CHARLO, New Brunswick, October 1, 2023 – So here’s the thing about God – he doesn’t stay where he’s not wanted.

If you don’t want God in your life, he’ll leave.

But here’s the other thing that’s just as important or perhaps even more important – after God leaves, demons rush in. There’s no such thing as a spiritual vacuum. Either God occupies and administers your spiritual real estate or the devil does. There’s no third option.

When demons take over spiritual real estate that used to be administered by God, things fall apart. Whether a nation or a city or family or an individual – once God is kicked out or willfully blocked from entering, there’s nowhere to go but down down down like the Titanic.

And that’s what we’re seeing now everywhere in the world, especially in former Christendom.

I’ve written before here and here and elsewhere about how kicking God out of a nation disastrously affects that country, but let’s look today at what happens to individuals when they turn from God or deny his existence altogether.

I’ll speak from personal experience because I lived as an atheist before I was born-again 24 years ago. I know what a life without God looks like from the outside and what it feels like from the inside.

From the outside, it can look fine. Prosperous, even. Happy, even. But this is an illusion that is very superficial.

Inside (that is, where no-one can see or when no-one’s looking), it’s a disaster zone. One thing after the other goes wrong – health-wise, relationship-wise, work-wise, study-wise. Not one day goes by when you don’t think about running away from it all, thinking that running away will solve your problems. Sometimes “running away” is called quitting a job or getting a divorce or dropping out of school or going on a drinking binge. Sometimes vacations are running away. But no matter what you do to try to shake off the constant feeling that you HATE YOUR LIFE (or just simply hate life), it follows you wherever you go. So you start therapy or you get a new lover or you try a new fitness regime or a new diet or a new hair style, or you learn a new skill or take up a hobby or buy a new car or laptop or phone, or you spend the day shopping or drinking – anything to take your mind off how hurt and angry you feel inside.

And then at some point you start thinking about killing yourself. This used to be known as suicide ideation, thinking that killing yourself will solve your problems. I actually tried it a few times (obviously not very successfully), but with me it was a classic case of a cry for help. When I was 18, I bought a doll that had a hangman’s noose around its neck. The doll was manufactured as an effigy of an executed woman. I hung this loathsome thing from my bedroom chandelier, horrifying everyone in my family, but I actually liked the doll. I felt sorry for it. I related to it.

People who’ve kicked God out of their lives may also become social justice warriors who spend most of their time obsessing over how victimized they are and who’s to blame for it (never themselves). This is probably the worst way to try to deal with life – obsessing over your problems and blaming others for them. This will, guaranteed, lead you directly into the hell of your own making. And in the process, you’ll become a demon-magnet. Remember the crazy guy in scripture who lived in a graveyard and ran around naked because no chains could hold him? He called himself “Legion” because there were so many demons in him. If he lived today (and trust me, he does), he’d go by the pronouns “they/them”. I became Legion as an atheist, only I kept my clothes on and wore a big smile, so no-one knew what was inside me.

And here’s the thing about people who’ve rejected God and are sorely in need of spiritual help – they’ll turn down whatever spiritual help is offered them. Oh, they’ll reach out eventually for the kind of help they think they need, but the kind of help they really need they won’t even consider. It will repulse them. Again, I speak from personal experience. As an atheist, the older I got and the worse my life grew in every conceivable way, the less I thought of looking to God for a solution to my problems.

It’s not that people didn’t try to help me; they certainly did. And it’s not that people were unkind to me; they certainly weren’t. But offers of help and gestures of kindness didn’t address the root of my problem, which was that I was demon-infested from unrepented sin. So while the kindnesses might have numbed my pain in the short term, they ended up prolonging and ultimately worsening my spiritual agony. In other words, the help the world gave me didn’t help me in the way I needed to be helped. The help the world gave me only made things worse.

Sin and repentance are words that are rarely heard these days, even among Christians. Most Christians blame the devil for their problems. They claim to be “under spiritual attack” and beg for people to pray for them, when what they actually need is to get down on their face before God and repent. They also need to forgive whatever they’re holding against others. Grudges and unrepented sin will sooner or later land you in hell on Earth, followed by hell in Hell. If Christians don’t even know to repent and forgive when they have problems, how can we expect unbelievers to do so?

Individuals who turn from God or try to live without God are on a fast track to perdition. There’s no other way to put it and the odds are totally against them. Their plight reminds me of the scene in the movie Titanic, where Rose gives up hope of rescue and lays down to die. She’s freezing to death floating on a piece of wood in the middle of the North Atlantic, surrounded by a sea of bobbing corpses propped up by their unaptly named life vests. Like the corpses around her, Rose’s skin is ashen, her lips are black, and her hair has frozen into icicles. She’s a goner if ever there was one.

As she drifts in and out of consciousness, she hears a voice calling from a distance. At first, she ignores the voice as background babble that has nothing to do her. But when the voice that she’s been ignoring starts to fade away, something inside her wrenches back to life and she finds the strength to blow the whistle attached to her now very aptly named life vest. Her whistle blows are faint and feeble at first, but grow stronger and stronger until the voice responds eagerly and a rescue boat appears.

I remember this scene when I think about people who’ve all but given up on life. I think about how they ignore God’s rescue call but God keeps calling anyway. As long as there’s still time and a sliver of hope, God keeps calling.

So for the individuals who’ve kicked God out of their lives or who deny his existence altogether, we who know and love God dare not give up on them. We dare not give up. If it’s too late for them and they’re beyond his help, God will let us know, but as long as there’s still any hope – however faint – we dare not give up on them. We never know when their desire to live will roar back to life and they’ll finally open themselves to God.