Disappointment With God
Disappointment with God - Phillip Yancy
for many people there is a large gap between what they expect from their Christian faith and what they actually experience.
People feel disappointment, betrayal, and often guilt.
Disappointment occurs when the actual experience of something falls far short of what we anticipate.
God Within The Shadows
Hearing the Silence
Where is God in our emotional pain? Why does he so often disappoint us?
Can God be trusted? If so many small prayers go unanswered, what about the big ones?
Struggles seem almost to mock the triumphant slogans about God’s love and personal concern that I often hear in Christian churches. Yet no one is immune to the downward spiral of disappointment ... first comes disappointment, then a seed of doubt, then a response of anger or betrayal. We begin to question whether God is trustworthy, whether we can really stake our lives on him.
Some Christians I know would reject the phrase ‘disappointment with God out of hand ... the Christian life is a life of victory and triumph ... any other state simply indicates a lack of faith.
Up In Smoke
How can you have a ‘personal relationship’ if you’re not sure the other person even exists?
Richard was feeling a pain as great as any that a human being experiences: the pain of betrayal. The pain of a lover who wakes up and suddenly realises it’s all over. He had staked his life on God, and God had let him down.
The Questions No One Asks Aloud
Does God really care? If so, why won’t he reach down and fix the things that go wrong - at least some of them?
Three large questions about God that seem to lurk just behind the thicket of our feelings:
1. Is God unfair?
2. Is God silent? - What kind of Father is he? Does he enjoy watching us fall on our face? If God has a wonderful plan for my life, why doesn’t he tell me what that plan is?
3. Is God hidden? It seems as if God deliberately hides himself, even from people who seek him out.
True atheists do not, I presume, feel disappointed in God. They expect nothing and receive nothing. But those who commit their lives to God, no matter what, instinctively expect something in return. Are those expectations wrong?
What If?
“If only”, Richard had said. If only God solves those three problems, then faith would flourish like flowers in springtime. Wouldn’t it?
Exodus described the very world Richard wanted! It showed God stepping into human history almost daily. He acted with utter fairness and spoke so that everyone could hear. Behold, he even made himself visible!
If God has the power to act fairly, speak audibly and appear visibly, why then does he seem so reluctant to intervene today? Perhaps the record of the Israelites in the wilderness contained a clue.
Question: Is God unfair? Why doesn’t he consistently punish evil people and reward good people? Why do awful things happen to people good and bad with no discernible pattern?
Imagine a world designed so that we experience a mild jolt of pain with every sin and a tickle of pleasure with every act of virtue.
The OT records a ‘behaviour modification’ experiment almost that blatant. God’s covenant with the Israelites. God resolves to reward and punish his people with strict, legislated fairness ... dependent on one condition that the Israelites had to follow the laws he laid down.
The results of this covenant based on a ‘fair’ system of rewards and punishments. Within fifty years the Israelites had disintegrated into a state of utter anarchy.
Years later when NT authors looked back on that history, they did not hold up the covenant as an exemplary model of God relating to his people with absolute consistency and fairness. Rather they said the old covenant served as an object lesson, demonstrating that human beings were incapable of fulfilling a contract with God. It seemed clear to them that a new covenant (testament) with God was needed, one based on forgiveness and grace.
Question: Is God silent? If he is so concerned about our doing his will, why doesn’t he reveal that will more plainly?
How do we know whether what we have heard is truly a word from God?
God simplified matters of guidance, I discovered when the Israelites camped in the Sinai wilderness. Should we pack up our tent and move today or stay put? For the answer, an inquisitive Israelite need only glance at the cloud over the tabernacle.
God set up other ways, like the casting of lots and the Urim and Thummim, to directly communicate his will, but most issues were pre-decided. He had spoken his will for the Israelites in a set of rules, codified into 613 laws that covered the complete range of behaviour from murder to boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk. Few people complained about fuzzy guidance in those days.
But did a clear word from God increase the likelihood of obedience? Apparently not.
I also noticed a telling pattern in the OT accounts: the very clarity of God’s will had a stunning effect on the Israelites’ faith. Why pursue God when he had already revealed himself so clearly? Why step out in faith when God had already guaranteed the results?... in short, why should the Israelites act like adults when they could act like children?
As I studied the story of the Israelites, I had second thoughts about crystal-clear guidance. If may serve some purpose ... 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.
Question: Is God hidden? Why doesn’t he simply show up sometime, visibly, and dumbfound the sceptics once and for all?
