It is the place where God must
withdraw our sense of his presence. Because in order to have real
faith, he must go silent and make it seem like we have been abandoned.
It is because we are treacherous creatures!
Any opportunity where we can explain
away God and convince ourselves that we are actually the ones in control...we
will!
Remember after the Exodus, how
long was it before the Israelites, those who had just walked through a parted
Red Sea no less were building golden calves because God had gone silent? Because Moses was taking too long on the mountain? Their
minds had convinced them that somehow, someway, it was all an illusion.
The God
they imagined to have delivered them, in fact had not.
Maybe that’s why the first three
matriarchs of Israel were all barren. The point cannot be overstated. God’s
inclination to work through human impossibilities is the only way we cannot
trick ourselves into dismissing the idea that it is God working.
It must be impossible.
It must be illogical.
For when
something is impossible and illogical…and
yet still happens!...the only answer we can give is, “It must be God.”
And
the point is, it is God!
But our
sinful natures don’t want to accept that verdict.
So God works in a way such
that we have to accept it...or reject it.
We do this all the time in the
present day, especially in my background, an evangelical one.
When we lose ourselves in the
grace of God's touch, and when that becomes the focus of our
relationship—constantly feeling and experiencing the love of God—it can be dangerous…I
weep as I write this because I know many people might misunderstand me.
But if we only talk about
tangibly feeling the love of God, then subconsciously, our mind will turn the love of God into God. We will be in a relationship with a
drug and all we will want to do is get our next high.
The love of God will become our
golden calf and we will no longer live in an unpredictable relationship with
the living God but will sink into an inebriated course moving from one
manipulative spiritual high to the next.
And hear me please, experiencing
the love of God is an unbelievable and holy thing and it is part of the relationship that he wants to
share with us. He wants to fill us up. And there will come a day when we
are overflowing with his Spirit in a way we never thought possible.
He does
touch us. He does!
I crave it. But his touch is not a relationship. And we know
that.
And if we focus only on the palpable sensation of his grace, then our
relationship is not with God but with
the ‘palpable sensation of God’s grace’.
When we experience, tangibly, the
love of God, in those moments we do not need faith.
We know, with certainty,
that God loves us then because we can feel his love. But that is not what the
first disciples experienced. That is not what Sarai must have thought when the
three visitors promised she would give birth and she laughed in their faces. That
is not what Paul thought it meant to be a disciple. It is all in his letters. Faith (an assurance in an invisible God and
thus living into this assurance) is being
a disciple. Constant threat of death is to follow Jesus. The uncertainty of life
lived in Faith is relationship.
Love is a “cold and broken
hallelujah.”[i]
Relationships are messy and
tiring and angering and God is exasperatingly God! I mean, what if he came to us and said, ‘I will be with you for the rest of your life and you will be my light,
my disciple, such as you can’t even imagine…but you’ll never feel or experience
my touch again.’
Would we still want to be in
relationship with him? Would we still choose this road?
Because God could…that is the
point. If we are in relationship with the living
God, then he could say anything…absolutely anything.
The road of surrender has a pit
in it when he must remove his hand; he must take away our sensation of his
presence which we interpret as the guarantee that he loves us…so that faith can become real, so that faith
can become life.
If we always think we are capturing him like one catches a
lightning bug in a jar, able to reproduce this sensation of love whenever we
want, then all we are doing is making God in our image, not walking beside and
within him asking what he would have us do, experience, how he would define
life.
A day must come when he
extinguishes all his light, all our sensible pleasure of his grace. On that day,
sitting in that wretched pit, you will have to decide again, again and again,
ever and again if you heard true, in happier times long past, or if you were
mistaken. You will have to decide on that day, that present, irremovable day,
if this Great Story is really happening as you believed it was yesterday.
And your decision will be made
not by a resolution of your will, but simply by endurance.
You will conquer the pit by crying
out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!” as you hang thirsty and lonely
upon a cross…but you will be upon the cross.
And
then he will come to you again…
In a whisper, in a cool breeze,
after the storm and the fire and the earthquake of stumbling and doubt, he will
come again and you will realize that he was never just the bug, but the wind upon which the bug rode, the grass where
the bug slept, the cells giving the bug life, the one who taught the bug to
shine light into the darkness!
We limit our Father’s intimacy
with us when we pursue an experience with him, straining to catch a glimpse of
the back end of a bug. But when he mercifully eliminates the light for a
period, we realize that we have been standing on the Son the entire time. Our
sense of God’s love must be lost for a moment, surrendered really, so that true
faith can become our sight.
Father, you love us so dearly,
but you are not a drug.
You are God. You are our Father. You
are bringing us into yourself and that means you will touch us sometimes. Oh
and Father, touch us often, I pray! We must have your touch. We must feel your
love or we are lost. But I do not pray that above all else.
Let your will be done. And if
that means you will not touch us or let us feel your love for a season (or even
ever again)…let it be so. Not my will but yours be done. I love you.
You are Life…not when you touch me.
To live is Christ, to die is gain.
When he goes silent, and you’re
left sitting in the pit, take heart. He is not rejecting you, but becoming one
with you. No longer will you see his glory.
You
will be his glory.
And
the world will see it.
[i]
“Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohen
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