Disappointment with God (extracts from the book by Philip Yancey)

Does it make a difference if God speaks to us clearly or not, or is seemingly absent (hidden) or present?

God spoke clearly to the Jews in the Old Testament (through Moses and prophets, etc). Did a clear word from God increase the likelihood of obedience? Apparently not. They marched when told to sit tight, fled in fear when told to march, fought when told to declare peace, declared peace when told to fight. Clear guidance became as much an affront to that generation as unclear guidance is to us.

I also noted a telling pattern in the Old Testament accounts: the very clarity of God’s will had a stunting effect on the Israelite’s faith. Why pursue God when He had already revealed Himself so clearly? Why step out in faith when God had already guaranteed the results? Why wrestle with the dilemma of conflicting choices when God had already resolved the dilemma? In short, why should the Israelites act like adults when they could act like children? And act like children they did, grumbling against their leaders, cheating on the strict rules governing manna, whining about every food or water shortage.

As I studied the story of the Israelites, I had second thoughts about crystal-clear guidance. It may serve some purpose – it may, for example, get a mob of just-freed slaves across a hostile desert – but it does not seem to encourage spiritual development. In fact, for the Israelites it nearly eliminated the need for faith at all; clear guidance sucked away freedom, making every choice a matter of obedience rather than faith.

Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love. The ten plagues in exodus show the power of God over a pharaoh. But the ten major rebellions recorded in Numbers show the impotence of power to bring about what God desired most – the love and faithfulness of His people. No pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence could make them trust and follow Him.

The fact that love does not operate according to the rules of power may help explain why God sometimes seems shy to use His power. He created us to love Him, but His most impressive displays of miracle – the kind we may secretly long for – do nothing to foster that love. Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life.

When the prophets complained loudly about God’s hiddenness, God didn’t argue. He agreed with them, and then explained why He was keeping His distance.

To Jeremiah, God expressed His disgust with what He saw in Israel: dishonest gain, the shedding of innocent blood, oppression, extortion. He covered His eyes, He said, refusing to even see hands spread out in a posture of prayer, for those hands were covered with blood.

To Ezekiel, God explained that once Israel’s rebellions had passed a certain point, He simply ‘gave them over’ to their sins. He withdrew, letting the people choose their own way and bear the consequences.

To Zechariah, He said, “When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I could not listen.’

God’s seeming slowness to act is a sign of mercy, not of weakness. His restraint marked an interlude of mercy, a time of probation he was granting Israel. Reluctantly, like a parent out of options, God resorted to punishment.

God within us

God has chosen us humans as the preferred way to reclaim His creation here on earth, through His Holy Spirit within us. He uses human instruments just as my brain uses the instruments of fingers and hand and wrist to write this sentence. That is the metaphor Paul used most frequently to describe Christ’s role in the world today: the Head of the body, directing its members to carry out His will.

No healthy parent wants a permanently dependent child on his hands. Good parents nudge their children from dependence toward freedom. Lovers, however, reverse the pattern. A lover possesses complete freedom, yet chooses to give it away and become dependent. In a healthy marriage, one submits to the other’s wishes voluntarily, out of love. God desires not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but the mature, freely given love of a lover.

The Bible presents the union of ordinary people with God’s Spirit as the supreme achievement of creation. God’s goal all along was to equip us to accomplish His will in the world.

God’s plan includes risks on both side. For us, it means risking our independence by committing to follow and invisible God who requires of us faith and obedience. For God, it means risking that we, like the Israelites, may never grow up; it means risking that we may never love Him. Evidently, He thought it a gamble worth taking.

A Trinity of Voices

Think of God’s plan as a series of Voices. The first Voice, thunderingly loud, had certain advantages. When the Voice spoke from the trembling mountain at Sinai, or when fire licked up the altar on Mount Carmel, no one could deny it. Yet, amazingly, even those who heard the Voice and feared it – the Israelites at Sinai and at Carmel, for example – soon learned to ignore it. Its very volume got in the way. Few of them sought out that Voice; fewer still persevered when the Voice fell silent.

The Voice modulated with Jesus, the Word made flesh. For a few decades the Voice of God took on the timbre and volume and rural accent of a county Jew in Palestine. It was a normal human voice, and though it spoke with authority, it did not cause people to flee. Jesus’ voice was soft enough to debate against, soft enough to kill.

After Jesus departed, the Voice took on new forms. On the day of Pentecost, tongues of fire fell on the faithful, and the church, God’s body, began to take shape. That last Voice is as close as breath, as gentle as a whisper. It is the most vulnerable Voice of all, and the easiest to ignore. The Bible says the Spirit can be ‘quenched’ or ‘grieved’ – try quenching Moses’ burning bush or the molten rocks of Sinai! Yet the Spirit is also the most intimate Voice. In our moments of weakness, when we do not know what to pray, the Spirit within intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. Those groans are the earthly pangs of birth, the labor pains of the new creation.

The Spirit will not remove all disappointment with God. The very titles given to the Spirit – Intercessor, Helper, Counselor, Comforter – imply there will be problems. But the Spirit is also ‘a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come,’ Paul said, drawing on an earthy metaphor from the financial world. The Spirit reminds us that such disappointments are temporary, a prelude to an eternal life with God. God deemed it necessary to restore the spiritual link before re-creating heaven and earth.

