Intimacy with God: Chapter Five

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"In the hour of trial, each man must have his own convictions, or he will find himself with none." -A. Lloyd Jones

The Contemplative Monks, particularly St. John of the Cross, talk of the Dark Night of the Soul. It is said by the monks that if you are coming into intimacy with God, you will inevitably experience this Dark Night. These times of darkness and silence can range from periodical to chronic, from momentary ditches to long valleys. They can be the result personal tragedy or loss, a major life change, or spring from our own insecurities. The most vividly illustrated example is recorded in the book of Job, the record of one long agonizing silence. But Job was no exception, David had his valleys too, and Christ his Gethsemane. Silence takes as many different forms as there are individuals, but if we are in the process of growing closer to God we are bound to encounter "growing pains". Centuries ago John Bunyan wrote of the ebb and flow of perception - the darkness and silence that is part of our Christian experience:

It seemed very strange to me that though God sometimes visits my soul with wonderful blessed things, yet sometime afterwards, for hours at a time, I have been filled with such darkness that I could not even remember what the comfort was that had refreshed me before. Sometimes I have gotten so much out of my Bible that I could hardly stand it. At other times the whole Bible has been as dry as a stick to me.

The story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus offers us profound insight into the nature and character of God in our lives in times of silence. Mary and Martha wrote to Jesus that their brother Lazarus was sick and asked Jesus to come. It is clear from the text that Mary knew that Jesus loved her and her brother. This is the same Mary that washed Jesus' feet with her tears, and in the letter the sisters refer to Lazarus as "the one you love", but Jesus chose to remain where he was for two days. He only conveyed the message "This sickness will not end in death".
When Christ did not come, and her brother died, Mary was devastated. When she has most needed God's help he was inactive, and his promise that the sickness would not end in death turned out to be, in Mary's eyes, false. She felt abandoned, alone, helpless, and without hope. Even if we know that God loves us as Mary did, silence is crushing. Sir Robert Anderson writes of the silence of God in the face of suffering:

The heart grows sick at the appalling story and we turn away with a dull but baseless hope that it may be in part at least untrue. But the facts are too terrible to make exaggeration in the record of them possible. Torn by wild beasts in the arena, torn by men as merciless as wild beasts, and, far more hateful, in the torture chambers of the Inquisition. His people have died, with faces turned to Heaven, and hearts upraised in prayer to God; but the Heaven has seemed as hard as brass, and the God of their prayers as powerless as themselves or as callous as their pursecutors!

Four days after Lazarus' death, Jesus came. Mary fell at his feet in tears and said to him "Lord if you had been here, he wouldn't have died". Partially because we know the story and its outcome already we half-expect Jesus to respond by saying something like "Oh ye of little faith did you not know that this is for the glory of God?". But he doesn't. His response is extraordinary and offers great insight into God's character. The Greek word translated in the English as "deeply moved" means to make the snorting noise of a horse. In other words he was so overwhelmed with the sorrow that it literally knocked the wind out of him. It goes on to describe him as troubled in his spirit - in his heart Jesus was instinctually insulted at the injustice of suffering.
To anyone familiar with grief, these two reactions: on the one hand shock - an intellectual and spiritual numbness, and on the other hand anger at the evil of suffering - are exactly how we feel. Even though he knows that in a few minutes Lazarus will rise from the dead, the next thing he does is to weep. Not some pious controlled socially appropriate tears, but hot honest choking tears. He is deeply and intimately involved with us in our pain. God suffers with us, feels every anguish, knows every doubt. Being infinite does not mean merely infinitely large, but infinitely small as well, so that God understands and experiences our silence, our pain, with us, not just in a theoretical way, but deeply and completely. Sometimes in our suffering, in the midst of silence we have the wind knocked out of us, and there is nothing left to pray with. You can be sure that at that moment God is praying for you with groans that words cannot express.
That Jesus was troubled is perhaps even more shocking to our theology than that he was overwhelmed. Like Job's summertime friends, in the face of suffering and pain we often feel the need to call evil good in a misguided attempt to defend God. God uses suffering in our lives to develop trust in our relationship together, but that does not mean that the evil, the suffering becomes good. Lazarus' death was not good.

