New research shows how taking God’s word seriously adds to life’s meaning. Researchers found that those who read their Bibles once or twice a week experienced no benefit over those who never read their Bibles. At three times a week, minor gains were detected, but with at least four times a week, everything seemed to spike.

If God exists but wanted us to be perpetually in the dark, He could have remained silent. If God wanted to only reveal His will and His moral expectations, but not Himself, He could have. That’s what makes the idea of Christian revelation so remarkable. Not only that God exists, He wanted us to know. And He wanted us to know not only what He expected but Himself.  

Getting God right requires that we rely on what He has revealed. I asked Dr. Thaddeus Williams, professor at Biola University and author of the book Revering God, to describe the significance of God speaking to a truly Christian worldview:  

What do you think is the most repeated phrase in the entire Bible? It’s, “Thus says the Lord…” which clocks in at over 400 occurrences. The God of the Bible is not the stone-cold silent god of the ancient Greeks. Nor is He the stone-cold silent god of the ancient Stoics or Epicureans, too busy enjoying the amenities of divine bliss to bother with humanity. No. The God who exists is a God who speaks.   

It is all too easy to take God speaking for granted. In fact, this is something we can learn from one of the most famous atheists of the twentieth century, the French existentialist Albert Camus.

Camus reckoned honestly with the implications for humanity if no speaking God exists. “When it comes to man’s most basic questions of meaning and purpose,” Camus said, “the universe is silent.” We shout, “Why are we here?!” to the night sky, and the answer is crickets. 

We can admire Camus’ honesty when he says, “all human attempts to answer the questions of meaning are futile. … our very existence is absurd.” That absurdity of life in a silent cosmos was precisely the tough pill Camus offered in his best novels, The Plague, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus. 

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