We'll NOT be Consumed

There is a promise in the Bible that has absolutely blessed me right from my youth. In Isaiah 43:1,2, God tells his children, "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze." This verse subtly warns us that we may see torrents and infernos, but we are not to lose heart. Humans have a tendency to imagine the worst when the see the slightest indications of danger, but God tells us that we can be sure of the final outcome. We will not be consumed, annihilated, devoured, utterly defeated !

This promise was given to the Israelites about 700 years before Christ. It is likely that Daniel, Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego who were part of the royalty that was exiled from Judah to Babylon about a hundred years later, had read this promise while studying their scripture. When Daniel's 3 friends later came across the prospect of being thrown into an inferno, I am sure, this promise weighed heavily in their minds, as can be seen from their response to King Nebuchadnezzar: "If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it . . ." What a confidence on God's power! They continued ". . . he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." They seem to have had a small amount of uncertainty about what God will do . . will he save or will he not -- that is for his sovereignty to decide. But they had no doubt on whether he can. And knowing that He besides being an all-powerful God is also faithful to his children, let them experience perfect peace with no anxiety about their future. They serve as ideal role models for us in these turbulent times.

In the new testament, we find similar trust on God's promise in Paul. While writing to the Corinthians, we find Paul stating in his second letter: "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." (II Cor 4:8,9) Here was a man who had gone through lot of suffering in life -- great endurance; troubles, hardships and distresses; beatings, imprisonments and riots; hard work, sleepless nights and hunger. His circumstances were such that should leave him dying, beaten, sorrowful, poor and having nothing. Yet he says he is living on, not killed, rejoicing, making many rich and possessing everything. (II Cor 6:3-10) How could he speak with such courage. Because he knew that the Lord who had given wonderful promises was living inside him.

• We too may face failures in life - failure in a critical exam, a broken relationship, loss of a loved one's life, etc., but we do not respond like those who have no hope. We do not handle a failure by commiting suicide or by resorting to addiction to forget the failure or by even becoming slothful and wallowing in self-pity. We are never crushed to the point of losing hope and giving up -- we have a glorious promise "you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze".
• When critical illness or a loss of job hits us, we may not know why they happen, but we will rest assured in the fact that the one who cares for us more than we ourselves do, is fully aware of what is happening to us and is sufficient to ensure that the worst does not hit us. We do not despair as the one who has promised to be with us has told us "Fear Not".
• People who we trusted may let us down when we expected them to defend our cause, but we never feel abandoned and alone. The one who said "I will be with you" came down to live among men as Christ. Is he not called Immanuel (God with Us), Jehovah Shammah (The Lord is present) and Ebenezer (The Lord who helps)? Today, through his Holy Spirit, he lives right inside of us even when we find ourselves in the eye of life's storm.
• We could fall in sin, lose to temptation again and again, but our Lord has promised that the Righteous shall rise up even if he falls seven times. We and not the Devil our adversary will have the last laugh.

Three things should comfort us. One: Our Lord knows our every situation. There is nothing that can come to us except with His knowledge, because we are His. Two: He loves us so much that he never lets go our hands and is always with us to help us tide over our situation. Three: The one who promised that we will never be swept away or set ablaze knows what he says and is able to keep his word. Therefore, Fear not . . Take heart . . and Cheer up!

Do I respond in Faith!

Philip Yancey in the second part of his book ‘Disappointment with God’ looks at Job to find how we too can have his faith in the face of disappointments. He acknowledges, “Studying someone like Job as an example of faith is a little like studying the history of civilization by examining only the wars.” However, he does that because there are others that promise victory alone and make no mention of the wars.

