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The God Who Speaks

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What do you think is the most repeated phrase in the entire Bible?  

If you said, “Thus says the Lord,” you would be correct. It appears more than four hundred times.  

The God of the Bible is not the stone-cold silent god of the ancient Greeks. He is not the Stoic or Epicurean Zeus, too busy enjoying the amenities of divine bliss to bother with humanity, shaving a few strokes off his short game on some distant galactic golf course. No. The God who exists is the God who speaks.  

My Personal Favorite Atheist

It is all too easy to take the fact that God speaks for granted. We need help from one of the most famous atheists of the twentieth century, the French existentialist Albert Camus (pronounced Ka-me-you).  

Camus did not believe in a speaking God. Yet he is one of my personal favorite atheists. He did what so few atheists have been willing or able to do. He reckoned honestly with the implications for the human race if no speaking God exists. “When it comes to man’s most basic questions of meaning and purpose,” Camus said, “the universe is silent.”1 We shout, “Why are we here?” to the night sky, and the answer is crickets.  

The Absurdity of Modern Life

The implication is that “all human attempts to answer the questions of meaning are futile. . . . In a word, our very existence is absurd.” That absurdity of life in a silent cosmos was precisely the tough pill Camus offered us in his best novels.  

The Plague showed us the nobility yet utter futility of fighting death and despair in a godless universe as a pandemic strikes a French colony in 1940s Algeria. The Stranger chronicles a post-Christian drifter killing an Arab on a beach, yet seeking no redemption because the categories of good, evil, guilt, and grace are nonsense in the absence of God. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus rebooted the Greek tragedy of a man condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again and again and again forever.  

Camus offers a helpful, albeit depressing metaphor for modern man, the kind of ennui and unbearable absurdity that sets the protagonists of Mike Judge’s Office Space, David Fincher’s Fight Club, and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad on their respective antihero paths to cyber fraud, corporate terrorism, and meth cooking.  

‘A Disillusioned and Exhausted Man’

Something astounding happened to Camus, something that has everything to do with a God who speaks.  

In the 1950s a New York Methodist pastor named Howard Mumma was guest preaching at a church in Paris. Mumma noticed a mysterious figure in a dark trench coat circled by admirers. It was none other than Albert Camus, mid-twentieth- century international atheist celebrity, and a self-described “disillusioned and exhausted man.” He confessed that he had never read the Bible himself, and Mumma agreed to be his tour guide through the text. What followed was a friendship that lasted five years, Mumma visiting Paris and Camus visiting New York City to explore the possibility that God has spoken.  

Camus confided in Mumma,  

“[When] I wrote the Myth of Sisyphus . . . [and] my first novel, The Stranger, I tried to show that all human attempts to answer the questions of meaning are futile. . . . In a word, our very existence is absurd. . . . So, what do you do? For me, the only response was . . . to commit suicide, intellectual suicide or physical suicide. . . . To lose one’s life is only a little thing. But, to lose the meaning of life, to see our reasoning disappear, is unbearable. It’s impossible to live a life without meaning.” 

Striving for the Faith

Then came a moment no one saw coming. Camus, famed atheist, asked Mumma if he could be baptized. Given his celebrity status, Camus had only one condition. The baptism must be private, behind closed doors. That way no paparazzi, no protesting atheists, no opportunist Christians could exploit Camus’s sacred sprinkling.  

Mumma kindly explained that the very concept of a private baptism was a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron like “jumbo shrimp,” “crash landing,” or “soft rock.” Baptism is a public sacrament, a visible declaration of one’s new identity in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  

Camus said he would consider it. They parted ways. Camus died a couple of weeks later in a car crash. His final words to Mumma were, “I am going to keep striving for the Faith.” 

The man who wrestled so desperately with the silence of the universe saw a ray of hope that the God who made the universe is not silent.  

“Thus says the Lord.”  

Dear friends, do not take those four words lightly. Don’t miss their life-or-death profundity. Run the depressing thought experiment. If there is no speaking God, then what have you got? How would you begin to answer the existential questions that seize us in our most sober (and often in our least sober) moments?  

