Why, Lord?

I have a friend who lives in South Africa. I've only met her by email through a mutual friend of ours. I use the term "lives" loosely. You see, she suffers from a very rare illness that attacks the mast cells and tricks her body to think its under attack by everyday, normal things such as food, fragrances, medication, etc. It has literally made her allergic to life itself.

How do you explain the silence of God that leads to Life to someone who cannot figure out why she wakes up in the morning? I cannot attempt to give my friend anything that wouldn't sound as trite as anything else she's heard since the onset of this illness.

Joni Erickson Tada wrote in her book When God Weeps about her wrestling with the big Why, Lord? every morning when she woke up and every night when she closed her eyes (she is quadriplegic). She has learned over time how God has used other people to serve her, and how other people have had their lives changed in big and small ways just by the capacity in which God has called them to serve her. She IS ministering to others in her most helpless capacity. She, too, has been changed dramatically by the helping hands and hearts that have surrounded her. But those hands and hearts did not come to her right away. It took a long time for them to show up in her narrow field of vision. She has learned that sometimes we are called to do nothing and that IS something. We want to DO something for God and that typically does not include removing our "useful self" from the equation.

Sometimes the searing pain of God's silence is even worse than the bitter pain in the body. But, God help me if this sounds trite or cold, sometimes He is silent because we refuse to hear how He really IS speaking. We refuse because it is not how we so painfully, desperately want Him and need Him to speak. So many Jews rejected Jesus, the Word of God, because He wasn't the king they thought He would be or because He was a rebel, or........... The Word of God wasn't what they thought it would be so they rejected it altogether.

This disease has stripped my friend of the beautiful young life she had as a wife and new mother. If anyone wants to visit her, they have to strictly adhere to a checklist of do's and don'ts for her safety. She suffers with PTSD because ordinary things have been so traumatic on her. But what if just maybe my friend's life is the forerunner for Jesus in someone else's life? What if my friend's suffering is the call on someone else to do something they thought was too difficult or time consuming only to find out when they actually answer the call, it births a highly effectual, faith-filled walk with God they never knew was possible? What if God has storehouses of rewards for her if she can somehow make it to the end without determining that end for herself? What if she suffers for Christ, not knowing any better reason except that she was called to do it? Would YOU do it? I mean, would you suffer solely so God could get the glory and richly bless you even if there seemed to be no earthly reason to even wake up in the morning (or afternoon)?

I felt the need to draw attention to my friend's suffering in order to apply the three part article I just wrote about the silence of God. It's one thing to give it superficial application or even let it jolt you a little. But the call to strengthen your commitment comes when you find yourself face-to-face with your mortality and you're not sure you can even trust God with that! How far will your faith really go? Will you reject His Word and starve to death because they're not the words you want to hear?

Oh, my heart aches for my friend and the countless others in her shoes. No one ever asks for that when they ask God to use them or seek God to know their calling. But it's not a mean trick played by a manipulative God. You can't possibly know the outcome from this spinning orb in time and space. The answers aren't here to be found. Just ask Job. He never knew the answer to "Why, Lord?" until after he persevered to the end. Don't quit! You can't quit. There are consequences for quitting altogether. Hearing God will be your reward here on earth if you allow yourself to truly hear the Word. Let His love speak through the bitterness. I pray God will give you soundness of mind and heart to redirect your attention to the sound of God speaking through the actions and words of others, to hear Him in the arrival of someone new in your life, to hear Him through His written words or streaming sermons, to hear Him speaking through you out to others who seem to only cause you heartache, to find His love in the pictures of a magazine or uplifting music, to recall His embrace around your heart. God hasn't stopped speaking since He poured His Spirit into you, but in this life, His Word does get drowned out and even tossed to the curb, mistaken for something worthless.

The Silence of God -- Part 3

The Silence of God – Part 3

Words are so very important to God. In my book, Healing Letters, I have a section about how writing a healing letter will help you find words and thereby find meaning and meaningful connections towards forgiveness. Without The Word, God would not have been able to make meaningful connections towards forgiveness either.

Jesus was the Word of God made flesh to dwell among us. I think I distinctly heard someone just mumble, “Big whoop! That’s the earth shattering news you had to share with us?” If it wasn’t enough that God had just been silent for 400 years and didn’t just finally speak, but put flesh around His Word, how about The Word’s response to Satan to make God’s Word even more significant than previously thought.

