Our God loves to hear the requests, complaints, fears, and laments of His people and to stand by us with His mighty presence in all our days.
For a variety of reasons, we often try to avoid meeting up with God. God can be very intimidating, simply because He is Magnificence in person, causing us to shake in our boots and at the same time overwhelming us with His fascinating power and glory, in whatever partial and obscure ways we may perceive it. God can be intimidating because we know we have not lived the kind of life our Creator designed for us. Adam and Eve tried to hide from God, but He pursued them, calling for them to come back to Him. Their sinfulness continued to trouble their relationship with God even after He restored it; the mystery of sin and evil continuing in the lives of God’s chosen people remains to this day. So, we experience that we may resist opening our ears to God’s call out of sheer fright from His just condemnation.
On occasion, we avoid God’s presence simply because we think He has nothing to offer us. Our modern world has opened so many blessings that we think human hands and minds can solve all problems. We often make our God too small and reduce Him to a tamed helper when we occasionally find ourselves in need. We sometimes regard Him as a passive observer when things go well. Or we ignore Him and freely wander into all sorts of seemingly pleasant meadows that turn out to be swamps filled with quicksand before He wakes us up to the fact that we have strayed from His ways.
When we are not listening to The Lord, we are listening to other voices, those of our own desires or fantasies of the world around us. We have the illusion that our own plans for life are more secure or more pleasurable than God’s. We fool ourselves into believing we or some political figure or program that appeals to us or the association we enjoy with people who exercise a perverted power in this world can guarantee a better life. Our own wills strive to master what only the Master can govern and direct, but we are not convinced this is true.
At times we sense the danger that He will ask us to be as honest over our hidden selves, so we follow Adam and Eve into the bush. Fleeing a wrathful God works only for a while. His ally, our conscience, may sleep but never dies. But, when we can be open and honest with Him as He corners us, we experience that He accepts us as the sinners we are and transforms us into His beloved children.
Then there are situations in which we sense God is playing with us in a mysterious manner. These unexplained modes and methods of dealing with us sometimes anger us, often frighten us, usually seem daunting and dismaying. They dishearten and demoralize us. Our puzzling over what our Creator is doing defies our best efforts to fit our experience with what He has promised to be His way of taking care of us. We want to read the script of our life, and God tells us only that we are written into the Book of Life. Often, we are angry with God for the results of His governance in our lives. Questions regarding the reasons for misfortune and evil beset us and twist our perceptions of the kind of person God is. We do not seek His image in Scripture, where He is talking to us, but we try to construct our own image of Him, which ends up, as Ludwig Feuerbach observed, being an image of ourselves and our own discontent, lack of hope and trust, or stubborn desire to refashion the world in our own mode. As our parent, our heavenly Father reads to us the stories of our life. We demand to peek ahead. But He knows better. Experience builds as He unfolds our narratives and builds our character through patience that arises both from our suffering and our blessings. He leads us into the life in which the courage born of trust confidently faces precisely those mysteries that we cannot fathom or unravel but rest, we know, in the hands of the Almighty deliverer, who died to give us life.
At such situations, He invites us to drag the Hidden God out of the shadows and point out His promises (not our works).
In all such situations our lack of faith is what disenables our confidence that God means what He says when He promises to be with us. At such situations, He invites us to drag the Hidden God out of the shadows and point out His promises (not our works). We point to Christ and to the life He has bestowed upon us through His resurrection after disposing of our offenses against the Magnificent Creator in His tomb.
When we have distanced ourselves from God or when He seems to have distanced Himself from us, whenever we have dilemmas in the midst of which we would love to have His company, we simply need to find the courage to corner God. Several biblical models serve us as we try to muster the boldness to take on our Creator. He does invade our lives and confront us with the necessity of wrestling with Him. Jacob had that happen to him. Jacob put up a good fight but lost. Nonetheless, Jacob got the prize (Genesis 32:22-32).
Abraham decided to try to aid his nephew Lot along with Lot’s neighbors by pleading for deliverance for Sodom. Demonstrating infinite patience, God welcomed Abraham’s challenge and let the patriarch test Him, but the statistics simply gave Abraham no support. The patriarch had to be satisfied with a, “No, not this time,” from the Lord as His wrath rolled over Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:16-33).
Moses, on the other hand, persuaded God to adopt a different policy than He had originally intended when the Israelites grew impatient and sought their own solution with a golden calf (Exodus 32:1-35). Moses reasoned with God and persuaded Him not to embarrass Himself by letting down the people whom He had let out of Egypt. God did not fail to remind Israel of its sinfulness, but He did not abandon His people because Moses cornered Him (Exodus 32:11-14).
We corner God not only with our requests, however. Sometimes His children come to Him simply in sorrow. We lament. A friend of mine translated the word for “lament” in his native language “whining,” and, indeed, God’s children come to their heavenly Father at times with hurts and vulnerabilities so painful that they simply whine. But Jeremiah demonstrates how God’s people go to God not only whining about their afflictions and losses. In the book of Lamentations, he carries his lament to the Lord, expressing his hurt, regret, desperation, and powerlessness, with the desire to find comfort simply in the presence of the Creator. But he also reminds God of His promises, of the obligations toward His people that God has taken on with His promise to be our God and make us His children. God seemed to have abandoned Jeremiah’s Jerusalem, and precisely in that situation Jeremiah’s lament expressed a trust that behind His apparent absence, His desertion of His people, God was very much present, preserving and protecting His own.
Our God is the God who wrestles with Jacob, said, “No,” to Abraham and, “Yes,” to Moses, the God who has come to us as Jesus Christ. He loves to hear the requests, complaints, fears, and laments of His people and to stand by us with His mighty presence in all our days.