We want proof, evidence, a personal appearance, so that the God we have heard about becomes the God we see.
What we hunger for happened once. For a time God did show up in person, and a man spoke to him face to face as he might speak with a friend ... God and Moses
God did not play hide-and-seek with the Israelites; they had every proof of his existence you could ask for. But astonishingly - and I could hardly believe this result, even as I read it - God’s directness seemed to produce the very opposite of the desired effect... God’s visible presence did nothing to improve lasting faith.
Would a burst of miracles nourish faith? Not the kind of faith God seems interested in, evidently. The Israelites give ample proof that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.
I came away from my study of them both surprised and confused: surprised to learn how little difference it made in people’s lives when three major reasons for disappointment with God - unfairness, silence, and hiddenness - were removed; confused by the questions stirred up about God’s actions on earth. Has he changed? Has he pulled back, withdrawn?
The Source
Simply reading the Bible I encountered not a misty vapour but an actual Person... deep emotions. Again and again God is shocked by the behaviour of human beings ... I know, I know, the word “anthropomorphism” is supposed to explain all those humanlike characteristics. But surely the images God ‘borrows’ from human experience point to an even stronger reality.
I marvelled at how much God lets human beings affect him.
These three questions about disappointment with God are put into a new light. They are not puzzles awaiting a solution. Rather, they are problems of relationship between human beings and a God who wants desperately to love and be loved by us.
People disappointed with God focus on the human point of view. When we ask our questions - Why is God unfair? Silent? Hidden? - we’re really asking, Why is God unfair to me, silent with me, hidden from me.
But what is God’s point of view? Why does he seek contact with human beings in the first place? What is he pursuing in us, and what interferes with that pursuit?
After two weeks of studying the Bible, I had a strong sense that God doesn’t care so much about being analysed. Mainly, he wants to be loved.
What does it feel like to be God?
Making Contacts
The Father
In the beginning, the very beginning, there was no disappointment. Only joy.
Adam and Eve
Gen 1 does not tell the whole story of creation, however. To understand what follows, you must create something for yourself.
Every creator learns that creation involves a kind of self-limiting. You produce something that did not exist before, yes, but only by ruling out other options along the way. No artist, no matter how great, escapes this limitation. Michelangelo knew that no trompe l’oeil would give the Sistine Chapel ceiling the three-dimensional reality he had achieved with his sculptures. When he decided on a medium, paint on plaster, he limited himself.
When God created, he invented the media as he went, calling into being what had existed only in his imagination, and along with every free choice came a limitation. He chose a world of time and space, a “medium” with peculiar restrictions: first A happens, then B happens, and then C. God who sees future, past, and present all at once, selected sequential time as an artist selects a canvas and palette, and his choice imposed limits we have lived with ever since.
On the sixth day of creation, man and woman came into being, two creatures unlike all others. God designed them in his own image, desiring to recognised something of himself in them. They were like a mirror, reflecting back his own likeness.
But Adam and Eve had another distinction as well: alone of all God’s creatures, they had a moral capacity to rebel against their creator.
“Man is God’s risk”
“God has, so to speak, imprisoned himself in his resolve”
Every quiver of disappointment in our own relationship with is an aftershock from their initial act of rebellion.
The Parent
If I had to reduce the plot of Genesis to one sentence, it would be something like this: God learns how to be a parent (not learning in the sense of gaining knowledge, but in the sense of taking on new experiences, such as the creation of free human beings. Jesus ‘learned obedience’ through what he suffered).
The humans set the pace by breaking all the rules, and God responded with individualised punishments.
The state of the earth continued to deteriorate toward a point of crisis which the Bible sums up in the most poignant sentence ever written: ‘The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain”. Behind that one statement stands all the shock and grief God felt as a parent.
Re covenant with Noah - you could view the covenant with Noah as the barest minimum of a relationship: one party agrees not to obliterate the other. And yet even in that promise God limited himself. He, the sworn enemy of all evil in the universe, pledged to endure wickedness on this planet for a time - or, rather, to solve it through some means other than annihilation.
In earliest history, then, God acted so plainly that no one could grouse about his hiddenness of silence. yet those early interventions shred one important feature - each was a punishment, a response to human rebellion. If it was God’s intention to have a mature relationship with free human beings, he certainly met with a series of rude setbacks. How could he ever related to his creation as adults when they kept behaving like children?
