism, hindhu, and buddhist have thresholds of their own. But atheists have none. Their thresholds are carved with clay, being molded and re-molded every time their lofty defenses are shot down. Their objections are valid but their response to the answers are invalid. The challenge with atheists and non-theists is that their minds are made up; they pre-suppose that their belief is right. Whether that belief is no God, naturalism, or not the Christian God, they cannot be convinced without their own hearts being open to convincing.

Sometime ago, early in my religious journey, I stumbled on a debate between an atheist and a Christian. The atheist boldly proclaimed that if there was a God and He came down from the Heavens and said, “It is I, God, and I am here to tell you that I am real and that you ought to believe in me” that he still wouldn’t believe thinking rather that he’d been caught in a hallucination or delusion. To a made up mind, if God came down from Heaven, took the form of a man, came to them, showed them miracles, and then preached, “I am the Son of God, I am the Messiah, the Father and I are one”, they would still not believe. Even if that God in the likeness of men continued to heal, open the blind, and even raise a man from the dead, they would not believe. They might even try to kill Him thinking He be a deceiver, false prophet, or a false messiah, taking His life for spreading lies about God just like Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth of Athens. Let’s say they succeed, God is now killed and verified to be dead, but then after some time rose from the dead where his former grave lies empty and open for all those willing to see, and then comes back to that made up mind and says, “It is I, the Son of Man who you killed”, that mind would still not believe. To him, everything he saw that did not fit with his understanding of the world would be a delusion, hoax, a conspiracy, a lie, a fairytale, a great mythological story.

If there were people during Jesus’ earthly ministry given all the signs and wonders who would not believe in him, then surely people outside of that environment would have difficulty believing. It’s amusing when hearing the sorts of criticisms like that of my Uncle wherein God need only to come down to him personally and convince Him of His own faithfulness and divinity. It’d be like a peasant of a wealthy and seemingly infinite Kingdom refusing to pay taxes to the King of his land, because He has never met this King in real life. He might think, “I’ve never seen this King of mine, only seen pictures and read his proclamations. How do I know he even exists? Sure, I’d pay my taxes if he’d just meet with me personally and prove to me his kingship.” In a situation like this, the King would clearly not come down to the homestead of his peasant just to tell his unruly citizen that he is indeed King and that he ought to believe in his Kingship and pay his taxes. While this is almost exactly how the Kingdom of Heaven works, the one difference is that the King of the Universe does meet with the peasants of creation. Not because the King of the Universe needs our faith as if it fuels the engines of his Kingdom or that it gives Him some sense of authority and pride as maybe an earthly King would feel when seeing his subjects bow down before his crown. Rather, the King of the Universe meets with creation for creation’s sake, to give them the necessary wholeness of truth so that they may strive for perfect lives on earth and live perfectly in Heaven. He comes down to us, washes our feet, sings songs of joy with us, eats with us, heals us, and dies for us so that unlike the peasant thrown in jail for refusing to oblige with the tax code, we may never know this fate.

Atheists like my uncle fail to recognize that Jesus did come down to “convince” us of His existence and nature; excelling their own depictions of God. The Greeks thought God’s image to be chiseled men and beautiful women. The Jews thought God’s messiah to be a warrior-king like David who’d unite the twelve tribes of Israel on earth and un-cuff the shackles of Rome’s oppression on their own people. In God’s unending wisdom though, He came as a poor servant who united twelve terrible, weak people in a mission to unshackle the chains of sin for all people, for all time, everywhere, giving those twelve and all future disciples the commission to share the finale of His work: His death, resurrection, and promise of salvation and the Holy Spirit through faith, repentance, and baptism. Through His Church, His written Word, and His Spirit, Christ will speak to all of creation so that, as Paul writes in Romans, God made His invisible qualities visible so that all men are without excuse.

What my uncle asks for is somewhat reasonable. The Jews had Moses and Abraham and a whole slew of patriarchs and scripture to testify to Yahweh. The entire culture of Israel was setup by God to continue to reinforce His sovereignty and authority and remind the Israelites through their customs of their God. The Gentiles had none of this. They were outside of God’s earthly borders and so to graft them in would require a new covenant, this time made with all of creation and not just Israel. And in like fashion to God’s first covenant wherein He first saves His people and then asks the Hebrews for their hand, Jesus comes, lives a perfect life, dies, and then asks the people of this world for theirs. This new Convent is unlike our earthly contracts written on paper; this stays bound forever, written on thick, stone tablets that cannot be changed or altered or taken away from the hands of the Church. Jesus’ work on earth exists for all time and does not need to be replenished like a well when emptied. And so, people like my Uncle have access to that contract and with faith are given the only pen he could use to add his name to the deed, even though the contract was created 2000 years ago. If Jesus had meet with each individual human while being incarnate, He would have to live forever on earth. But the problem with this is that Jesus, being fully man as well as fully God, cannot dwell amongst the peoples of earth forever in the flesh as the flesh dies. He needed to go back to the Heavenly realm. Though even with this, He didn’t leave without giving His followers the Holy Spirit that would be the Great Helper reminding them of God’s Will and Work, securing their salvation, and working within them to become Christ-like. So, while Jesus incarnate’s earthly ministry was temporary, it was for an eternal purpose. That purpose being fulfilled with Jesus’ sacrifice allowed for the next phase in God’s plan exchanging the visible image of God for the invisible spirit, no longer constrained by the finitude of flesh.

