God Is Dead—Nietzsche. Nietzsche Is Dead—God.

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Okay. Let’s carry on.

I saw the words in the title of this article many decades ago on a photo. I thought it was humorous. It is obvious that Nietzsche was dead. He died in 1900. But was God dead, as Nietzsche was quoted as saying?

Nietzsche wasn’t boldly proclaiming the views of a determined atheist when he said God was dead and that we had killed Him. He was challenging the children of the Enlightenment. They had declared that reason and science were the forces that would guide, help, and cause us to thrive, and that we no longer had need of God. Nietzsche wondered why, then, those children of the Enlightenment who wanted to eliminate the Christian God from all of life, still lived as though God were still alive and continued to adhere to His moral laws.

God, of course, is not dead. He is not only an eternal being, He is the eternal being.  He lives in eternity. When I write that, I don’t mean at all that He lives in the universe. The universe is not eternal, although, from our point of view, it is so incalculably vast that it must be. However, the Bible tells us that is not the case.

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed” (2 Peter 3:10).

Being eternal, He can give eternal life to those who believe in Jesus. That eternal life can only be bestowed by someone who is Himself eternal. What one doesn’t possess, one cannot give away. That life can only be obtained by believing in Jesus who paid a debt we cannot.

But back to Nietzsche. Why do people who do not believe in the Christian God still hold to many of His moral laws? They may say, “For the sake of society and maintaining stability.”

However, why do society and stability matter?

Unbelievers believe that human beings are simply advanced apes. Those apes evolved over eons from something that formed in a tide pool, hot springs, or near a deep-sea hydrothermal vent. They have no evidence for this, of course, but what else could it have been? This “thing,” whatever it was, died and passed along its attributes to another “thing,” although, of course, it had no DNA to do so. Nevertheless, “thing” to cell to another, which grouped together, and on and on the fairy tale goes.

But if we are just an accumulation of a very advanced development of cells, what does it matter what we do? We’re only animals, after all. No one slaps handcuffs on a male gorilla for killing its own offspring. No one puts a cheetah in jail for taking down a gazelle, a grizzly bear for killing a cub, or an eagle for snatching some salmon, one of our dear, distant cousins, from a river.

No, somehow, we are different. But unbelievers know the truth of it, although they refuse to give credence to it.

“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

God’s law is writ large in our beings. We know we are guilty when we break His laws, unless we are psychopathically insane, I suppose.

Believers do have evidence that God exists. Just look up into the heavens. Study flowers. Insects. All manner of living beings. Unbelievers will say, of course, “That’s not evidence.” They are without excuse. And this is the state of their lives.

“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:21–23).   

Please pray for your unbelieving friends.

¹All Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

Gif courtesy Bing images.