He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
Micah 6:8. NIV
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
God—who does not normally show himself—
Has put man here on this Earth,
Giving us enough information
To believe in him (if we want to),
And to know, (if we want to)
What he requires of us.
He has even given us the cognitive faculties
By which to reason out the Golden Rule
For ourselves (if we want to)—
And even the moral faculties by which
To live it out (if we want to),
Doing by nature (if we want to)
The things of the law.
And make of it what you will, but it seems
He prefers for the time being this subtle approach,
His grand appearance having been reduced to the record,
Such that it may sit idly on the shelf—
If that’s where it is left.
That is to say that he does not go house to house,
Bullying the residents for their devotion,
But leaves it to man—who does not normally
Look deeply into the things of God—
To choose for himself what he will do about it.
And many, being procrastinators,
Will choose not to choose, while others—
Seeking being dodgers—
Will claim they have neither noticed him
Nor reasoned him out,
Nor sensed the echoes of eternity in their hearts,
Nor ignored the prick of a God-given conscience—
And some will reason that
They are off the hook
Because he does not exist—
Or if they are particularly shameless,
That he didn’t really mean what he said—
Or that they are are in fact
Doing better than they really are—
And that is how it goes so often.
But even so, man—
Who does not normally repent fully—
Sometimes does!
God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us…. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.
Acts 17:27-31. NIV