The book of Job portrays one man confronting misery that makes no sense. He lost 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 5000 oxen, 500 donkeys and numerous servants. He then lost all children – seven sons and three daughters – in one mighty gust of wind. Finally, his last consolation too failed – he lost his health as sores broke out from the sole of his fee to the top of his head. Yancey asks us to think of it as a “mystery play”, a “Whodunit” detective story. Before the play begins, we in the audience get a sneak preview. The plot and the main characters are described to us and every mystery is solved except one: How will the main character respond? He points out, that the book is not about suffering as most people think; it is primarily about faith in its starkest form. The book is not about ‘Where is God when it Hurts?’, the preview settles that issue; it is about ‘How does Job respond?’ Will he trust God or deny Him? Satan scoffs that God, unworthy of love in himself, only attracts people like Job because they have been ‘bribed’ to follow him. When God accepts the challenge to test Satan’s theory, calamities begin to rain down on unsuspecting Job.

God’s critics protest that Job paid one hell of a price to just make God feel good. Yancey points out that the wager, the bet, the wresting match was not between Job and God. Satan and God were the chief combatants – Job was just performing in a cosmic showdown before spectators in the unknown world. Many people get up, eat, drive their cars, work, make phone calls, tend to their children and go to bed without giving a single thought to the existence of an unseen world. Hence they find it absurd to believe that one human being, a tiny dot on a tiny planet, can make a difference in the history of the universe. Job’s friend Elihu too had the same thought: “If you sin, how does it affect God? . . If you are righteous what do you give him? Your wickedness affects only a man like yourself”. But according to the Bible, human history is a staging ground for the battle of the universe. The opening and closing chapters of Job prove that God was greatly affected by the response of one man and that cosmic issues were at stake.

The bible rustles with hints that something like The Wager is played out in other believers as well. Apostle Paul, borrowing an image from gladiators being lead into the Colosseum, pictured himself as on public display, “We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men”. He is emphatic, “The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own”. God who had created from nothing and ended up with an universe rich in splendor is now engaged in Re-Creation employing the very humans who had spoiled his work. Creation progressed through stages: stars, sky and sea, plants and animals and finally man. Recreation reverses the sequence, starting with man and culminating in the restoration of all creation. Yancey is convinced that The Wager is a stark reenactment of God’s original question in creation: Will man choose for or against me? Satan denied that human beings are truly free. Man has freedom to descend . . . but freedom to ascend, to believe in God for no reason at all? Often disappointments with God begin in Job-like situations. The death of a loved one, a tragic accident or loss of job may bring on the same questions that job asked. Why me? What does God have against me? We may beg God to change the circumstances – the ill health, the bank account, the run of bad luck. In our own trials, we will not have the insight that we got as readers of Job’s story. Will we trust God? Job affirms that our response to testing matters.

The book of Job does not answer the question ‘Why?’ When God himself arrives on the scene, one would have expected God to say, “Job, I’m truly sorry about what’s happened. You’ve endured many unfair trials on my behalf, and I’m proud of you. You don’t know what it means to me and to the universe”. God says nothing of this kind. He rather seems to guide Job through a course of appreciation for the created world. Perhaps God keeps us ignorant because enlightenment might not help us. No intellectual answer will solve suffering. Perhaps this is why God sent his own son as an active and personal response to human pain, to experience it and absorb it into himself. Perhaps God keeps us ignorant because we are incapable of comprehending the answer. A tiny creature on a tiny planet in a remote galaxy simply can not fathom the grand design of the Universe. In Yancey’s view, the book of Job substitutes the question ‘Why?’ with another question ‘To what end?’ Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, in the struggle to reverse all that is wrong with the universe.

At some point, everyone confronts the question –- Is God unfair? Yancey lists out several ways in which we respond.

• Some respond like Job’s wife who advised Job, “Curse God and die”. Why hold on to a sentimental belief about a loving God when so much in life conspires against it. Still they cannot avoid a tinge of outrage, as if they have been betrayed. They overlook the underlying issue of where their primal sense of fairness comes from.
• Others equally mindful of the world’s unfairness cannot bring themselves to deny God’s existence. They propose that perhaps God agrees that life is unfair but cannot do anything about it. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the best-seller ‘When Bad things happen to Good people’ portrayed God as compassionate but powerless, and millions of his readers found comfort in such a conclusion. If God is indeed less-than-powerful, why did he choose the worst possible situation (when he was being tried by Pilate) – when his power was most called into question – to insist on his omnipotence?
• Still others evade the problem of unfairness by looking to the future when an exacting justice will work itself out in the universe. The Hindu doctrine of Karma calculates that it may take a soul 6.8 million incarnations to realize perfect justice. At the end, a person will have experienced exactly the amount of pain and pleasure he deserves.
• Yet another approach is to flatly deny the problem and insist that the world is fair. Echoing Job’s friends, these people insist that the world does run according to fixed laws: good people will prosper and evil ones will fail.

