Let me explain what I mean when I say we live without God. First, we live life without a sense of God’s presence. We might feel some spiritual or divine connection when we’re on top of a mountain or on other rare or special occasions, but most of us, most of the time, don’t feel any connection to God. When we’re sitting in history class, or eating dinner in the dining hall, or playing soccer, or watching a movie with our friends, we don’t feel like God is around. It is this aspect of life without God that is God’s problem. If the only reason we live without God is because God hasn’t introduced himself, so to speak, oh well. There’s nothing to for us to do about it.

And yet there’s more to it than that. In addition to living without a sense of God’s presence, we live our lives as if God doesn’t exist. Even if we theoretically believe in God, we make decisions without reference to God. We’re like my daughter Penny. Much of her life right now is about “good choices” and “bad choices.” Good choices get a thumbs up. Bad choices, thumbs down. Good choice: gentle hands. Bad choice: pulling hair. Good choice: eating peas. Bad choice: spitting peas at her mother. You get the point. We’re a lot like Penny. Even if we are making good choices, morally upright choices, it often isn’t because we’re thinking about how God made the universe and how we want to live in accordance with those moral rules in order to please God. We’re just doing the thing that feels right to us, or the thing that will get us praise from other people, or the thing that will cause the least difficulty. Often, what feels right to us is perfectly fine and good. Other times, what feels right to us hurts other people and sometimes what feels right to us even ends up hurting ourselves.

When I was in high school, on the outside, I was a very good person. I was nice to people who didn’t have friends. I obeyed the rules of study hall and lights out. I obeyed my parents and teachers. Etcetera. But I can also remember getting to boarding school and having a lot of questions about God. I wondered about other religions. I wondered about whether the Bible was true. I wondered whether it was worth it to be religious when all my friends didn’t believe. And I remember one night sitting at my desk and pulling out my Bible because I wanted to try to figure it out. I heard footsteps in the hallway, and my heart started to pound. I threw my Bible in the bottom drawer of my desk and pretended to be doing homework. The person in the hallway walked right by, but I left the Bible in the drawer. I decided to navigate high school on my own. I let my questions sit in that drawer for a couple of years. I decided to live my nice, morally upright life, without God.

So we can live without the experience of God. We can live a morally upright life without reference to God, which is kind of a passive way of living without God. And we can also live in a more active way without God. We can live in rebellion against God. It is active rebellion against God whenever we disobey the moral law, whether that’s by talking about our friends behind their back or yelling at our parents or lying or abusing our bodies. We actively rebel and we also actively refuse to acknowledge God as God, as the one who created us, as the one who is in control. Life without God is not forced upon us. It is something we choose, even though it is harmful, to ourselves and to others around us.