Jesus’s time of temptation from Satan in the wilderness immediately following His baptism tells us again how important God’s words are. Talk about a famine for the words of God, Jesus had just been wandering in the blazing desert for 40 days and nights. The Israelites wandered to and fro for 400 years not just looking, but starving for a word, and Jesus illustrates that famine as he is starving for bread in his hour of temptation. “The tempter came and said to Him, ‘If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.’ But He answered and said, ‘It is written, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”’” (Matthew 4:3-4). Here, Jesus quotes the ancient writings from Deuteronomy 8:3 to connect the dots for us. (Now would be a good time to recall that empty feeling and whirlwind of emotions in your gut when you have heard and felt the silence of God.) The 400 year famine for a word from the Lord was no secret to Jesus. He knew very well the mindset of God's people when He was born. He knew John before the two of them were born (John leaped in the womb!) Jesus was not oblivious to the starvation of the people to hear from God and He was well aware of His purpose to satisfy.

 

I never felt the gravity of Jesus’s response during this temptation until I understood the significance of the prophecy of Malachi in correlation to the Silence of God followed by His Word coming to tabernacle among us. Jesus didn’t have to turn the stones into bread, He WAS the bread, the Bread of Life, the Manna in the wilderness, (John 6:35). And for the first time, because He was fully human, he felt the literal, physical need for food, the hunger pain of the body He’d never felt before just as the body of people starved for Him. Up to then, Jesus, being the Word Himself, could not experience the spiritual starvation for a word from the Lord, so he reversed the starvation for himself to know our pain. I believe Jesus finally experienced spiritual starvation when He cried out in His dying moments, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” The soldiers then offered him an anesthetic drink to quench the agonizing thirst. His heart was not craving or starving for a drink though. It was starving for God to make things right.

How ironic that millions of overweight people have tried to feed their spiritual hunger with physical food, and underweight people have tried to starve their physical needs the way their soul starves spiritually. I will end this three part article with the words of Christ from these verses in John 6:32-35; 41; 45-51…

Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world.

I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.

I am the bread that came down out of heaven.

It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me. Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.

The Silence of God -- Part 2

The Silence of God – Part 2

In Luke Chapter 1, we find the first prophet in all the land since Malachi, over 400 years prior. A prophet brought words from the Lord since the Holy Spirit had not come to indwell all believers, and no one heard from the Lord for those 400 years despite searching high and low for anyone who had heard a Word. They clung to God’s previous teachings and versed themselves in what words and guidelines they already had that came from Moses. Some had stepped in and put themselves in charge as Pharisees, teachers of the Law, and added with some supposed divine authority many other laws.

What Luke has to say about this prophet that would come in the spirit of Elijah is the fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy. He begins with Zacharias – the Levite and husband of Elizabeth who was cousin to Mary, fiancé of Joseph – who was serving his turn tending the altar of incense in the temple this particular year. It is no coincidence that the altar of incense was the representation of the prayers of the people, a place of conversing with God. During this precise duty, the angel Gabriel visited Zacharias with a word from the Lord. That alone would make a man speechless, but the fact that Zacharias laughed in true disbelief at the message is what made him literally speechless for the next 9 ½ months during his wife’s pregnancy.  There’s that theme of silence again.

Jesus confirmed that John was the Elijah the people were waiting for but he was not the Messiah they were waiting for as they thought Elijah would be (Matthew 11:14; 17:11-13).

Now, what’s really exciting is that Malachi’s very last words, and thereby God’s last words were, “Watch for the forerunner to prepare people’s hearts for the Messiah, the sonship of God the Father.” Then the forerunner shows up. We see in Matthew that many people missed their Elijah, the forerunner. But notice how God shows up.

John 1:1, 14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. …And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.

FINALLY!!! God speaks!!! John was the first prophet since Malachi but he was born only 6 months before Jesus was so he wasn’t talking when Jesus was born. No, Jesus was God in the flesh, the living Word from the living God. The silence was broken by the birth, even conception of Christ!

God even provided every opportunity for people to hear Him. If you do the gestational math of Luke 1, you’ll find that, because the Jews watched for Elijah to return at Passover (they even set an empty seat at the Seder table for him and left the door open for his return), then it’s most likely that John was born around Passover. If this is true, then that places Jesus’s birth very near the Feast of Tabernacles. That would fit Herod’s wicked tactics to tell the Jews they could not come to Jerusalem for the last of their three pilgrimage feasts, but instead had to return to their town of origin, which led to Jesus being born in a manger. The point is, the Feast of Tabernacles is also called the Feast of Booths. Jesus’s blood ran rich with the Tabernacling metaphor. Any attentive student of the Word should have been able to see Christ for who He was. He was the Word made flesh to tabernacle among us. He was the manna in the wilderness when the Israelites tabernacled on their way to the Promised Land.

 

Part 3 of this article will follow soon. Stay tuned……………

 

 

The Silence of God -- Part 1

I learned something over the past week that feels like it could corrupt the power-hungry soul with the thrust of its Truth if kept contained!  It MUST be shared!

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……………