“I believe in God the Father Almighty.”

(Genesis 1:1; The Apostle’s Creed)

In these days of violent political revolution through which we are living, strange things often happen. Not long ago in the Far East, a prisoner from jail was brought in and stood before the police. The first question the police captain asked the prisoner was this: “What do you believe about God?”

Doesn’t that seem to be a queer question for the police to ask a political prisoner? “What do you believe about God?” Wouldn’t it be a question more appropriate from a church session to a new member or from a church court examining a candidate for the ministry? But in these revolutionary times this is not an irrelevant question and its being put to prisoners by the police is becoming increasingly frequent.

Really this is the sort of question life is asking every one of us every day: “What do you believe about God?” How would you describe the God you worship? How is your belief influencing your thinking and acting, your working and playing, your suffering and your rejoicing?

We often hear our times described as an era of militant atheism. Everyone knows the communists have been hard at it for decades trying to cleanse men’s minds from that debilitating superstition — belief in God. “Atheism is today the officially declared and zealously propagated creed of countries containing at least a third of the population of the world. That fact is momentous enough. Nothing, however, could be more mistaken and misleading than to contrast a godless East with a religious West. Let us remember that Marxist atheism is a Western product.”

An open letter to a college chaplain printed recently in a popular American Religious journal claimed that: “Most learned persons today (which includes some university and college faculty members) do not believe in the God portrayed by Christianity, by Islam, by Hinduism, or by any other major religious faith.”

Yet, in the face of all the avowed and militant atheism of our day, at home and abroad, a very strong case can be made to prove the point that no man is ever an atheist, that atheism is in the end an illusion.

For whatever a man believes in as the supreme value of his life, that is his god. Whatever he trusts and serves is the deity of his life. Therefore, there are no atheists, only worshippers of the true God or idolaters. The communists are the worst of idolaters. Like the emperor worshipers of ancient Rome they have deified the state, and made as corrupt and cruel and changeable a monster, as political organization is their supreme reality. No wonder their pagan idol to whom they have ascribed such power and given such devotion should act with cruel immorality and cause what someone has called planned international confusion.

Men live for something, if not for the next world, at least for their next meal. If you live to eat, then your god is your stomach and your actions are based upon your belief that this is the real essence of life for you and that belief is your creed.

Studdert Kennedy has said that the drunkard’s real creed is: “I believe in Alcohol Almighty, Lord of all good living, bestower of true peace. I believe in the fiery spirit that can give courage to the coward and make the dumb man speak; that soothes all sorrows, dries all tears, and gives the weary rest.” That is his real creed, and, says Kennedy, “his actions are based upon it, in fact, his nose is colored by it.”

Most people have not one god, but many. It is not that they do not believe in any one god, but that with characteristic human inconsistency they believe first in one god and then another. A writer for the New Yorker confided in the pre-Christmas season that one girlfriend of his — aged eight — had only two items on her Christmas list, a Bible and a deck of cards.

Yes, the most popular creed even today is the one with which the human race began — the creed of polytheist. Men still believe, as St. Paul found the Athenians believing long ago, in many gods. First they serve the wine god Bacchus, then they turn to the worship of the god of lust, Venus, then they prove their devotion to Mars on a thousand battlefields. But the creed of the polytheist dooms him to destruction. It always has. It always will. As our Lord said, he is like a house divided against itself. The polytheist becomes a split personality. Finally he has no true self. He comes to the place where he can no longer say — “I believe in anything,” not because there is nothing left to believe in, but because he has no true unified “I”, with which to believe.

Bliss in living comes only to the man who has a monotheistic creed — who says: “I believe in the One God.” For a while a man may find some satisfaction with any sort of God. He can make money, fame, art, pleasure, his god and be happy for a season, but only for a season. It won’t last. Man has a many sided nature and he can fool part of his nature all of the time and the whole of his nature some of the time but he can’t fool all of his nature all of the time.” If his god is not big enough sooner or later part of a man’s nature will turn sour on him and rebel.

If I knew of a bigger and a better monotheistic creed than that one which states: “I believe in God, the Father, Almighty, maker of Heaven and earth,” I would recommend it to you, but I don’t.

