Our questions are never completely and fully answered. Growing as a Christian, there are questions that I face that I find difficult to answer in different chapters in my life. For a good portion of my college career, the main question that bothered me and nagged at me was the question of natural disasters. Why would God allow them to happen? This is probably because of the various natural disasters that happened in the recent past - Katrina, Haiti, South Asia, Japan. For these doubts and questions, I usually have head answers that I already know. If someone asked me questions on my own doubts, I could answer them. But deep down, I have yet to fully come to peace with those answers.
For me, the question/doubt that is nagging me right now is really hard to describe and articulate, but I'm going to try anyways. It has to do with the bigness and vastness of the universe. Basically, given the enormity of the universe, is it not arrogant to say that of all of the universe, the millions of stars and lightyears, God especially loves humans so much that He sent his son down to die for us? Now I know Romans 8, and I know that God is here to redeem all of creation, but I can't help but think that it all just seems so human-centric. Why would God decide to plan things such that something as insignificant in the universe, such as human beings, have a special ability to communicate with him? Why would God choose to bless a single life form with his special revelation on a tiny planet in a tiny galaxy in a single universe, to which there could possibly be parallels?
And put space aside for a bit. What about time? Time just rumbles on. Humans have only been able to communicate via writing for a few thousand years. What will the gospel look like in another 10000 years? Or 1,000,000 years? Will humans even be recognizable then, or will some sort of natural or man-made evolution have happened? Space is vast, it is but finite. Time, however, is a number line that never ends. Will people a million years from now be able to understand that God came as a man and died on the cross for them? Will not Christianity seem more and more bogus and insane as time passes? Will the Bible avoid becoming completely obsolete as our forms of communication shifts completely away from text?
These doubts have been in the back of my head for a while, and I think about it every so often, but reading Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question really makes it all come back again (I highly recommend reading it - it's pretty mind-blowing). We often forget just how small and insignificant we are when measured by time and space. Atheists, like Isaac Asimov, seem to have a significantly more firm grasp on the magnitude of the universe and the finitude of humanity. But this insignificance in time and space also leads to a certain hopelessness and meaninglessness. It's all sort of hard to describe. In a way, I think it's beneficial to periodically ponder our smallness in comparison with the universe. How much smaller are we in comparison to an infinite God that holds the entire universe in the palm of His hand! How much more remarkable is it that he loves us! Who is man that You are mindful of him?! This love is a great mystery, and one that I can't wrap my head around, and I doubt I ever will fully, in this life or the next.
Even though I find it incredulous that a God would care about a single species on a tiny speck of a planet in the enormity of the universe (and the space of all possible universes) and I find it unbelievable that such a God would invade time at such a precise time as to interact with humans that are more or less experience many of the same things I experience, I hold on dearly to the empty grave. Though I have not yet in my head reconciled these things, I know that Christ rose from the dead. Christ rose from the dead! I do not know why this universe was allowed to exist, and I do not know if there exists universes parallel to this one. I do not know what the human race will look like ten thousand years from now, and I do not know when time will end and Jesus will come back. But this I know - that Christ was crucified, died, and was buried, and on the third day he rose again! It is on the resurrection that my faith rests. And if he didn't, we of all men are to be most pitied.
