November 3, 2016

How can you differentiate God according to religion?

Every human has a hunger within that needs to be filled in by God. Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and philosopher, put it like this: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, ……”.

C S Lewis explains ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.”

All religions at its root are about this hunger – humans attempting to reach God and please him. These are human efforts and really get nowhere at the end of the day, except to feel the vacuum more deeply. What happens after the gaiety of a festival? Are we waiting for the next one to take our eyes off the mundane-ness of our existence?

But Jesus Christ was born as man among men so that God could bridge the gap between humans and himself. Jesus Christ is God reaching out to us. And, that is the fundamental difference between the Christian faith and all the others. We just have to receive the grace of God given through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to be in a living relationship with God. We are not only promised eternal life as individuals but we also start experiencing the daily fullness of a purposeful life. Not driven now by desires of the flesh that can satisfy only for a time, but by what is everlasting.

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