How, then, it may be asked, can we either reach or avoid Him?
The avoiding, in many times and places, has proved so difficult that a very large part of the human race failed to achieve it.
But in our own time and place it is extremely easy. Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) your own grievances.
Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful, especially those with a snobbish or a sexy appeal.
About the reaching, I am a far less reliable guide. That is because I never had the experience of looking for God. It was the other way round; He was the hunter (or so it seemed to me) and I was the deer. He stalked me...took unerring aim, and fired.
--From The Seeing Eye, by C. S. Lewis
I think all of us who bear the name of Christ can see how God led us to Himself. How the searching of our hearts for the "something that was missing" was, in fact, the way He drew us to Him.
And now as I am older, I see that the reaching and avoiding of God that Lewis talks about applies to our daily walk with God also, as well as our original coming to Him.
We can still try to "avoid Him." But it is truly hard.
Remember Paul's sermon in Athens at Mars Hill?
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives all men life and breath and everything else....God did this so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us.
--Acts 17:24-25, 27
It would appear that, because God revealed Himself to us in His creation and sustains us through His providence, that we have an obligation to seek Him.
I have read that the word Paul uses for "reaching out for--or feeling after" is the same Greek word that Homer used in his story about Cyclops, the giant one-eyed monster who captured Odysseus and his men and held them captive in a cave.
Odysseus got the Cyclops drunk and then blinded him with a sharp stake. Then the prisoners tried to make their escape. And Cyclops began groping around and feeling his surroundings, intending to recapture Odysseus. That's the very word Paul uses to describe how God intends for us to "seek out God...and to reach for Him."
In our sin we are as blind as Cyclops. And Paul is saying that because of God's creation we have an obligation to feel after God and seek Him, even though we cannot see Him.
Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.
-- James 4:8
"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
I will be found by you," declares the LORD.
-- Jeremiah 29:13-14
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