Evil remains evil no matte how much good God may be pleased to reveal. Romans 8:28 does not say that God makes all thinks good, but rather that "in all things God works for the good of those who love him." Confidence in God's love, presence, And providence does not require that we deny the objective reality of evil or say that pain really does not hurt. Jesus delighted in doing God's will, but he did not delight to go the cross. The text says that Jesus "For the joy set before him endured the cross" (Heb 12:2).

God used Lazarus' death to show them and us that no mater how bad it gets, God is still in control. Mary knew that Jesus could have healed him, but she did not know that he was even stronger than death. Paul writes that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ - nothing. - and now Mary knew this first hand.
Though this was a crucial lesson for Mary to learn, it did not make the death of Lazarus a good thing. Jesus felt this, and suffered it with Mary. God is not sitting comfortably in Heaven in our times of silence observing us from a far. God knows and experiences our pain vitally and intimately. This is not some celestial game of Chess for God. Silence hurts, and it is important to know that we are not abandoned. God understands, God entered the dark night of the soul at Gethsemane, crying on the cross "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?". God suffered alone so that we, even in the silence, need never suffer alone. God was there, and even when we can't see, God is here.

DOUBT

In the last chapter we saw a vision of deep trust and intimacy, but what do we do in the meantime, when this knowledge is somewhere between our head and our heart? What is especially hard about doubt, insecurity, and silence is that they are by their nature in unfamiliar territory for us. Mary had no problem believing that Jesus could heal her brother. She had experienced this. Her doubts came when he died. This was uncharted territory. When all the outward props are removed and were left alone with just the trust we've built, our own inner doubts and insecurities can become clamorous and loud against a background of silence, and when this happens, our response is critical.
Doubt is a lot like anger - it can get bottled up, eating away at your soul, chewed over unhealthily like gossip, or it can be dealt with constructively. A vital distinction to make in this is between the question and the emotion - between intellectual doubt, which is asking hard questions that pull away our blinders and bring us closer to the truth that is in God, and emotional doubt which is largely based on fears and unrelated past experiences.
The nature of emotional doubt is often more of a vague, far away feeling than any particular thought. since it has no basis in reality, being based rather on our insecurities and fears, it thrives on impressions rather than logic. The last thing it wants you to do is to think clearly. Then it would be discovered for what it is - a lie. Instead it gets us looking down at all the problems in and around us, and keeps us from looking up to God. It fills our eyes, so it's all we can see. It separates us from God.
These emotional doubts can be divided up in to two types: Those regarding God, and those regarding ourselves. In the first category, we may think God is unapproachable - maybe God's mad about something. God seems at times impersonal and frightening. These could be the result of something we've been told, or maybe we had a bad relationship and are transferring that to God. If your father beat you it is confusing to think of God as your father. If everyone youÕve ever loved has deserted you, you will most likely struggle with the fear of God leaving you, too. This projected slander clouds how we can love God and receive love from God.
Another less obvious way emotional doubt crops up is indirectly, by doubting ourselves. We think we are so fake, worthless, and sinful that God couldn't possibly want us. The question though, is not who are we, but who is God. It is unlikely that our evil could exhaust God's love.
When emotional doubts are exposed by times of silence, they reveal areas in our lives where trust has not yet developed. In this way they act as a sort of berometer, showing how far the trust in our relationship with God has developed - and by the same token, they present an opportunity for that trust to grow when we decide to believe - despite our fears and circumstance - in God's present love. In these times, the best advise I have ever heard was that of Os Guinness. He counsels us to suspend judgment, keep faith, and do the last thing God told us to do. Never at a loss for a literary antithesis, he explains,

Faith may be in the dark about guidance, but it is never in the dark about God. What God is doing now may be a mystery, but who God is is not. So faith can remain itself and retain integrity by suspending judgment. Jesus underwrites such faith when he promises "I am the light of the world - no follower of mine shall wander in the darkness." Jesus does not say that we will never walk in the dark but that we need not wander in the dark, or have a way of life at home in darkness .

The darkness won't last forever, and I think you'll find as you grow in your relationship with God that these times of silence will become fewer and farther inbetween. We will always have trials, but not always of insecurity. In the meantime we can suspend judgment, remembering that what we do understand of God is good and loving and merciful, and what we do not understand we must commit to GodÕs care in faith and dependency.