Is God unfair? The cross settled that issue for ever. God is not, but surely life on earth is. 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. Just as Good Friday demolished the belief that this life is supposed to be fair, Easter Sunday followed with its startling clue to the riddle of the Universe. Out of the darkness, a bright light shone. Someday, God will restore all creation to its proper place under his reign. Until then, it is good to remember that we live out our days on Easter Saturday.

Was Job’s case exceptional? Yancey finds from reading through the Bible that Job stands as merely the most extreme example of what appears to be an universal law 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. Yancey gives a new label “Survivors of the Fog” to Hebrews 11, a chapter most have labeled ‘The Faith Hall of Fame’. He draws distinction between two kinds of Faith: child-like Faith and the greater Fidelity. David exercised childlike faith when he strode out to meet Goliath, as did the Roman Centurion whom Jesus commended. Today, “faith missionaries” write stirring accounts of miracles – houseful of orphans being fed and mountains being moved - resulting from “seed faith”, a childlike trust. Childlike trust may not survive when the miracle does not come, when the urgent prayer gets no answer, when a dense grey mist obscures any sign of God’s concern. Such times call for something more – hang-on-at-any-cost faith that can be called fidelity. God did not exempt himself from the same demands of faith. Job sat on ashes, scratching his sores. Jesus hung on a cross, unable to reach his wounds. In a sense, God tied his own hands in The Wager over Job; in the most literal sense, he let his hands be tied the night of crucifixion. The three day pattern – tragedy, darkness, triumph – will someday be enlarged to a cosmic scale. We have little comprehension of what our faith means to God. According to the Bible, human beings serve as the principal foot soldiers in the warfare between unseen forces of good and evil, and faith is our primary weapon.

Why doesn’t GOD intervene? Living in a seen world of trees and buildings, we have difficulty in believing in another, unseen world existing alongside it. “We want proof”, we say. “How can we be certain that God even exists if he will not enter into our world?” We look for a blinding difference between the natural and supernatural worlds; a gulf separated by barbed wire. But in reality, we do not stop being ‘natural’ persons when we pray; we still get sleepy and lose concentration. Yancey quotes C. S. Lewis who talked of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which are claimed to be spiritual. He talked of the reappearance of all the same old elements which make up our natural life in what is professed to be our supernatural life. The modern world can reduce most natural phenomena and even most spiritual phenomena, to their component parts. Should it surprise us then to find the same universal principle operating in the realm of the spirit? From below we tend to think of miracle as an invasion, a breaking into the natural world with spectacular force, and we long for such signs. But from above, from God’s point of view, the real miracle is one of transposition: that human beings can become vessels filled with his Spirit; that ordinary human acts of charity and goodness can become nothing less than the incarnation of God on earth. Jesus Christ, said Paul, serves now as the head of the body. The risen Christ accomplishes his will through us, members of his body.

A final objection that one might have: Job got a personal appearance by God, but how does that help me who has not had a visitation from God, with my struggles? In a sense, our days on earth resemble Job’s before God came to Him in a whirlwind. We too live among clues and rumors, some of which argue against a powerful, loving God. We too must exercise faith. 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”. Let us fix our eyes on eternity and respond to God in Faith.

Are you there, GOD !

Is God Hidden, Silent and Unfair? Philip Yancey gives voice to these questions that no one asks aloud, in his book Disappointment with God.

• “Is God hidden? Why doesn’t he simply show up sometime, visibly, and dumbfound the skeptics once and for all?”
• “Is God silent? If he is so concerned about our doing his will, why doesn’t he reveal that will more plainly?”
• “Is God unfair? Why doesn’t he consistently punish evil and reward good people? Why do awful things happen to people good and bad, with no discernible pattern?”

