Do Unbelievers Seek God?

People all around us are seeking peace, meaning, and eternal life—but that doesn’t mean they’re seeking the Lord. Today, R.C. Sproul distinguishes between those who seek God and those who seek the benefits God provides.

I hear Christian people come to me all the time, and they say, “Hey, my friend, Sally, or Bill, he’s not a Christian, but he’s seeking. He’s searching for God.” On the basis of their experience, they’re convinced that this person is seeking for God. Now, their experience tells them that people are seeking for God. The New Testament tells us, he’s not seeking for God, that he’s running from God. Now, which is right? Is God playing some kind of hide-and-go-seek game with man? Again, is God hiding behind the cloud somewhere, and it’s left to man to pursue with all of his might, and all of his strength, and all of his intellectual genius to try to discover the hidden God? Is that the picture you get of the nature of God biblically? Who’s doing the hiding? When Adam walks into the garden, is it God that runs and hides behind a bush?

But why do we make that mistake of saying that people are seeking after God? Here’s where the error comes in. It’s an error in inference. It’s a deductive error. We see people all around us searching for peace, searching for relief from guilt, searching for meaning and purpose to their existence, seeking for the hope of eternal life, seeking for the power of love and of righteousness, and of all of these things, which I would call the benefits of God, the things that only God can provide me.

And we see people all around us seeking for the benefits of God, and we make the gratuitous assumption that therefore they’re seeking for God. But the fundamental sin of man, biblically, is that man wants the benefits that only God can give, but he does not want God Himself. And that the essence of human sin is the quest for the benefits of God outside of submission and obedience to God. Don’t make that error in assuming that because people are seeking peace, because people are seeking happiness, because they’re seeking eternal life, they’re seeking God. No. They’re not seeking God, because God terrifies them.