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