The Plan
Genesis 12 marks a momentous change. For the first time since the days of Adam, God stepped in not to punish, but to set into motion a new plan for human history.
Rather than trying to restore the whole earth at once, God would begin with a pioneer settlement, a new race wet apart from all others.
Re Abraham and the promises of a child - first moment of disappointment with God.
God wanted faith, the Bible says, and that is the lesson Abraham finally learned. He learned to believe when there was no reason left to believe.
The pattern continued - Isaac married a barren woman, as did his son Jacob ...a gambler would say God stacked the odds against himself. A cynic would say God taunted the creatures he was supposed to love. The Bible simply uses the cryptic phrase “by faith” ... somehow that ‘faith’ was what God valued and it soon became clear that faith was the best way for humans to express a love for God.
Re Joseph’s trials and disappointments - God unfair? But shift for a moment to the perspective of God the parent. Had he deliberately ‘pulled back’ to allow Joseph’s faith to reach a new level of maturity? Through all his trials, Joseph learned to trust: not that God would prevent hardship, but that he would redeem even the hardship.
Unfiltered Sunlight
Re God using his power to release the Israelites from Egypt - the response to the Israelites to such direct intervention offers and important insight into the inherent limits of all power. Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.
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 miracles - the kind we may secretly long for - do nothing to foster that love.
Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life.
One Shining Moment
The dedication of the temple by Solomon.
But all God had given Solomon meant that Solomon no longer had to depend on God. Israel became like the Egypt they had escaped from.
In response to this change, God quietly turned elsewhere. You can easily detect the shift by scanning the OT, which gives lengthy accounts of the first three kings of Israel - Saul, David, and Solomon; but after Solomon, stories of the kings sped up into a forgettable blur. God turned instead to his prophets.
After Elijah and Elisha, God seemed to rein in his supernatural power, turning from spectacle to word ... and as God seemed to draw farther and farther away, these prophets (Isaiah, Hosea, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) themselves began to ask questions; eloquent questions, haunting questions, questions wrapped in pain. They voiced aloud the cries of a people who felt abandoned by God.
More passionately than anyone in history, the prophets of Israel gave voice to the feeling of disappointment with God. Show yourself; break your silence. For God’s sake, literally, ACT!”I
Wounded Lover
God talked back, defending the way he ran the world. He lashed out, stormed and wept. And this is what he said:
I am not silent; I have been speaking through my prophets.
We tend to rank God’s revelations by their dramatic effect ... God acknowledged no such rating ... God did not consider “mere words” and inferior form of proof. Miracles had never had much lasting impact on the Israelites’ faith; but the prophets would inscribe a permanent record to be passed down over generations of God’s overtures toward his people.
I have indeed withdrawn my presence
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.
My slowness to act is a sign of mercy, not of weakness
In my own times of disappointment with God I have called on him to act with power. I have prayed against political tyranny and unfairness and injustice. I have prayed for miracle, for proof of God’s existence. But as I read the prophets’ descriptions of the day when God finally will take off all the wraps, one prayer overwhelms all others: “God, I hope I’m not around then.” God freely admits he is holding back his power, but he restrains himself for our benefit.
Tho my judgments appear stern, I am suffering with you
A single elegant sentence from Isaiah summarises God’s point of view: “in all their distress he too was distressed.”” God may have hidden his face, but that face was streaked with tears.
Despite everything, I am ready to forgive at any moment
Often in the midst of a stern reproof, God would stop - literally midsentence - and be Israel to repent.
Nothing expresses God’s yearning to forgive better than the book of Jonah.
After Jonah, you could never trust God not to be merciful again.
The powerful image of a jilted lover explains why in his speeches to the prophets, God seems to ‘change his mind’ every few seconds. He is preparing to obliterate Israel - wait, now he is weeping, holding out open arms - no, he is sternly pronouncing judgement again. Those shifting moods seem hopelessly irrational, except to anyone who has been jilted by a lover.
“What else can I do?’ God’s poignant question to Jeremiah points up the dilemma of an omnipotent God who has made room for freedom. The stork in the sky knows her season, the ocean tide rolls in on schedule, snow always covers the high mountains, but human beings are like nothing else in nature. God cannot control them. Yet he cannot simply thrust them aside either. He cannot get humanity out of his mind.
Too Good To Be True
No summary of the prophets would be complete apart from one last message: their loud insistence that the world will not end in ‘universal final defeat’, but in JOY.
