Hidden God

I know it has been quiet here for a few weeks. I simply have been swamped with book donations in the library that needed sorting and processing. I was almost done with the 7 boxes of books that came in just before we headed for Alabama when 2 huge boxes of books appeared one day last week. No notification of who donated them. I have a pretty good guess though. Most of them are non-fiction, many about Israel, some on prophecy. One little book was a Haggadah for a Messianic Jewish Seder. God’s timing can be remarkable. Our retirement community was putting on a Seder supper last night led by a Messianic Jew. I processed this little book and put it in the hallway display Monday afternoon. Somebody picked it up right away.

In the evenings I have been reading Mike Erre’s Astonished: Recapturing the Wonder, Awe, and Mystery of Life With God. I had loaded it on my ipad when it appeared in the free Kindle books list several months ago.  It is well worth spending money on though.

He talks about the status of current American Christianity. We like to shrink-wrap God into doctrines, traditions, institutions to make God less mysterious to us. Yet it is the mystery of God that leads to worship. We try to fit Him into labels and categories, to fit Him into our boxes, but He is a God of surprises. Jesus was not what the religious people were expecting in a Messiah. They missed out because He did not fit into their boxes. We miss out sometimes, too, because we fail to look for God with eyes of faith and expectancy outside of our boxes.  Modern Christianity has become the means to give God structure, shape and understandability, but faith requires us to live with mystery and tension and paradox.

Which brings us to the thought that we experience periods when God seems hidden to us. It is true that God sometimes has to prepare us for His moving in our lives. The timing isn’t right for Him to reveal certain things. However, we are often the reason we don’t see God working. There is trouble with our heart (do we really want to see?) or our heads (how we look at the world). We want to see more of God, but in manageable doses. We don’t want disruption to our perceived comfortable and safe lives. We may be hanging on to certain sinful behaviors and thoughts that we know God wants gone.

Desolation (the felt absence of God) is as much a gift to God’s people as consolation. Desolation draws us deeper so that we pursue God for His own sake, not the benefits we might receive. It matures our love for Him. Do we want true relationship which means going through the hard times together with God or are we wanting a Blessor who imparts gifts according to our preferences and agenda?

In our culture we view life with sacred/secular dualism. Sometimes God’s presence and work go unrecognized because we only expect to see Him in what we designate as our sacred places and times, e.g., in church, during prayer and devotional reading. Whenever we predetermine how or where or when He will reveal Himself, we run the risk of missing Him.  We fail to see that God can and does meet us in the everyday, the ordinary, and the common. He is in the mundane as well as the dramatic. Our culture hungers for the sensational and extraordinary and is blind to God’s work in the ordinary events of our lives.

We can also see His working through the practice of remembrance. We need to look back and reflect on His presence and activity in our lives and the lives of others. We can read signs of what God is like by spending time in His creation rather than being constantly involved in the busyness of life. It is our own “blindness” that keeps us from recognizing God’s presence in all of life.

There is so much in this book. The nature of lament; discussion of faith and surrender; what real treasure is and how what we treasure causes fear or confidence. I highly encourage you to read and reflect.

 

 

 

 

Who’s Filling the Bowl?

Questions about suffering and loss and how they fit into God’s will enter our minds as we see what fills our beggar’s bowls. I have mostly operated under the idea that suffering is a consequence of living in a fallen world and/or a consequence of individual sin.

Trusting God by Jerry Bridges states that both calamities and good things come from God. He quotes Saint Augustine who said, “Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen: He either permits it to happen or He brings it about Himself.”

I feel bewildered to think of God directly causing suffering. How can He be good and loving if He wills pain for His people? Yet, His plan of salvation included suffering for His Son.

Authors like Philip Yancey try to distinguish among 3 types of “wills” in God’s plan. 1) Intentional (goodness); 2) circumstantial; and 3) ultimate. The Bible teaches God is good and His intent is good so the ultimate must also be good. God uses circumstances to serve His ultimate will. The ultimate will is His own glory and the good of His people.

According to Bridges, all occasions of pain and sorrow are under the absolute control of God. People’s sinful intents and actions serve the sovereign purpose of God, but He does not make them sin. They make the choices. God is not the author of sin.

John Piper in the pdf file available on the internet titled Disability and the Sovereign Goodness of God discusses the man born blind in John 9. Jesus does not focus on the cause of the man’s blindness but on the purpose for the blindness, i.e., to demonstrate the glory of God, in this case thru healing. The explanation of the blindness does not lie in the cause but in the purpose.

Suffering can only have value and meaning in relation to God’s plan.

Bridges says the natural response to adversity is to seek relief, but our greatest need is not freedom from adversity, but freedom from the penalty of sin. If God’s love was sufficient for my greatest need, I need to trust it is sufficient for my lesser needs. Trust means not resigning ourselves to pain and heartbreak, but accepting it as part of God’s purposes and plan.

Most of the writings on suffering by evangelical Christians offer words of advice. Don’t dwell on the why, but focus on how God redeems the pain and uses it for ultimate good. Hard to do because sometimes the suffering lasts a long time, even a lifetime. Often we cannot foresee the outcome, the way God uses adversity.

