The Ground Beneath the Question: A World Without God

Try it. Take God out of the world and see what you are left with.

You reach to do the taking, and the hand is his. You think the thought, and he strung the mind that thinks it before you drew a breath. You look for a place to stand while you do the subtracting, and there is no floor, because there is no room, because there is no world. Paul said it to a city of philosophers who prided themselves on having outgrown the gods: “In him we live and move and have our being,” he told them, “as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring’” (Acts 17:28, ESV). Not beside him. In him. Take God out and you do not get a cold universe humming along on its own. You get nothing. There is no one left to be cold.

I’ve tried it. I’ve tried to see the world through the eyes of unbelief, and maybe when I was younger, for a while I did. But unbelief could never furnish its own ground. Even the mind I used to doubt him was living on borrowed breath.

We would like to think that settles it. It does not. The experiment that collapses on paper is one we run with our lives, most of us, most days.

“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Colossians 1:16–17, ESV

That last sentence is key. “In him all things hold together.” Paul names the great powers first: thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities. Every throne a man might fear, every authority he might flatter or bow to, set inside the grip of the one who made them. Rome is on that list. So is the council that sent him to a cross. And so is every atom, every orbit, every heartbeat you will spend today: held. A world without God is not a lonelier copy of this one. It is the instant this one stops being held, and that instant has never come.

So the honest experiment fails before it starts. And still we attempt it, not with equations but with the shape of an ordinary life.

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good.” Psalm 14:1, ESV

The fool here is nobody’s village idiot. He is a practical man. He cannot make the Maker vanish, so he does the next thing: he lives as though he had. He builds a small world with no God in it and moves in, all of it standing on ground God is holding up under his feet the whole time. We would like the fool to be the neighbor. He is the face we put on before we have had coffee, the calculation we make when no one is watching, the quiet assumption that the day is ours to spend. That is the only world-without-God any of us has ever seen. Not a clean philosophical absence. A heart that stopped looking up, and what grew there in the dark once it did.

Paul is willing to follow the thing all the way to the bottom. Suppose the stone held. Suppose the tomb kept what it was given. Suppose the God who came in a body stayed dead, and the world-without-God turned out to be the real one after all:

“If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” 1 Corinthians 15:19, ESV

Most to be pitied. He does not say most free, or most grown, or most finally awake. He says pitied. Because a world with a dead Christ in it is a world where the grave is telling the truth, where love is a chemical accident, where the grief you carry at three in the morning weighs exactly what it feels like it weighs and not an ounce less.

But the stone did not hold.

The world that did its level best to be rid of God, that drove the nails and rolled the rock and posted the guard, woke to find him holding it still. The very powers on Paul’s list did their worst that day, and every one of them was being held while they did it. He never let go of it. He did not let go of you. “In him all things hold together” was true from inside the sealed tomb. It was true of the very ground the soldiers stood on. It is true of the chair you are sitting in right now, whether you have given it a thought or not.

So picture the world the way it actually is. Not empty. Shot through with a Presence you cannot subtract. Held up by a Christ you could kill and could not keep. Named, out loud, by a God who has never stopped saying your name. Then stop picturing it. Answer him. He is calling.

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Acts 17:28 · Colossians 1:16–17 · Psalm 14:1 · 1 Corinthians 15:19