Atheists often say that if God showed Himself, they would believe in Him. Let us for a moment run with their belief that God hasn’t actually revealed Himself, and let’s see if they would consider the following manifestations enough for them to believe that God exists.

Imagine there was a guy. This guy comes to the public scene, worldwide. Everybody knows about him. At one point, however, he’s fatally wounded. Except, he eventually recovers, miraculously; practically coming back from the dead. This is such an astounding event that the entire world ends up going after him, placing their trust in him as The Great Worldwide Leader, for the destiny of the whole planet.

“Ok,” you might be saying, “certainly something really impressive must have happened for the whole world to go after this man, especially when we consider the exceeding levels of scepticism that today’s world has towards great political figures”. But you might also be saying: “it’s a still a bit lacking”, in terms of evidence for God, that is.

Maybe. But I haven’t finished, anyway.

Like I said, The Great Worldwide Leader eventually rises to global power, and starts cracking down on those the whole world agreed — certainly — were the bad people. He makes the world a better and cleaner place in roughly three years. No one in history even comes close to such an incredible achievement. He’s so good, so startling, so awe-inspiring, that everybody starts worshipping him.

It’s at this point that a second man comes on the scene: he’s a close friend of The Great Worldwide Leader. We’ll call him The Great Friend. He has the right to exercise the full authority of his friend, and he’s the one actually encouraging and pushing the world to worship The Great Worldwide Leader. What makes The Great Friend so effective in doing this is that he — wait for it!—can actually perform great signs and wonders.

Here are some of them.

In order to impress the world, The Great Friend made fire rain from the sky, worldwide. He then gets the people to build a giant statue of The Great Worldwide Leader, that everyone may bow down to his image. That isn’t that impressive, one may think, except for one little detail: once the people finished building the image of The Great Worldwide Leader, The Great Friend exercised his power to make the statue come alive, so that it would actually speak the words of The Great Worldwide Leader, and would also kill all those who refused to worship him!

So, what do you think? Well, if you believe that’s the kind of “signs” you have been looking for, congratulations: you’ve just believed in the Antichrist.

Now mark these words: it is not about the signs, or the wonders, or the power. It never was. It’s about the truth, and whether or not you are prepared to accept what it entails: that you are a rebel against the one true God. That you know this already, yet pretend not to. That God would be right in condemning you for your lawlessness. That you have been using the “I would believe in God if He showed me a great sign” mantra as an excuse not to believe. That you are lost and without hope, unless someone saves you. And that someone is Jesus Christ, who died for your sins, and rose again. Publicly, in front of plenty of eyewitnesses. That same Jesus Christ said:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” (John 3:16–18)

(inspired by Chapter 13 of the book of Revelation)