No matter how limited our understanding of suffering, we do know God is always present with us and sees us thru our adversities. We have to quietly rest in Him and trustingly ingest the hard-to-swallow rations that fill our bowls (lives). I confess when I see no relief, I often fall into resignation. Let’s try to move to thanksgiving that God does have redemptive purposes.

Endarkenment

I was surprised to find Barbara Brown Taylor featured on the cover of Time magazine’s April 28th issue. I mentioned her in an earlier post re her book Leaving Church.

The article points out that we seek enlightenment but shun darkness. Indeed, enlightenment is a goal of many religions. Darkness in the Bible is at times identified with evil, sin, spiritual blindness. Taylor says darkness holds more lessons than light and that contrary to what many of us believe, it is sometimes in the bleakest void that God is nearest. “New life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”

“Turning in to darkness, instead of away from it, is the cure for a lot of what ails me. Because I have a deep need to be in control of things, to know where I am going, to be sure of my destination, to get there efficiently, to have all the provisions I need, to do it all without help—and you can’t do any of that in the dark.”

Some of her thoughts tie in with Belden  Lane’s Ravished by Beauty, his examination of centuries of Reformed theology’s perspective on how nature reflects and communicates to us about God. Some of his observations:

“One experiences God in loss even more powerfully than in attainment.”

“One should never automatically assume adversity to be a sign of God’s punishment. God’s sending of a ‘sea of troubles’ to heighten the longing of the faithful was a mystery that captivated the Puritan mind.”

“A God of wild splendor is found in nature’s dark side as well as its lightness and beauty. Encountering God means facing head-on the unexplainable mysteries of a world filled with pain.”

“Nature serves as a school of affliction as well as a school of desire [to experience the transcendent God]. It disrupts the ego, redirects misplaced longings, and teaches radical trust.”

In darkness we must trust God’s goodness and redemptive powers. Whether our bowls (lives) are filled with darkness, light, natural beauty, or natural disaster, He is in control. He sees what we cannot see in darkness as our begging bowls fill. 

A Room Called Remember

This has been a topsy turvy week, just like the weather which goes from cold to hot to cold again as showers pass through. Yesterday, I felt happy as I finally completed several pending items and loose ends got tied up. There were even a few nice surprises. Today was one of those days that started out with pouring rain, the newspaper not delivered, a problem with a credit card bill, several not-on-the agenda tasks awaiting in the retirement library and so on. However, I reminded myself of Frederick Buechner’s sermon titled A Room Called Remember.

 

Buechner has a dream that he is looking for the same room in a hotel that he loved when he was there before, but he couldn’t recall the name or location of the room. He had felt so comfortable in that room that he wanted to repeat the experience. The hotel clerk tells him the name of the room is Remember. At this, Buechner was startled awake.

 

He goes on to say that this remembering is beyond spontaneous memories popping into our minds. This is purposeful meditative remembering. This is realizing that though most of the time we failed to see it, we were not alone. David in the Psalms exclaims “Remember the wonderful works that God has done.” David had many failings in his past, but he knew to remember God was with him and brought him through them. That is a wonderful work.

 

Buechner says : “There has never been a time past when God wasn’t with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom …; To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift. Remember those moments in our lives when Christ came to us in countless disguises through people who one way or another strengthened us, comforted us, healed us, judged us by the power of Christ alive within them.”

 

By entering the Room of Remember we receive hope that what God has done in the past, He will continue to do. Hope for the future. Hope to get beyond a bad day and a bad attitude and rest in His peace. Excuse me. Time for me to do some more remembering.

 

 

Songs In The Night

About 2 weeks ago, George Beverly Shea died. Though he is most closely identified with the Billy Graham revival campaigns, in the 1940’s Mr. Shea sang for the radio program “Songs in the Night” which came out of Western Springs, Illinois. That program seems to have been named for its evening time slot, but probably also alluded to the phrase Songs in the Night or Songs of the Night found in the Bible. Depending where it is found in the Bible, it can have varied meaning.

 

In Isaiah 30:29 the Israelites are told that when God passes judgment on their enemies, they will have songs in the night as when you keep the festival. These are party songs, songs of celebration. However, usually the phrase in the Bible talks of dark times, times of trial and trouble.

 

In Psalm 77:4-6, David says that he is so troubled that he cannot even speak, but he will remember his song in the night and meditate with his heart. Psalm 63:6-7 tells us David will remember God on his bed and meditate in the night watches for God has been his help. Psalm 42:8 declares that the Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime and God’s song will be with David in the night. Ah, now it is God’s song, not David’s song, and not our song. We are not alone. Job 35:10 asks “Where is God my maker, Who gives songs in the night?” He is there with us as we open ourselves to His reminders of His love and care. We do not have to create peaceful slumber through our own efforts. He will send the songs of comfort.

 

I have 5 CDS of instrumental hymns put out by Our Daily Bread several years ago. My favorite is Hymns of the Night. What kind of songs belong to the night? O the Deep Deep Love of Jesus; Wonderful Peace; Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus; The Love of God; Near to the Heart of God; and others in that vein.

 

To finish, here is the final refrain of one of Virginia Ely’s poems:

 

There’s rest for those who are weary;

There’s joy for those who are sad;

There’s peace for those who are troubled;

His presence makes lonely hearts glad.

But the marvelous gifts of His mercy

Which quicken the soul with delight

And lift from the heart every burden

Are the songs He sends in the night.