For the prophets, human history is not an end in itself but a transition time, a parenthesis between Eden and the new heaven and new earth still to be formed by God.
“What else can I do?” God had asked. There was something else. What could not be won through power he would win through suffering,
In his dealings with human beings, God had often humbled himself ... after four hundred years of silence, God took on a new form: he became a man. It was the most shocking descent imaginable.
Think of the condescension involved: the Incarnation which sliced history into two parts had more animal than human witnesses. Think too of the risk. In the Incarnation, God spanned the vast chasm of fear that had distanced him from his human creation. But removing that barrier made Jesus vulnerable, terribly vulnerable.
What could be less scary than a newborn baby with jerky limbs and eyes that do not quite focus?
Divine Shyness
If ever the time was ripe to settle the question of God’s existence, it was while Jesus walked the earth. Jesus had one splendid opportunity to silence the critics forever. ... but he didn’t!
Why the divine restraint?
Perhaps a clue can be found in the first ‘event’ in Jesus’ ministry, the Temptation. I believe that Satan’s challenge was a true temptation for Jesus, not a staged, predetermined contest.
In effect, Satan was offering him a shortcut to achieve his messianic goals.
Ivan Karamazov calls the Temptation the most stupendous miracle on earth: the miracle of restraint. If he had yielded to the Temptation, Jesus would have earned his credentials, not just with Satan but with all Israel, establishing himself beyond dispute.
How does the temptation differ from times when I beg, almost demand, that God intervene and save me from a predicament? ... in each case the challenge is the same: a demand for God to take off the wraps and prove himself. In each case, God demurred.
God holds back; he hides himself; he weeps. Why? Because he desires what power can never win. He is a king who wants not subservience, but love.
Jesus, who presumably could work a wonder any day of his life if he wanted, seemed curiously ambivalent about miracles. With his disciples, he used them as proof of who he was ... but even as he performed them, he often seemed to downplay them. ... Jesus knew well the shallow effect of miracles in Moses’ day, and in Elijah’s - they attracted crowds, yes, but rarely encouraged long-term faithfulness.
Although Jesus’ miracles were far too selective to solve every human disappointment, they served as signs of his mission, previews of what God would someday do for all creation.
The miracles did just what Jesus had predicted. To those who chose to believe him, they gave even more reason to believe. But for those determined to deny him, the miracles made little difference. Some things just have to be believed to be seen.
The Postponed Miracle
God the Father who could have helped his Son on the cross did not act. Why? Anyone who thinks about disappointment with God must pause at Gethsemane, and at Pilate’s palace, and at Calvary - the scenes of Jesus’ arrest, trial and execution ... Jesus experienced a state very much like disappointment with God.
Two days later came the resurrection. Shouldn’t that have vindicated God and solved the problem of disappointment once and for all?
What a missed opportunity! If only the risen Jesus had reappeared on Pilate’s porch to deliver a withering blast against his enemies ... but his dozen or so appearances after resurrection show a clear pattern: Christ presented himself only to people who already believed in him. So far as we know, not a single unbeliever saw Jesus after his death.
The spectacle of the cross, the most public event of Jesus’ life, reveals the vast difference between a god who proves himself through power and One who proves himself through love.
Progress
What difference does Jesus make to our feelings of disappointment with God?
1. The Torn Curtain: Both for God and for us, he made possible an intimacy that had never before existed. In the OT, Israelites who touched the sacred Ark of the Covenant fell down dead; but people who touched Jesus, the son of God in flesh, came away healed. ... Jesus contributes at least this to the problem of disappointment with God: because of him we can come to God directly.
2. A Face: Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father - whatever Jesus is, God is.
3. Not Yet: The writers of the NT were convinced that Jesus had changed the universe forever. ... from Hebrews, it seems clear that the Incarnation had meaning for God as well as for us. It was the ultimate way for him to identify with us. ... would it be too much to say that, because of Jesus, God understands our feelings of disappointment with him? How else can we interpret Jesus’ tears or his cry from the cross?
Why didn’t Jesus brandish a sword in Gethsemane or call on his legions of angels? Why did he decline Satan’s challenge to dazzle the world? For this reason: if he had done so, he would have failed in his most important mission - to become one of us, to live and die as one of us. It was the only way God could work ‘within the rules’ he had set up at Creation.