The unreasonableness of my Uncle’s request is in misalignment between him and God that supposes for that request. Just as the peasant from earlier equalizes himself to the King in order to levy refusal for taxes based on the peasant’s demand of a personal visit, so too do objection-raisers of this sort equalize themselves to God in their demands of personal evangelism. The irony being that the King of the Universe does ordain personal visits on his behalf through gentle maneuvering of the Holy Spirit so that all men are without excuse. That missionary that comes to your door; the Bible that lay sitting in the hotel drawer; the article in your inbox about Christ; the food kitchen in a church basement open every morning and every evening; that friend that invites you to church one Sunday; your nephew that shares the gospel for hours: this is the divine providence of God visiting men and tugging at their heart. This is the interesting paradox of the Christian God: He relents. When Israel demanded a human King to serve in place of the King of the Universe, God relented. When Moses interceded for His people on Mount Sinai when they were found to be worshipping a golden calf just days after their exodus, God relented. When Thomas doubted the resurrection and demanded to see and feel the wounds of Christ, God relented. We see throughout Scripture a deity willing to make do with imperfect creatures in order that they maybe perfect one day through His salvation.

Beyond the misalignment, the consequences of, “Come down and show me you’re God”, would be the annihilation of free will. Without free will, the erasure of true love would follow. God wholly subsisting on His own with no need for creation still creates for the expansion of the institution of love. The Trinity exists as a eternal entity with all three persons of the Godhead bound by a perfect and free love for each other. From this perfect love would the desire for expanding it’s bounds outside the Godhead exist. This is not to say that God is not omnipotent or exists in some finite container and wills to expand that container. God is infinite in presence and takes up all spaces, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all space is God as the pantheists believe. God can choose to limit His power for a good cause and does so when Jesus incarnates on earth. He chooses to limit His complete power to be poor like men, humbling Himself for our sake. This limit in power is what allows for the Son of Man to be killed at the hands of mere men. Yet, since the Godhead persists omnipotently through the Father and the Spirit, Jesus raises Himself (as the Trinity is one) from the dead. Through this sort of mechanism, God is able to be both everywhere and somewhere, dead and alive, fully man and fully God. Now, the propagation of this perfect love between the persons of the Trinity into finite creatures comes from the desire to share such a love with more beings. It is like a wife and a husband choosing to create life in order that this new life may partake in the joint love of that marriage and share in the experiences of mankind. Without the choice of the family to conceive, that joint love is limited to the bounds of the family. For creation’s love for their creator to be genuine, these beings must choose freely to love God. Without the free choice to believe in God, the love is meaningless. Faith must be free. Humans must be free to believe and free to not believe. God is not invisible from a sort of limitation in power. He is invisible so that the hearts that choose to believe in Him choose so out of free-willed faith. It is a more genuine faith; refined through doubt melted in recognition of Christ’s sacrifice. Even though Jesus relented to the wishes of doubting Thomas to see the visible aftermath of the resurrection, Christ remarked that blessed are those that believe in spite of His visibility. Here, Christ is not claiming that those who believe without any semblance of proof or without an air of rationality are blessed - giving way to the blessedness of “blind faith” - rather, He points out that a faith born from hearing the Word takes more risk than one born from seeing the Word. And in that, the faith is greater. It is reasonable to accept that to propel twelve men to die for the their testimony of the Gospel would take greater proof. Though, 2000 years later that proof has only grown. Countless more testimonies, miracles, archeological evidence, of the same event has sprouted from the seeds planted at Calvary. What does that say about people like my Uncle? That with bountiful evidence of the workings of the Holy Spirit, that God must do more? It seems arrogant that in all that God has done, people with my Uncle’s objection demand more.

The threshold for faith should be high. I don’t fault any individual from asking a given religious text, “So what?”. No one should take any claim at face value. God would not want us too. Yet, I do fault those individuals that receive answers and do not think much of it; who themselves fall short of satisfying objectors of atheism. Show me an eternal universe and I’ll throw my Bible away. Show me irrefutable existence of no God and I’ll throw my Bible away. Give me one inkling of proof that non-life begets life or that stones create flesh and I will throw my Bible away. These objections cannot be answered, at least not sufficiently. And so, with two sides aiming to win the hearts of a skeptical mankind, the victor cannot be the one with some sort of irrefutable proof impossible to obtain, but rather the one with more evidence. With this frame of mind and an open heart, Christ wins.