Silenced by Joy
Is the present, personal, and loving Christian God actually absent, distant, and invisible?
Since time immemorial, a significant reason why people have rejected Christianity is because they think that God is absent, distant, and invisible. The average human accepts that there is a higher power, but struggles to accept that this power is personal. We are naturally agnostic. We are naturally wrong, too.
Christianity claims to be a set of facts - to be the truth. It isn’t an auspicious agreement that you make after God reveals Himself to you. The creator of all doesn’t try to prove Himself.
Where did we get the anthropocentric idea that God is obliged to reveal Himself to us? He didn’t tell us. On the contrary, the Bible makes His unseen nature perfectly clear.
God is often called invisible.1 ‘Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father2… You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form3 … God, who alone has immortality, whom no man has seen or can see4… No one has ever seen God.’5
And Job laments, ‘Were He to pass by me, I would not see Him; Were He to move past me, I would not perceive Him.’6
Mankind has the false expectation that God should reveal Himself to us. But He is under no obligation to do so. How incredible is it that He still does.
We also have an expectation of the manner in which God should reveal Himself - something dramatic and supernatural. In the Old Testament, God met with people like this, and Jesus of course did too. There’s no reason to assume that He has stopped.
We all know people who say they have radically experienced God. There is a huge body of this anecdotal evidence. Perhaps even we have met Him and have forgotten or didn’t recognize Him. Madmen claim to encounter God, but it would take the maddest man of all to argue that only madmen encounter God.
The radical encounters with God in the Bible were the climaxes of epic stories. God met with the Israelites to save them after 430 years of slavery. Jesus healed the crippled man by the pool who had been there for 38 years.7 For someone with no relationship with God to expect the same is like walking into a packed theatre expecting the orchestra to immediately play the final cadenza.
These supernatural encounters are of course the exception. God is always waiting to meet with us through the beauty of nature, people, art, and everything else. He is there in the love we have for our friends, in that unknown feeling of longing.
He is there in the everyday miracles; that birds sing, that grass is green, and that clouds float. ‘For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.’8
The book of Elijah teaches us to listen for the ‘gentle whisper’ of God.9 His voice was not in the earthquake nor the fire. How often are we not listening for that whisper, but rather for a roar.
It is mysterious that the creator of the universe would whisper to His subjects. And this is what we forget, that God is enigmatic. His thoughts and ways are different to ours.10
There is no greater adventure than a relationship with this invisible God, for we will never understand Him fully. It takes faith to follow something invisible… ‘Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’11
It is mysterious when Jesus says, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’12 And that God hides great mysteries from the wise but reveals them to little children.13 Only the humble, joyful, loving, and those with wonder will see God. The arrogant and lofty will not.
Perhaps the greatest error that humans make is to assume that if they saw God, they would believe in Him. The Israelites saw God part the sea and rain down bread from the sky, but they still ultimately rejected Him. Pharoah saw the ten plagues, yet his heart was hardened against God. Judas saw Christ perform many miracles, and He betrayed Him to death. The psalmist says, ‘In spite of his wonders, they did not believe.’14
The Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign from heaven. Many people ask God for a sign. Jesus replies to them, ‘Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.’15
The Pharisees’ mindset was sceptical. They wanted Jesus to prove Himself. And our mindset is often the same. Perhaps if we changed our minds - if we changed our hearts - Jesus would change His appearance.
Many people have of course come to Jesus by seeing Him. And yet Christ says, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.’16 I think most people fall into this latter category, and we are blessed.
All this talk of seeing God forgets that He ‘dwells in unapproachable light’17, and that He can be terrifying and dreadful.18 People in the Bible died from just seeing Him. God says, ‘You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!’19 We should not jump into the furnace to get warm…
Till We Have Faces is CS Lewis’ final novel, where he explores the invisible nature of God by retelling the tale of Cupid and Psyche. It was considered by Lewis and JRR Tolkien to be his best piece of work.
(I am about to wildly summarize and undersell this true masterpiece, so I therefore urge you to read it yourself).
The protagonist of the story, Orual (Psyche’s older sister), accuses the Gods of being blind, deaf, and indifferent to human pain. She says, ‘If they had an honest intention to guide us, why is their guidance not plain?’ She longs to know what the God’s expect of us… ‘They would give no clear sign, though I begged for it.’
Orual wants the Gods to face mankind honestly and tell us what to do… ‘What sort of God would he be who dares not show his face?’ She wonders if they know what it feels like to be human.
Orual says, ‘The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.’
At the end of the novel, God reveals Himself a second time to Orual after many years. And by then, ‘the voice of God had not changed in all those years, but I had.’
God reveals Himself, and thus shows her where the beauty comes from. In pursuing God, she had changed. She is silenced by joy.
And He was indeed right with Orual all along. He can clearly be seen even in His invisibility. Moses saw Him who is unseen.20 We see Him when we love others. We see Him in ourselves when we are pursuing Him. Why should ‘our hearts not dance’ to know that He never leaves us?
God often doesn’t answer us or reveal Himself to us because we don’t know what it is we are asking. How can He face us when we do not have faces?
‘I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You yourself are the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?’
1 Timothy 1:17 & Colossians 1:15
John 6:46
John 5:37
1 Timothy 6:16
1 John 4:12
Job 9:11
John 5:1-18
Romans 1:20
1 Kings 19:12
Isaiah 55:8
Hebrews 11:1-3
Matthew 18:3
Matthew 11:25
Psalm 78:32
Mark 8:12
John 20:29
1 Timothy 6:16
Job 13:11
Exodus 33:20
Hebrews 11:27
Thanks Michael
Great thoughts and well put together again.
It's interesting that people don't know God, for they also don't that we are his son's:
Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knows us not, because it knew him not.
Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.
(1Jn 3:1-2)
When we have faces of Spirit then we will see him for who he is:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1Cor 13:12)
Some thoughts on knowing God:
God does tell us in scripture that if we seek him with our whole heart, and cry out to him, then he may be merciful and generous and give us understanding about him and his way of life. (Prov 2:1-5, James 4:6-7)
We can therefore initiate a relationship with God, and he may decide to respond to us, because he tells us that I love those who love me; and those who seek me early shall find me. (Prov 8:17)
However, God may not decide to respond to us and give us the understanding of his existence.
Why not?
Because God has determined to call some people during this life, and all other people later, after they have died and been resurrected into a second life. (John 12:39-43, Acts 24:15, 1Cor 1:24-27, Rev 20:5-6)
So, we can’t actually prove God exists- only God can prove to us that he exists- by opening our mind to his understanding. (1Cor 2:6-16)