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.