Here’s a
rhetorical question for any seasoned Christian. Have you ever felt the silence
of God? Have you ever heard that deafening silence that pierced your soul and
drove you to cry out day after day, night after night, begging through bitter-clinched
teeth for God to say something…
ANYTHING?
In my family
of origin, silence was deadly. It was punishment when no words could express
the seething anger one felt towards another. When our hearts burned with
bitterness towards one another so much so that there was positively nothing
nice to say, we’d say nothing at all. Not speaking was the only so-called
restrained thing we could find to do with our hurts that ran far deeper than
any situation at hand.
When I
became a believer in Christ, within the first year, I discovered this Silence
of God. It was the ultimate torture. I only had an earthly frame of reference
for this silence, so to me, it could only mean one thing. I will be 22 years in
my walk with God this week. Just this week, I learned another key lesson about
the silence of God. I wish I could sit in a big round booth at a cozy café with
some sisters in Christ and just discuss this till the management locked the
doors and swept under our feet.
The Bible
was not written in two testaments. Originally, there were no divisions, no
chapters or verses or breaks of any kind except that each book was written on a
separate scroll(s). When we got our bound format, the executive decision was
made by scholars to put the books in a certain order and divided up a specific
way for ease of reading.
Imagine
this. Imagine that you read the book of Malachi and flowed straight into
reading John Chapter 1. Pause here and go try it.
Welcome
back. Now try this. Read Amos 8:11-12, then Malachi 4, and flow straight into
the introduction of Luke Chapter 1 as though it was the first book of the New
Testament before the division of the testaments.
Now let me
put the key segments together and see if you can hear some of what I’ve heard
this week.
Amos 8:11-12
reads:
“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord
God, “When I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread or a thirst
for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord. “People will stagger
from sea to sea and from north even to the east; they will go to and fro to
seek the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.”
Amos
prophesied this great and terrible silence of God, but knowing when the
prophesy was fulfilled and what Jesus said about it teaches us a new and deeper
aspect about God’s desire and love for us. You see, this long, dark silence and
famine for His words is the silence between the testaments! FOUR HUNDRED
YEARS!!!
Recall your
personal experience with the silence of God. It hurt in your bones, at your
core. You became delusional, believing lies about God you never thought you
could conceive, and perhaps trashing your faith altogether or coming close to
it. Some may say it felt like wandering through a desert for 40 days and
nights. Dry like you’ve never felt dry before or since. Empty. Deafening like
the sands of a hundred miles. Dry like the stones that you dreamed into bread. Grit.
Wishing you could sleep off the heat of it. But mostly the emptiest solitary
confinement of the soul. A longing for words that was beyond words.
I read Amos and
naturally asked, “Ok, so when was this prophecy fulfilled?” to which I just
explained became the natural break for the testaments (old and new covenant).
The questions on the heels of the first was this, “Then what were God’s final words
just before the silence?”
Turn to
Malachi 3:1. “Behold, I am going to send
My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek,
will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom
you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the Lord of hosts.
Now see 3:6.
“For I, the Lord do not change; therefore
you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.”
And the last
Malachi dot we’ll connect is 4:4-6. “Remember
the law of Moses My servant, even the statutes and ordinances which I commanded
him in Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I
am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and
terrible day of the Lord. He will
restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the
children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a
curse.”
And those
are the words of comfort before the silence. There are two main points in these
verses. (There are other points in the verses other than the ones I’ve
mentioned.) First, God reminds the people (my paraphrase), “Look [Behold], I’m
about to deal with some sin that needs to be cleansed. I’m about to prepare the
way for something unlike any cleansing you’ve ever known. I will send a herald
to announce My coming so be watching and listening. Don’t grow numb. Remember
these two things: 1) When circumstances change, when lies move in, when
everything falls apart, I, the Lord, do not change. I am for you, not against
you and you can’t change that about me. 2) If you cling to the stories,
teachings, rules, and guidelines to live by, which I gave you through Moses,
you’ll do just fine. You’ll make it through this preparation and receive the
gift of Myself.”
Here’s a
game changer for me. It’s been several years since I thought of God’s silence
as punishment, but that old lie likes to test the boundaries. But if you are
where I was, it seems rather foreign that God would preface His silence with the
love and tenderness of a Father. What an extreme contrast to what I grew up
with! Silence never meant anything good was coming. My 22 years of walking with
God have been peppered with this struggle to believe that, when God didn’t
publish my book when I thought it was supposed to publish, or when the house I
thought He led me to receive from His storehouse of blessings wasn’t “The One”
afterall this year, His intentions are really so much better than what I give
Him credit for. His silence, His withholding for a time is only preparation for
the blessing I didn’t fully understand or else something altogether better than
I’ve imagined. The pangs of silence give birth to blessings bigger than me!
Part 2 of
this article will follow soon. Stay tuned……………
No comments:
Post a Comment