The progression - Father, Son, Spirit - represents a profound advance in intimacy. At Sinai the people shrank from God, and begged Moses to approach him on their behalf. But in Jesus’ day people could hold a conversation with the Son of God ; they could touch him, and even hurt him. After Pentecost the same flawed disciples who had fled from Jesus’ trial became carriers of the Living God. In an act of delegation beyond fathom, Jesus turned over the kingdom of God to the likes of his disciples - and to us.
Look at the people in the pews of any church. Is this what God had in mind? Delegation always entails risk, as any employer soon learns..
1. We represent God’s holiness on earth
2. Human beings do the work of God on earth.
My friend Richard had asked “where is God? Show me. I want to see him.” Surely, at least part of the answer to his question is this: if you want to see God, then look at the people who belong to him - they are his “bodies”. They are the body of Christ. ... he will likely never get a personal glimpse of God in this life. He will only see me.
Dorothy Sayers has said that God underwent three great humiliations in his efforts to rescue the human race. the first was the incarnation, when he took on the confines of a physical body. The second was the cross, when he suffered the ignominy of public execution. The third humiliation, Sayers suggested, is the church. In an awesome act of self-denial, God entrusted his reputation to ordinary people.
To understand the gain to God, think back to the images from the Prophets: God as Parent and as Lover. Both those human relationships contain elements of what God has always been seeking from human beings. One word, dependence, holds the key ... no healthy parent wants a permanently dependent child on his hands. And so a father does not push his daughter around in a large carriage for life, but teaches her to walk, knowing that she may one day walk away. 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.
The difference between those two relationships shows what God has been seeking in his long history with the human race. He desires not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but the mature, freely given love of a lover. He has been ‘romancing’ us all along.
Some people pine for the ‘good old days’ of the OT when God used a more obvious, hands-on approach. The OT tells of an actual contract signed by God guaranteeing physical safety and prosperity under certain terms; the NT offers no such contract. The change from the visible presence of God in the wilderness to the invisible presence of the Holy Spirit involves a certain kind of loss as well. We lose the clear, sure proof that God exists. Nowadays, God does not hover over us in a cloud that we can gaze at for reassurance. For some, like Richard, this seems a great loss indeed. ... the confused voice of the modern church is part of the cost, the disadvantage to living today rather than with the Hebrews in the desert or among the disciples who followed Jesus.
What then is the gain? ... to use Paul’s own words, the OT way was ‘the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters of stone.” It was a mere “schoolmaster to lead us to Christ”. Who wants to stay in kindergarten forever?
God’s plan includes risk on both sides. For us, it means risking our independence by committing to follow an invisible God who requires of us faith and obedience. For God, it means risking that we, like the Israelites, may never grow up, never love him. Evidently, he thought it a gamble worth taking.
Think of God’s plan as a series of Voices.
1. the first Voice, thunderingly loud, had certain advantages ...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.
2. The second Voice - the voice modulated with Jesus, the Word made flesh - it was a normal human voice, and though it spoke with authority, it di not cause people to flee. Jesus’ voice was soft enough to debate against, soft enough to kill.
3. The 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’, yet the Spirit is also the most intimate Voice.
Seeing In The Dark
A Role In The Cosmos
Belief in an unseen world forms a crucial dividing line of faith today ... according to the Bible, human history is far more than the rising and falling of people and nations; it is a staging ground for the battle of the universe. Hence what seems like an ‘ordinary’ action in the seen world may have an extraordinary effect on the unseen world ... much of that effect however, remains hidden from our view - except for the occasional glimpses granted us in places like Revelation and Job.
The Wager offers a message of great hope to all of us - perhaps the most powerful and enduring lesson from Job. In the end, the Wager resolved decisively that the faith of a single human being counts for very much indeed.
We humans inhabit a mere speck of a planet in the outer suburbs of a spiral galaxy that is only one of about a million million such galaxies in the observable universe, but the New Testament insists that what happens among us here will, in fact help determine the future of that universe.
After the fall from Paradise, history entered a new phase. Creation God had done by himself, starting with nothing and ending up with the universe in all its splendour. The new work is RE-creation, and for this God employs the very human beings who had originally spoiled his work. Creation progressed through stages: first stars, then the sky and sea, and on through plants and animals, and finally man and woman. Re-creation reverses the sequence, starting with man and woman and culminating in the restoration of all the rest.
The book of Job insists ... one person’s faith can make a difference.
The more important battle, as shown in Job, takes place inside us. Will we trust God? Job teaches that at the moment when faith is hardest and least likely, then faith is most needed. His struggle presents a glimpse of what the Bible elsewhere spells out in detail: the remarkable truth that our choices matter, not just to us and our own destiny but amazingly, to God himself and the universe he rules.