He looks at what many consider to be the golden period and yearn for as the panacea for disappointment – the Old Testament days when God was so visible, vocal and indulgent – to see if indeed that is where the solution lies. God showed up in Moses’ time in a pillar of cloud by day (and fire by night) and spoke to him face to face as he might with a friend. He had simplified matters of guidance for the Israelites in the wilderness. A glance at the cloud over the tabernacle was all that was needed to determine if they should move today or stay put. Most things were pre-decided and communicated to them in a set of rules, codified into 613 laws that covered a wide range of behavior. For the rest, God had set up Urim and Thummim. And he had set up a “fair” system based on rewards and punishment -- health and wealth in exchange for obedience, and sickness and misery if they were to disobey. We would think that all this would produce great results. Yet, as one scans through Joshua and Judges, one finds that within fifty years the Israelites had disintegrated into a state of utter anarchy.

Yancey then turns around to consider from the Bible, God’s point of view -- “What does it feel like to be God?” Genesis begins with God’s creation and his exuberance that everything he had made was very good. He designed man and woman -- creatures unlike all others, reflecting back God’s own likeness and with a moral capacity to rebel. God had taken a risk and when the first man and woman chose to rebel, intimacy between man and God was spoilt leading to disappointment in man’s relationship with God ever since. Following Adam, Cain rebelled and soon the entire human race rebelled so much that the Bible tells us, “The Lord was grieved that he had made man on earth, and his heart was filled with pain”. Each time he intervened like a parent of a rebellious child and punished. God’s intention to have a mature relationship with free human beings was met with child-like behavior.

God then set in motion a new plan for human history, starting with Abraham. He set before man alternating experiences of revelation and lonely waiting, as if to help man reach a new level of maturity. After dangling a bright dream before Abraham, he seemed to sit on his hands and watch as Abraham advanced towards tottery old age. Isaac married a barren woman and so did his son Jacob – Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel, all spending their best child-bearing years in despair. Joseph's valiant stabs at goodness - visiting his brothers in obedience to his father, resisting a sexual advance in Egypt and interpreting a dream to save a cell-mate's life - brought nothing but trouble. In Yancey’s words, “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” to describe what they went through.” Faith was what God seemed to value as the expression of man’s love for God.

During Israelites' wandering in the wilderness, just as God found it nearly impossible to live among sinful people, the Israelites too found it nearly impossible to live with a Holy God in their midst. The elaborate rituals laid down for the Israelites to approach God with zero margin for error, made them feel distant and cry out, “Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire anymore, or we will die”. Looking back at that period one might ask, “Who wouldn’t lose heart in harsh circumstances? If only there were happier times, when God seemed close and granted heart’s desires!” God granted exactly that in Solomon’s time. He ruled over a golden age within a long tormented history of the Hebrews. With everything working in his favor, Solomon at first seemed to gratefully follow God. But by the end of his reign he had taken Israel from a fledgling Kingdom dependent on God for bare survival to a self-sufficient political power that took God for granted once his presence centered in the temple.

When the Kings who followed Solomon continued to lead Israel away, God turned to the prophets. But after spectacular demonstrations through Elijah and Elisha for a brief while, he seemed to rein in his supernatural power, turning from spectacle to word. Isaiah, Hosea, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all had no stunning displays of God’s power but only words. After all, miracles had not had a lasting impact on his people’s faith; he decided to inscribe a permanent record of how He felt. He felt like a betrayed lover and poured out emotions pent up for centuries. It was He not Israel, that was truly the disappointed party. The books of the Prophets reveal God struggling for a language, any language that might break through to his people. To the prophets too, it seemed like God was getting farther and farther that they protested loudly with disappointment. However God did not consider his ‘words’ as an inferior form of proof. Heaven then went silent for four hundred years.