PAGAN WINGS

C.S. Lewis described pain as God's megaphone to get our attention. When his wife died of cancer and he wrote "A Grief Observed", a collection of his thoughts at the time, he did not wax quite so philosophical. Like a child when it cries, "Mommy, why does it have to hurt?" the answer we seek in our pain is not so much one of explanation but of relief. What we mean is "Make it stop."
One reason we feel such pain is that we usually feel it alone. Bertrand Russell, when he still believed in God, said that he kept his doubts to himself for fear of destroying those around him. Those oppressed doubts destroyed him, however. One can only assume that many are contained in his infamous book "Why I am not a Christian". Our problem is not honesty, but isolation.
In Jesus' dark night of the soul in Gethsemane he pleaded with his friends to help him. So far the story fits in well with our rugged individualist hero picture of Jesus. As the story is often conveyed, he asks his friends for help, and they let him down, but our hero (played by Bruce Wilis) goes on to do it alone, the way God intended. He asks for help of course, but if you want something done right...
But this is not the way it really happened. Jesus was in anguish. He cried out to God in desperation. He said he was overwhelmed to the point of death, and finally needed the help of an angel to go on.
Think about that for a moment. Jesus would not have been able to go to the cross without help. He couldn't make it on his own, and this was perfectly within the will of God for his life. As Christians we are happy to give help, but reluctant to admit that we need it. Jesus demonstrated though, that even in the most important test of his life, it was not a sin to need help. When he asked for the help of his friends, he really wanted it, and really needed it. And to be fair to the disciples, the Bible says were asleep because they were exhausted from sorrow, not because they were lazy or callous.
We need each other. This not only applies to the comfort we can provide one another in times of emotional doubt, but to the intellectual side of doubt as well - having the courage together to work through the hard questions we have involving injustice, suffering, personal sin, and a myriad of theological concerns. Questioning is not an immature phase to get out of your system, but the expression of an honest and dependent soul.
Because we are human, and live perpetually within the blinders of culture, corruption in our thinking is inevitable and understandable. Therefore we must continually test, continually ask, continually seek. George Bernard Shaw said, "All great truths begin as blasphemies." We must dare to ask the hard questions, to tear it down and build again. Our faith must be of such a mettle that it can withstand the arduous questions that refine it - questioning ourselves, (even our own concepts of God), but at the same time clinging to God. This way we can prune the tree without sawing the limb out from under us.
Most of our answers though, unfortunately tend to be the one paragraph type, meant to appease non-Christian skeptics. Questions are often mistakenly discouraged as a sign of weak faith, or at best, patiently tolerated in the hopes that the seeker will "grow out of it". At worst they are seen as a malicious smokescreen to cover up pride. There are many mature, trusting, humble Christians though, who know the issues better are tormented by these same questions. In "Pagan Wings", Jace Seavers asks what so many of us are afraid to,

Why have you cast us here so stranded,
Logged in the swallows of regret
Shot down by grief and empty handed,
Shouldering our souls with debt?

Why have you not broke down the silence,
And spoke with your celestial tongue?
WeÕve called to you with inner violence,
YouÕve left the snares we've set unsprung

Why do you hide from the shafts of man?
Is there safety in the dark?
Why is the past pregnant with legions
Of those who've searched for guiding sparks?

If our hearts are choked with evil
Why refuse to heal us now?
If you've the means to cure the feeble
Why won't you cast your pearls to sows?

Questions are the mortal cancer
Sweeping down on pagan wings
If I expect to find an answer
Why do I fear to ask these things?

I have found that when I have tried the foundations of Heaven, God did not fall off the thrown. But my faith was made more sure, and the misconceptions came to the surface like dross. Truth can withstand this scrutiny, while the cultural biases and errors are exposed. Most of this book was written because of such scrutiny - facing doubts, agonizing questions, and fears. The hard stick looks more sturdy than the green one, but in the wind one breaks and the other bends. Through this lifestyle of dependency, even in times of silence we can have the faith to confront life with an open face, to see reality and not be crushed by it.

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