Far more terrifying than persecution, ideologies, and militant atheism put together may be the hidden force behind the seemingly innocuous statement: “You don’t need God!”
“You don’t need God!” has become a symbol of progress, maturity, and superiority. The phrase gains power over the human mind and becomes, unwittingly, a subtle process of thought deconstruction (lust and hatred work in the same way). Sooner or later this idea, first whispered, becomes alive, feeding the pride and arrogance that grow like weeds in the mind. This is why “you/I don’t need God” has dealt the world of faith one of the most devastating blows in its history, not by bloodshed but by indifference.
Faced with the expression: “You are not allowed to…”, people immediately adopt a position of resistance. But when they are told, “You don’t need…”, their pride is very subtly activated: “You are so big and important that you don’t need such a thing…” Belief in God is for children who are afraid of the dark, Richard Dawkins argues. The idea of God, which made sense at one time or situation in life, does not make sense at another time or situation. Stephen Hawking argued that humans no longer need God to understand the universe.
Against the background of pride thus stimulated, the mind often gives way almost without a struggle. As in the story of the father who says to his son, who is reaching for a second peach: “You don’t need it. They all taste the same, and a boy like you doesn’t stoop to this level,” the boy is discouraged and makes no further attempt to take another peach for fear of falling into the demeaning pattern.
What we see as mistakes
The first error in the expression “You don’t need God!” concerns its content and the status of God and mankind. Humans can say “I don’t need anything” because objects exist to serve the purposes for which we use them. When a person says, “I don’t need anyone,” they are speaking of others as objects. God’s existence is not justified by any of us needing Him. He exists, and by virtue of that simple fact, regardless of our perceived needs, we must choose how we relate to God.
On the other hand, if someone says they don’t need God, they are denying themselves, like a child who says to his mother or father that he doesn’t need them. You may not need parents for the fulfilment of your purposes of one kind or another. But beyond this functional and simplistic perspective, the existence of any individual is derived from the existence of their parents. It is from them, therefore, that a person gets his or her life and, moreover, whatever a child is and wherever he or she is, his or her parents are and will forever remain part of what he or she is. God is not something we use or do not use. God is Someone through whom we exist.
So the mistake is not made at the point when people say “I don’t need God”, but already at the point when people start to think that God is something they “need” or “don’t need”, that He is there to fill a “need”, and that when that need disappears there is no need for Him. God is not something to be used, but the constant source of our being. “For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring'” (Acts 17:28), exclaims Paul.
The truth behind the words
The foolishness of the expression “I have no need of God!” (“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'”—Psalm 14:1) is also due to the fact that the scale of any measurement is always external, whereas the man who believes that he “has no need of God” is in fact saying: “I measure myself by myself, I do not steer my lifeboat by the stars or by any other instrument, but by what I think I ought to do. I want to replace the Christian God with another, be it someone or something, according to my desires.” In reality, man does not replace God with something or someone, but with his own being and thinking. He himself becomes God for himself. “Then they sweep past like the wind and go on—guilty people, whose own strength is their god” (Habakkuk 1:11).
It is undoubtedly a question of replacing God, not of renouncing Him, which is impossible by the very nature of humankind. The idea of God is fundamentally linked to the idea of creation, of existence. Since humans cannot be their own creation, they are and will remain essentially a result and not a cause.
Proof of effects
The words “I don’t need God”, although they may be the result of various factors, are undoubtedly the expression of a desire and an impulse for change. The tendency to seek change is natural and positive in itself, but it is conditioned by its nature, its object and its purpose. Has it been proved in any way that the renunciation of God and His substitution by something or someone else, whatever the factors that cause them, are for the benefit, happiness, and progress of the individual and of humanity? Have the ages of dark paganism, of idolatry, or of superior atheistic societies produced works and achievements conducive to the elevation of humanity? Is the individual who has made himself God in a more promising position than that which the theory of the evolution of life on earth gives him?
Let’s take a look at our world as it looks today in the light of decisions made without the God that humanity says it no longer needs. The first thing at stake is truth. Once God has been replaced by something or someone else, and the individual has made himself God, the question arises: do we enjoy a greater level of truth? Have we been able to find a higher definition of truth than the one Jesus gave when he said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6)? Petre Ţuţea believed that without God and without eternity we cannot speak of truth, because we have neither a universal reference nor the time necessary for its full development. This prophet, who was despised in his homeland, was right. Who or what can replace the Absolute, and without His existence, who can know where they come from, where they go, and what their purpose is here? If the thought of eternity is eliminated, who can escape the quicksand of time?
The first effect felt by our generation, which does not lack God, is the loss of definitions. “So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter” (Isaiah 59:14). People no longer know exactly what it means to be human, values have disappeared, swallowed up in the mire of the local, the temporal and the individual. Morality has lost all guidance and direction. Social bonds—family, nation, society, church—have been detached from the shore and sent out to sea, at the mercy of the waves and without landmarks. Human beings, in their self-sufficiency, have become the measure of all things and have lost all measure. The threshold towards which moral decay moves is that of ruin and non-existence. In their eyes, things, phenomena and processes have lost their relation to a well-defined and established absolute. Large parts of humanity, and unfortunately also the Church, have borrowed the language of the demons—”Go away! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” (Luke 4:34)—hoping, however, that the result will be different. (The case of the Church of Laodicea is a typical example.) Unfortunately (or fortunately), the same factors, through the same operation, will always produce the same result.
