“Seek the Lord while He may be found;
call upon Him while He is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that He may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.
For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are My ways higher than your ways
and My thoughts than your thoughts."
If you ask an unbeliever, "What is two plus two?", he will respond, "Four." Is it ever anything other than four? Of course not, he will say. So ask now, "Where does the sun rise?" "In the east," he will tell you. Does it always rise in the east? Never the west, or appear in the center of the sky? "How silly!" he will probably say.
Yet, he will play the lottery, expecting that luck will eventually pay off for him. Or ask the origins of the world around him, and he will unthinkingly respond,"Chance." And he will say it without any consciousness of the logical tension between that belief and his earlier statements.
My point is this: the world operates according to laws, predictable laws. That is because it was created by a God of laws. The very predictability of the universe is a consistent evidence of the hand of God. However, the unbeliever covers his eyes at that evidence, even as he admits the particular examples that he himself acknowledges.
This is what Paul talks about in Romans 1:18-22, especially 18b, "by their unrighteousness [they] suppress the truth." To acknowledge the God Who made them would force the unbeliever to acknowledge that he is in rebellion against Him, and deserving of His judgment. That he can never permit! And it is this that the Christian confronts in apologetics and evangelism.
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