God has granted to ordinary men and women the dignity of participating in the Great Reversal which will restore the universe to its pristine state.
The book of Job gives no satisfying answers to the question “Why?”. Instead it substitutes another question, “To what end?”.
Why the delay? 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 Wager, 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.
We still expect a God of love an power to follow certain rules on earth. Why doesn’t he?
1. One option seemed obvious to Job’s wife: “Curse God and die!” ... common view that God doesn’t exist. Yet this overlooks the underlying issue of where our primal sense of fairness comes from. Why ought we even expect the world to be fair.
2. Others propose that God agrees life is unfair, but cannot do anything about it.
3. A third group of people evade the problem of unfairness by looking to the future, when an exacting justice will work itself out in the universe.
4. A fourth approach is to flatly deny the problem and insist the world is fair. Good people will prosper and evil people will fail.
Douglas - “We tend to think ‘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. God’s existence, even his love for me, does not depend on my good health.” ... I challenge you to go home and read again the story of Jesus . Was life ‘fair’ to him? For me, the cross demolished for all time the basic assumption that life will be fair.
No-one is exempt from tragedy or disappointment - God himself was not exempt. Jesus offered no way out of unfairness, but rather a way through it to the other side.
Why Doesn’t God Explain?
The message behind God’s reply to Job boils down to this: Until you know a little more about running the physical universe, Job, don’t tell me how to run the moral universe.
“why are you treating me so unfairly, God?” Job has whined throughout the book, “Put yourself in my place.”
“NO!!!” God thunders in reply, “you put yourself in my place”.
Quite frankly, for me God’s evasive reply creates as many problems as it solves. I cannot simply whish the ‘why?’ questions away.
Why does God give no answers? What follows is pure speculation because the Bible does not speak into this area.
1. perhaps God keeps us ignorant because enlightenment might not help us. In Job, God deflects those questions of cause, and focuses instead on our response of faith. ...knowledge is passive, intellectual; suffering is active, personal. No intellectual answer will solve suffering.
2. perhaps God keeps us ignorant because we are incapable of comprehending the answer
I hesitate to say this because it is a hard truth and one I do not want to acknowledge, but Job stands as merely the most extreme example of what appears to be a universal low of faith. The kind of faith God values seems to develop best when everything fuzzes over, when God stays silent, when the fog rolls in.
The baffling, Morse-code pattern of divine guidance - a clear message followed by a long, silent gap is repeated time and again in the OT - Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David.
Two Kinds of Faith
Some of the difficulty comes from the elastic way in which we use the word ‘faith’. First we use it to describe great, childlike gulps of faith when a person swallows the impossible (David and Goliath, Roman centurion)
But Job along with the saints in Hebrews 11 points to a different kind of faith, the kind I have circled around in this book .... that hang-on-at-any-cost faith.
But why would God subject people who love him to such a test?
I offer no neat formula, only two observations:
1. We have little comprehension of what our faith means to God. Ever since God took the ‘risk’ of making room for free human beings, faith - true, unbribed, freely offered faith - has an intrinsic value to God that we can barely imagine. There is no better way for us to express love to God than by exercising fidelity to him.
2. God did not exempt himself from the same demands of faith. Job’s trials cannot stand apart from their louder echo in the life of Jesus.
Three Responses to the Hiddenness of God
1. Retaliate by ignoring him.
2. Be scandalised by the questions that it raises (cf Job’s friends)
3. Lash out in a protest that is futile - as Job did.
One bold message in the book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment - he can absorb them all. As often as not, spiritual giants of the Bible are shown contending with God. God can deal with every human response save one. He cannot abide the response I fall back on instinctively: an attempt to ignore him or treat him as tho he does not exist. That response never occurred to Job.
Cf also Daniel praying - Michael being held up for 21 days. Daniel must have thought his prayers were futile and God indifferent; but a glimpse behind the curtain reveals exactly the opposite. Daniel’s limited perspective, like Job’s distorted reality.
If you can’t comprehend the visible world you live in, how dare you expect to comprehend a world you cannot even see! Conscious of the big picture at last, Job repented in dust and ashes.
Why Job Died Happy
In a sense, our days on earth resemble Job’s before God came to him in a whirlwind. We too live among clues and rumours, some of which argue against a powerful, loving God. We too must exercise faith with no certainty.