What else could God do? God then set to win his people’s love through suffering, what he could not win through power. Supernatural encounters had always caused fear , sometime sounding like thunder, sometimes stirring the air like a whirlwind and sometimes lighting up the scene like burning phosphorous. God decided to span the vast chasm of fear that distanced him from his creation. On Christmas day, God became a baby, giving up language, muscle coordination and the ability to eat solid food or control bladder. God took on a shape in the world, acquiring a face, a name and an address. He made possible an intimacy that had never existed before – a bridge between ordinary human beings and a perfect God. Because of him, we can come directly to God. But his very ordinary appearance did not let Israel accept him as their Messiah, as it did not match with their expectation of what God should look like.

The problem of unfairness just did not go away and only seemed to worsen. Jesus’ own life ended in the greatest unfairness of history: the best man who ever lived becoming yet another victim of a cruel world. Though Jesus fed five thousand, raised Lazarus from the dead and calmed the raging storm, people disappointed with God are more interested in the miracles that Jesus did not perform. Why does a God who can right any wrong, choose not to sometimes? Why heal one paralyzed man at Bethesda – but only one? His selective miracles far from solving every human disappointment serve as previews of what God would someday do for all creation. Jesus refused temptations from the devil – to pull out a miracle to satisfy his hunger after forty days of fasting, to pull out another to defy nature and guarantee his physical safety, and to take the shortcut to achieve his messianic goal of making the world his own. The spectacle of the Cross – the one event that took place in the open for all the world to see - reveals a God who would not prove himself through power but rather through love. He had come to become one of us, and live and die as one of us. He passionately loved the people he had made but had a terrible urge to destroy the Evil that enslave them. On the cross, God’s son absorbed the destructive force and transformed it into love.

During his life on earth, after the seventy he had sent out returned with reports of people being healed and devils being cast out, Jesus jubilantly exclaimed, “I see Satan fall like lightning from heaven!” During the last supper on the eve of his arrest he told the disciples with a finality, “I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me”. While his disciples anticipated a call to take arms and overthrow the Roman Empire, he asked them to wait for the Holy Spirit and ascended to heaven. He had indeed come to settle divine justice and to show us what God is like. But more than that, he came to establish a Church, a new dwelling place for the Spirit of God. The New Testament uses the phrase “body of Christ” to refer to this church. Humans on earth in whom God himself –the Holy Spirit – was living, extended the arms, legs and eyes of God on earth. Here, God took another risk, of letting us represent him badly and Christian have indeed represented him badly – Slavery, the Crusades, pogroms against Jews, colonialism, wars, Ku Klux clan. A prefect God now lives inside very imperfect human beings. According to Dorothy Sayers, after the Incarnation and the Cross, the Church is his third humiliation.

In the Old Testament days, God's voice was thunderingly loud. 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 those who heard the voice and feared it soon learned to ignore it. Its very volume got in the way. For a few decades the Voice of God took on the volume and rural accent of a country Jew in Palestine. It did not cause people to flee and was soft enough to kill. After Jesus' ascent, the Voice of God speaks to our spirit, as close as breath and as gentle as a whisper. It is the most vulnerable voice of all and the easiest to ignore. 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. We lose the clear, sure proof that God exists. But he has elevated us from being a permanently stunted child to becoming a mature lover. For a baby, dependence is everything; someone else must meet its every need or the child will die. A lover, on the other hand, possesses complete freedom, yet chooses to give it away and become dependent. He desires not the clinging helpless love of a child who has no choice but the mature, freely given love of a lover. His Spirit in us will not remove all disappointment with God. His titles – Intercessor, helper, Counselor, Comforter, - imply there will be problems. However, his Spirit inside us reminds us that such disappointments are temporary, a prelude to an eternal life with God.

[Philip Yancey's Disappointment with God includes 2 books that treat the same subject from two different perspectives. In the first book he looks at the whole Bible from beginning to end, to find an answer to our disappointment. In the second book he looks for an answer from 'Job'. I would be naive to believe that I can summarize 152 pages of rich arguments put forth by the author in the first book, in a few pages here. I therefore greatly recommend that you read Philip Yancey's insightful book to glean more of the Answer. I just hope that your appetite has been sufficiently whetted by this summary.]