God seeks to reconcile, to love, and to be loved. And the Bible shows a clear progression in God’s efforts to break through to human beings without overwhelming them: from God the father who hovered parentally over the Hebrews, to God the Son who taught the will of God ‘from the bottom up’, rather than from above, and finally, to the Holy Spirit, who fills us with the literal presence of God. We who live now are not disadvantaged, but wonderfully privileged, for God has chosen to rely primarily on us to carry out His will on earth.

Why does God let evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive, on this planet? Why does He let us do slowly and blunderingly what he could do in an eyeblink?

He holds back for our sakes. Re-creation involves us; we are, in fact, at the centre of His plan. The motive behind all human history is to develop us, not God. Our very existence announces to the powers in the universe that restoration is under way. Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, and faith like Job’s reverberates throughout the universe.

Is God Unfair?

Life is unfair, not God. This is due to Satan, who lies to us, telling us that your faith is not strong enough, or God is teaching you something, or your disobedience caused it, or good things happen to good people, or give and do more, and you will be more blessed.

We tend to think that life should be fair because God is fair. But, God is not life, and if I confuse God with the physical reality of life, then I set myself up for a crashing disappointment. “If we develop a relationship with God apart from our life circumstances,” says Douglas, “then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down. We can learn to trust God despite all the unfairness of life.”

No-one is exempt from tragedy or disappointment – God Himself was not exempt., Jesus offered no immunity, no way out of the unfairness, but rather a way through it to the other side.

We need more than miracles to strengthen our faith. We need a new heaven and a new earth, and, until that time, unfairness will not disappear. The cross of Christ may have overcome evil, but it did not overcome unfairness.

Why doesn’t God explain?

God’s response to Job’s disappointment is “until you know a little more about running the physical universe (all of creation), don’t tell me how to run the moral universe (unfairness).” We don’t have a right to criticize God. We must learn to love and trust and be obedient to Him unconditionally because of who He is, and His unconditional love and sacrifice on the cross.

God is silent – He does not answer Job’s questions about suffering and unfairness because

1) Knowing the cause and reason doesn’t change anything. We probably know the answer anyway, and it still does not help us.

2) We are likely incapable of fully understanding with our current capabilities and limited perspective (in this physical realm, not the spiritual, unseen realm). We cannot and should not apply our simplistic rules to God. He is everywhere, and sees/experiences everything at the same time (omnipresent, omniscient) – we can never properly perceive or understand this. God does not ‘foresee’ anything – He simply ‘sees’ them happening, in an eternal present, because He sees everything at the same time – God exists outside of time, in another dimension than our limited reality.

Only at the end of time as we currently experience it, after we have attained God’s level of viewing, after every evil has been punished or forgiven, every illness healed, and the entire universe restored – only then will fairness reign. Until then, we will not know, and can only trust in a God who does know.

We remain ignorant of many details, not because God enjoys keeping us in the dark, but because we have not the faculties to absorb so much light. At a single glance God knows what the world is about and how history will end. But we time-bound creatures have only the most primitive manner of understanding: we can let time pass. Not until history has run its course will we understand how “all things work together for good.”

Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.

Is God Silent?

Paul Tournier said “where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.” Faith demands uncertainty, confusion. A guarantee would, after all, preclude faith.

There’s childlike faith, when a person swallows the impossible. Then there’s Job faith, like fidelity, or “hang on at any cost” faith, which is faith toughened through testing. Fidelity involves learning to trust that God reigns always and through all our unclear circumstances, and has not abandoned us, no matter how it may appear.

Human nature needs problems more than solutions, as we grow and learn, and grow closer to God and more dependent on Him when facing problems.

The big picture, with the whole universe as a backdrop, includes much activity that we never see. When we stubbornly cling to God in a time of hardship, or when we simply pray, more – much more – may be involved than we ever dream. It requires faith to believe that, and faith to trust that we are never abandoned, no matter how distant God seems.

I doubt whether God feels any obligation to prove Himself to us now. He did so many times in the Old Testament, and with finality in the person of Jesus. What further incarnations do we require of Him? I say this with great care, but I wonder if a fierce, insistent desire for a miracle – even a physical healing – sometimes betrays a lack of faith rather than an abundance of it. Such prayers may set conditions for God. When yearning for a miraculous resolution to a problem, do we make our loyalty to God contingent on whether He reveals Himself yet again in the seen world? If we insist on visible proofs of God, we may well prepare the way for a permanent state of disappointment. True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do His will.

We human beings instinctively regard the seen world as the ‘real’ world, and the unseen world as the ‘unreal’ world, but the Bible calls for almost the opposite. Through faith, the unseen world increasingly takes shape as the real world and sets the course for how we live in the seen world. Live for God, who is invisible, and not for other people, said Jesus in His words about the unseen world, or ‘the kingdom of heaven.’

Paul told the Corinthians that, in spite of incredible hardships, he did not ‘lose heart’: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

The Bible never belittles human disappointment, but it does add one key word: temporary. What we feel now, we will not always feel. Our disappointment is itself a sign, a kind of homesickness, for a home we have never visited but have never once stopped longing for.