06/15/06
Lord of the Dance
Joe Boot

I vividly remember what it was like as a child to have overwhelming questions running through my head about existence. Sometimes I would sit and think and try to get my head around why I existed at all, until my mind simply quit and went blank. Who am I? What is life? How did it begin? If life goes on after death, what is eternity? Surely even that must end? The one thing we cannot accept as children or rationalize as adults is that things just happen by themselves. In my family, like most others, lots of things happened inexplicably. Food went missing from the cupboards, rooms messed themselves up, fights were started by phantoms, dirty footprints appeared across the carpet on their own, and all sorts of things were broken by the invisible man! All of us when questioned by mom or dad usually denied responsibility. "I don't know! It wasn't me!"

Why did this reasoning never get us off the hook? Because people cannot accept that things happen by themselves--something causes them to happen. That room did not get messy by itself; something or someone messed it up. This is a rule of common sense and common knowledge; all events must have a cause. No reasonable person would dispute that. This is the source of the persistent questioning of a child who asks why. If one asks why enough times, eventually you either get back to God or you simply have to assert something like, "It just is; that's all" or "Because I said so." The latter response is rather unsatisfactory, and even reference back to God will often prompt the question, "But who made God?"

This fact is telling. What it shows is that our minds demand a principle philosophers call "efficient causality" or cause and effect. We all notice that some things cause other things to begin to be, to continue to be, or both. Every event must have a cause. We can say for example: I have just knocked over my cup of tea because my arm knocked it over, because my brain told my arm to move, because electrical impulses moved the muscles as I willed to move my arm, because that's how the body works. If we go on like that, we either get back to God or we resort to something irrational.

As we have said, our senses tell us that the universe is real and that our world is a system of events and changes. These events, like the spilling of a cup of tea, cannot cause themselves--this would be absurd. Everything at this moment is caused to be by something other than itself. But what is causing them if everything at any given moment needs a cause? The only reasonable solution is that there must be a first cause that is uncaused, self-existent, independent, and eternal. A cause that is not dependent on anything else to be its cause. This must be God. He is not an effect of something else; instead, he is the ultimate cause of all other effects. God is not an event that occurs at a given time like everything else; he has always been and always will be.

The Bible begins with that very assertion: "In the beginning God." It does not argue about it or seek to persuade the reader by clever argument that it is true. It is simply stated. And human consciousness nods its head to this fact--God is! This is the very answer to the child's question, "Who made God?" For even a child knows that the gift of life came from someone and was passed to all from somewhere. This is a constant theme in the Bible. It tells us that people intuitively know they have been given the gift of life from the giver of life who is eternal.

The Lord of the dance, the one who gives life to and sustains everything, has placed in the human heart a sense of our own created-ness, of our own immortality. Despite the fact that we cannot understand or explain an infinite, self-existent God, a persistent awareness that He is the source of all life remains embedded in the very essence of what it means to be a human being. He is the great assertion, the only one who can truly say, "Because I said so."

From Searching for Truth by Joe Boot, © 2002. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.com. Download for personal use only.

Joe Boot is ????utive director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Canada.

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