Man is incurably a believer. A creed of some sort he must have. The only choice before him is the content of his creed.

But the ultimate essence of the Christian creed is not in the correct forming of the words, but in the genuine committing of life. That is in affirming with the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty” to not only give intellectual assent to the proposition that there may well exist an eternal superior being in nature as described and revealed in Jesus Christ, but to also live as if all this were so — to trust in the supreme reality above self and all else — to hazard one’s very life up to the hilt for all those earthly causes consistent with such a God.

In J. H. Oldman’s fine phrase — “Every man finds himself mysteriously pitch-forked into a particular situation” at a particular point in the stream of the world’s life. The particular station from which a man must view the world and act in it has been irrevocably determined for him. He must put his trust in the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and act accordingly.

The Second Commandment was given the ancient Hebrew people to prevent their objectifying God: “Thou shalt not make unto Thee any graven image.” Bonhoeffer tells us in his letters from prison that he was repeatedly impressed with the Biblical record of the Jews refusing ever to use even the name of God in addressing deity. Our great danger, even in formulating our creeds, and positioning our belief in God is that we also should objectify God, believing in Him only as written down in a book, captured in a creed, confined in a church constitution.

“We have to learn to think of God as present and active in every situation, meeting us and challenging us, accepting all the factors which constitute the situation, respecting both the processes of His own creation and human freedom and spontaneity, and continuously and creatively directing the whole to the fulfillment of His purpose for the good of man.

“When our ways are committed to God, everything is seen in a new light. The facts may be the same, but they are suffused with a new meaning.” Karl Heim quotes a letter from a German sailor who wrote to his mother: “If you should hear that our cruiser has been sunk and no one has been saved, do not weep. The sea in which my body sinks is also the hollow of the hand of my Savior, from which nothing can separate me.”

Emil Brunner has said that: “To let Jesus Christ influence us is what the Bible calls faith. The image of God appears whenever we allow Jesus Christ to influence us.”

For every one of us, the awesome crisis of a correct creed is put pictorially and perpetually before us in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. There are the two well-known scenes and the two well-known characters. The first scene, laid on earth, shows Dives the rich man dining sumptuously every day, callously unconcerned for the misery of the sick beggar, Lazarus, at his very doorstep.

The second scene, in the other world, reveals Lazarus in heavenly bliss in Abraham’s bosom, and Dives in torment in hell imploring Abraham to send Lazarus either to hell to minister to his misery or as a messenger back to earth to warn his five brothers of the terrible urgency of right decisions on earth at any moment of existence.

But Dives is told that the first is impossible because there is a great gulf fixed between heaven and hell and there is no traffic to and from; and the second is unthinkable, because his brothers have Moses and the prophets to warn them and they would not listen to any other, even if he rose from the dead to bring such tidings.

Though every one of us may play here or hereafter the part of Dives or Lazarus, the principal characters for us to set our eyes upon in this moment are the five brothers of Dives. It is these for whom the parable is told. You and I are those brothers. We are still in the land of the living. There is yet time for us to decide.

What will come to make us really believe in God, in the Biblical sense of believing — intellectual assent and moral commitment — what? What will God have to do to wake us up — bring us to our senses — to make a decision for Christ and His church and begin to live for HIM? What?

We need not expect a messenger from heaven, a celestial vision — no angel visitant, no opening skies.” We have what every man has — the word become flesh, Jesus Christ.

“Inevitably the time comes when all decisions have been made. Here, God is still calling us and we are the ones to speak. But one day God will open the books and He will be the one to speak. Now the word of invitation is heard, then the word of Judgment will be sounded. Here, Jesus Christ is asking us whether we will have him as our one consolation in life and death. But one day this pleading, comforting question will cease to be asked. The mercy of God is boundless, but it is not offered indefinitely. Here we are still living by the grace of God and mercy of Christ; the sentence is still punctuated with a colon. We still have a reprieve; a season of grace; we still have time to live and turn back home; but one day comes finality, period.”

“This night thy soul shall be required of Thee.” Who are you? Today, Today.