So is it true that people do not need God? If this is a truth, and truth sets people free, it must be demonstrated that they are free without God. Don’t ask them, ask their lives. If they are not free, the logical and immediate conclusion is that what they have substituted for God is not true. For fear of receiving an undesirable answer, the person who has abandoned God does not ask these questions. And even when the answer comes from all directions, he continues to be in denial.
Against the current
Is there a way out of this whirlwind? Who could solve the case of a person who does not need God? “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32), Jesus said throughout creation and time. If we would properly perceive the seriousness of the problem, we would live out the text from Revelation: “I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside” (Revelation 5:4). In the same chapter the scene changes dramatically: “Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals'” (Revelation 5:5). The mere proximity of Jesus, the mere mention of His name, causes the demon to cry out: “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (Luke 4:34). “‘Be quiet!’ Jesus said sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him” (Luke 4:35).
Self-deception
Is it true that through renunciation one lives a life without God? What can we become apart from God? With which other God will human beings be human? Does this mean that Peter’s illustration of the return to mud and vomit (“Of them the proverbs are true: ‘A dog returns to its vomit,’ and, ‘A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud'”—2 Peter 2:22) is true? It is evident that we know little history and, tragically, we distort and ignore the little we do know. Therefore we are condemned to repeat history.
It is clear that the expression “I don’t need God” is not true. Human beings do not exist without the concept of “God” in one form or another. These words actually say: “I don’t need this God of the Christian religion in the way that it has understood Him, more or less, from Jesus. I refuse to throw up my hands in ‘pious horror’ at this ‘flood of debauchery’, and instead of wondering why the meat has gone bad, I choose to look at myself in the mirror and ask: ‘Where is the salt?'” (John Stott). The answer to this question is given by Solveig Anna Boasdottir, professor of theological ethics at the University of Iceland’s Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. One of the findings of her research is that 46 per cent of the younger generation still consider themselves to be Christians, but none of them believe that God created the earth. “Theories of science are broadly accepted among both young and old. That does not necessarily affect people’s faith in God,” says Boasdottir. The (Lutheran) clergy, the report says, have discussed the phenomenon extensively on Facebook, but by all accounts they are not surprised, let alone shocked. The question “Where is the salt?” is thus clearly answered, not only by the clergy, but by all of us.
Considering the fruits and results of the statement: “I don’t need God”, we realise that it is no longer an expression of the desire for change and evolution, but in fact the corpus delicti of human tragedy, the self-incrimination of mankind. It is the law of sowing and reaping, whether we are talking about an individual, a society or history itself. This is how human society is doomed.
The answer to the last “why?”
When I hear, “I don’t need God, or I don’t need God any more,” I feel the urge to repeat the question the pastor asked the young woman who had just given up her faith in God: “Which God do you no longer believe in?” She replied: “The God of hell, of natural and human disasters, of suffering and death…”. “I don’t believe in that one either,” said the pastor. So which God do you no longer need? The one you once needed and to whom you’re ready to run as soon as you’ve experienced it again? When you needed God, why did you need Him, what were your reasons, and now that you no longer need Him, what are your reasons? It seems easy to say: “I don’t need God anymore”, but in fact it’s not that simple. A friend of mine just said to me: “If I had known what it was like to get divorced, I would never have walked up the steps of the courthouse!” The renunciation of God also takes place on the steps of a courthouse, much more real than the one in the city centre. It is the courthouse of your conscience. Your being accuses you of the most heinous crime you can commit against it: Woe to them, because they have strayed from me!
Destruction to them, because they have rebelled against me! I long to redeem them but they speak about me falsely” (Hosea 7:13) or: “You are destroyed, Israel, because you are against me, against your helper” (Hosea 13:9).
What explanation can you ever give to your being? It will never understand why you have committed this heinous crime against it, just as children will never be given any reason to justify the divorce of their parents. Their souls will remain torn apart, like a lonely traveller on a deserted platform. What will your defence be in the tribunal of your conscience? Was your being your worst enemy, will you say that you committed against it the most heinous crime one can commit against one’s own soul? It is hard to believe. I think it is an act of grave irresponsibility and supreme selfishness, I think it is a matter of superficiality rather than sadism.
I have seen people standing in front of other people with no answer to the question “Why? Recently I saw on the news a nurse who was shot by a policeman in the street. He was shot while lying on the ground with his hands up, completely unarmed. The victim survived to ask the assailant, “Why did you shoot me?” He replied, with a blank face, “I don’t know why I did it!” This will indeed be the only answer given by the godless human being and the devil alike. For the mystery of lawlessness was and will always remain a mystery. “Lord, save me!” (Matthew 14:30) cried Peter.