Science can answer questions about how the universe works. But science cannot answer a single why question. Thank God for science, but no amount of science, much less entertainment, alcohol, orgasms, income, or obsessive self-analysis can extinguish the burning why questions.  

Don’t Sell Your Soul

We might be tempted to delegate the answers to why questions to the politicians. Yet the twentieth century’s hundred-million-plus casualties of totalitarian megalomaniacs unite like a chorus of ghosts to shout, “Resist! Don’t sell your soul!”  

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We might then be tempted to take the inward turn. The universe may be silent and the ideologues may lie, but our hearts can show us the way. “The answers are within” is the kind of advice offered either by those selling something by stroking your ego or those who have never plunged deep enough within to behold the contradictions and corruptions that lurk in our depths. The human heart is “deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9 NIV).  

Thankfully, “God is not man, that he should lie” (Num. 23:19 ESV). “Your word, Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations” (Ps. 119:89–90 NIV).  

Because God exists and God speaks our quest to answer why questions does not leave us cosmically alienated and pondering a noose in Camus’s silent universe. Deep trust becomes possible, a trust in something or rather Someone infinitely more trustworthy than scientists, politicians, and everyone else, including ourselves.  

Camus was right that “human attempts to answer the questions of meaning are futile.” Yet, your existence is not absurd. Your quest is not doomed. You have purpose because you were created on purpose by a purpose-driven God. “All things,” which would include you, “were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16 ESV).  

God’s purpose-illuminating words can be accessed whenever you want and with greater ease than anytime in human history. Bibles are no longer under lock and key in the Latin Vulgate that average folks couldn’t understand. Today at least some Scripture can be found in 3,589 languages (and counting). A ten-second app download can put hundreds of translations at our fingertips.  

Revere God

We revere God when we take his word seriously. Such reverence has a proven positive impact.  

When researchers Arnold Cole and Pamela Caudill Ovwigho polled forty thousand people ranging from eight to eighty years old, they made some unexpected discoveries. People who read their Bibles once or twice a week experienced no benefit over those who never read their Bibles. At three times a week, some minor gains were detected. But with at least four times of reading Scripture per week, everything seemed to spike.  

  • Sharing their faith skyrocketed 200 percent.  
  • Discipling others jumped a whopping 230 percent.  
  • Feelings of loneliness dropped 30 percent.  
  • Anger issues dropped 32 percent.  
  • Relationship bitterness dropped 40 percent.  
  • Alcoholism plummeted by 57 percent.  
  • Feelings of spiritual stagnancy fell 60 percent.  
  • Viewing pornography decreased 61 percent. 

Do you battle a sense of purposelessness as Camus did in his silent universe? Do you feel lonely, lost, or stuck? Thankfully, God is not silent. Open a Bible and hear your Maker speak.


Cover of "Revering God" by Thaddeus J. Williams

Adapted from Revering God: How to Marvel at Your Maker by Thaddeus J. Williams.

The chief reason we exist is to glorify and enjoy God. But for many, God remains a vague cloud of cosmic kindness, a super-sized projection of ourselves into the sky, or an impossible-to-please killjoy. Who is God, really? Who is this being we should thank for our next breath?

Written in the great tradition of classic discipleship works like A. W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God, J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, and R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God, this discipleship guide stands out as our generation’s invitation to good theology that yields profound, reverent, God-centered living.

  1. All quotes are taken from Howard Mumma, Albert Camus and the Minister (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2000).  ↩︎
Thaddeus J. Williams

Thaddeus J. Williams (Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) loves enlarging students’ understanding and enjoyment of Jesus at Biola University in La Mirada, CA, where he serves as associate professor of Systematic Theology for Talbot School of Theology. He has also taught Philosophy and Literature at Saddleback College, Jurisprudence at Trinity Law School, and as a lecturer in Worldview Studies atL’AbriFellowships in Switzerland and Holland, and Ethics for Blackstone Legal Fellowship the Federalist Society in Washington D.C. Heresidesin Orange County, CA with his wife and four kids.

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