BOOKNOTES: Disappointment with God – Philip Yancey

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Disappointment with God – Philip Yancey

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?
As I studied the story of the Israelites, I had second thoughts about crystal clear guidance from God. It may serve some purpose—it may, for example, get a mob of just-freed slaves across a hostile desert—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.
The Israelites give ample proof that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.
Man is God’s risk…he gave us free will to even believe in him.
CS Lewis: "Perhaps we don not realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of "divine abdication."
According to Yancey there is a 400 year gap between Genesis and Exodus. (p.69)
Power can do everything but the most important thing; it cannot control love. No pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence from God could make the Egyptians in Exodus trust and follow him.
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. Oscar Wilde
God said to Zechariah: My slowness to act is a sign of mercy, not of weakness.
According to Yancey there is another 400 year gap between Malachi (last book of Old Testament) and Matthew (first book of New Testament)
How did Christmas day feel to God? Imagine for a moment becoming a baby again: giving up language and muscle coordination, and the ability to eat solid food and control your bladder. God as a fetus! On that day in Bethlehem, the Maker of All That Is took form as a helpless, dependent newborn.
If Jesus had the power, why didn’t he heal everyone?
If Jesus had just avoided one emotionally charged word, "kingdom", everything might have been different. As soon as he said it, images sprang to life in the minds of his audience; bright banners, glittering armies, the gold and ivory of Solomon’s day, a nation restored to grandeur. The masses wanted more than a sprinkling of miracles here and there; they wanted a visible kingdom of power and glory. But Jesus talked instead about the kingdom of heaven, an invisible kingdom. The real battle was against invisible, spiritual powers.
God holds back; he hides himself. 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.
The miracles in the authentic Gospels are about love, not power.
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 dozen or so appearances after Christ’s 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.
All through the Bible, especially in the Prophets, we see a conflict raging within God. On the one hand he passionately loved the people he had made; on the other hand, he had a terrible urge to destroy the Evil that enslaved them. On the cross, God resolved that inner conflict, for there his Son absorbed the destructive force and transformed it into love.
God’s delegation: He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. Creation seems to be delegation through and through. I suppose this is because He is a giver.
The progression of delegation: Father, Son, Spirit—represents a profound advance of 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 the 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.
Delegation always entails risk, as any employer soon learns.
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine of "the church": God living in us. The Bible’s extravagant statements about the body of Christ:
We represent God’s holiness on earth
Human beings do the work of God on earth (he does it through us)
"Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not." Augustine
"I might believe in the redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed." Nietzsche
What exactly does God’s plan for the ages accomplish? If one could submit that plan to something like a "cost-benefit analysis" used by corporations, what would be the "gains" and "costs" of such a plan—for God and for us?
The church’s obvious defects would seem to be the greatest cost to God. He now submits his spirit to flawed human beings.
Dorothy Sayers: Three Great Humiliations in God’s 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.
Yet in some way invisible to us, those ordinary people filled with the Spirit are helping to restore the universe to its place under the reign of God.
We must not press the point so far as to think God "needs" our cooperation. Rather, he has chosen us as the preferred way to reclaim his creation here on earth. He uses human instruments just as my brain uses the instruments of fingers and hand and wrist to write this sentence.
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—the key to what they have in common and the key to how they differ.
God’s goal all along was to equip us to accomplish his will in the world. That slow, difficult process will one day result in the total restoration of the earth.
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; it means risking that we may never love him. Evidently, he thought it a gamble worth taking.
God’s "goal", if one can speak in such terms, is not to overpower all skeptics with a flashy miracle; he could do that in an instant if he wished. Rather, he seeks to reconcile: to love, and to be loved. And the Bible shows a clear progression in God’s efforts to break through to human beings without overwhelming them.
Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.
Job is really not about the problem of pain. Suffering contributes the ingredients of the story, not its central theme. Just as a cake is not about eggs, flour, milk, and shortening, but uses those ingredients in the process of creating the cake, Job is not "about" suffering; it merely uses such ingredients in its larger story, which concerns even more important questions, cosmic questions. Seen as a whole, Job is primarily about faith in the starkest form.
Job: How can God’s winning a contest, be worth such a price?
Belief in an unseen world forms a crucial dividing line of faith today. 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. But 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: a short-term mission assignment causes Satan to fall like lightning from heaven (Luke 10); a sinner’s repentance sets off celestial celebration (Luke 15); a baby’s birth disturbs the entire universe (Revelation 12). Much of that effect, however, remains hidden from our view—except for the occasional glimpses granted us in places like Revelation, and in Job.
As I studied Job, it struck me that The Wager was, at its heart, a stark reenactment of God’s original question in creation: Will the humans choose for or against me? From God’s point of veiw that has been the central question of history, beginning with Adam and continuing on through Job and every man and woman who has ever lived. The Wager in the Book of Job called into question the whole human experiment. Satan denied that human beings are truly free.
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.
The Wager, the motive behind all human history, is to develop us, not God.
Life should be fair because God is fair. But God is not life. Do not confuse God with life.
If we develop a relationship with God apart from our life circumstances, then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down. We can learn to trust God despite all the unfairness of life.
With the heroes of the Old Testament (Abraham, Joseph, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, Daniel) each went through trials like Job. For each of them, at times, the physical reality surely seemed to present God as the enemy. But each managed to hold on to a trust in him despite the hardships. In doing so, their faith moved from a "contract faith"—I’ll follow God if he treats me well—to a relationship that could transcend any hardship.
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".
God’s message to Job: Until you know a little more about running the physical universe, Job, don’t tell me how to run the moral universe.
Knowledge is passive, intellectual; suffering is active, personal. No intellectual answer will solve suffering.
Reasons why God might have not explained suffering to Job:
Perhaps God keeps us ignorant because enlightenment might not help us.
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 could not fathom the grand design of the universe.)
Questions about God’s foreknowledge:
Did God know in advance whether Job would stay faithful to him and thus win The Wager?
What about natural disasters on earth?
God is not limited by time and space. No matter how we rationalize, God will sometimes seem unfair from the perspective of a person trapped in time.
Not until history has run its course will we understand how "all things work together for good." Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
Saints become saints by somehow hanging on to the stubborn conviction that things are not as they appear, and that the unseen world is solid and trustworthy as the visible world around them. God deserves trust, even when it looks like the world is caving in.
Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.
2 definitions of faith:
Seed faith: great, childlike gulps of faith, when a person swallows the impossible. Childlike trust. (Psalm 23)
Fidelity: hang on at any cost faith. (Psalm 22)
Human beings grow by striving, working, stretching; and in a sense, human nature needs problems more than solutions.
Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.
CS Lewis suggested that God treats new Christians with a special kind of tenderness, much as a parent dotes on a newborn. "I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic."
CS Lewis gives two strong Biblical examples of unanswered prayers: Jesus pled 3 times for God to "Take this cup from me" and Paul begged God to cure the "thorn in my flesh".
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 most powerful weapon.
Don’t dwell on Job’s suffering without considering how God sent his son Jesus Christ who suffered beyond all.
Is God silent? I answer that question with another question: Is the church silent? We are his mouthpiece, his designated vocal chords on this planet. A plan of such awesome transposition guarantees that God’s message will sometimes seem silent. But embodiment was his goal, and in that light the Day of Pentecost becomes a perfect metaphor; God’s voice on earth, speaking through human beings in a manner even they could not comprehend.
When yearning for a miraculous resolution to a problem, do we make our loyalty to God contingent on whether he reveals himself yet again in the seen world? If we insist on visible proofs from God, we may well prepare the way for a permanent state of disappointment. True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will.