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If we are ever tempted to confuse God with life, I would encourage each one of us to go back
to the Gospels and read the story of Jesus. If anyone didn't deserve the pain that he got, it was Jesus. The cross of Jesus
Christ demolished for me for all time that notion that life is supposed to be fair.
Difficult as the dark, lonely
times may be, they may produce stronger faith than those times when God is clearly visible. In leading the children of Israel,
God was certainly evident. They could look out their windows and see a pillar of fire or cloud. Every morning they ate breakfast
that God provided for them. But it got old after a while. The miracles got old. They no longer thanked God for them. Instead,
they started grumbling about not having the pumpkins and watermelons of Egypt. They seemed to look for ways to defy God. We
don't look back on the Israelites as a people of great faith. God was so close that it stunted their growth.
In
stark contrast to the petty grumbling of the Israelites stands the trust of Job, forged on the anvil of adversity. The prelude
to the book of Job is amazing. You've got a scene where God and Satan are discussing the human experiment. Satan is saying,
Job doesn't love You - he loves his ranch, his happy family. You take those things away and he's not going to love You anymore.
We tend to focus on the high points, the exciting
times when God directly intervenes, we have heard lots of sermons about the first chapter of Exodus, where God starts moving
to free the children of Israel from slavery - the burning bush, the 10 plagues, the parting of the Red Sea. But just before
those incidents there's a little verse that says, in effect, that for 400 years there was no word from the Lord. Four hundred
years - that's 100 times as long as The Republic of Kenya has been in existence!
Christians sometimes give the
mistaken message that God is equally apparent in people's lives at all times. I've seen Christians having stickers on their
Bibles that say `If you feel far from God, guess who moved?' The implication is that God hasn't moved - it must be you. Yet
I see some passages in the Bible that refer to incidents in which God clearly moved. For example, in 2 Chronicles there's
a story about King Hezekiah. It says very plainly that God left him to test him that He might see what was in his heart. We
also can see that bout one third of the Psalms, deal with the "dark times" of life. Psalm 23 is a wonderful expression
of faith and has been a comfort to people over the years. But back up one page. Psalm 22 starts off, `My God, my God, why
have You forsaken Me?' It's the psalm that Jesus quoted when He was on the cross."
The book of Job deals with
hard questions about God more directly than any other biblical account. Many Bible scholars will tell you that Job was probably
the first Bible book written. It's very significant to me that God started off with those toughest questions first. I've never
read an argument or a doubt about God that doesn't appear in the book of Job. Job really laid it out before God. Over the
thousands of years since Job was written, people have continued to wrestle with the silence of God and how to make sense of
it.
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