“When God Seems Silent”
Exodus 32:1-7 (The Message)
The story is told of six WWII Navy pilots who left their aircraft carrier on a mission. After searching for enemy submarines, they tried to return to their ship shortly after dark. But the captain ordered a blackout of all lights on the ship. The frantic pilots radioed repeatedly asking for just one light so they could see to land. They were told that the blackout could not be lifted. After several appeals the ship’s radio was turned off and they broke communication with the pilots. The end result led to the pilots crashing in the ocean.
I doubt there’s a person here who hasn't had a dark night experience when God didn’t seem to hear your desperate cry for help or answers. Worse than that it seemed he broke contact with you and you felt dreadfully alone.
When these times come to us, we go through stages of questions, anger, frustration, doubt and fear. When we feel these things we become vulnerable to behaving in ways we thought could never be possible for us. We’re not that different to the people in our text. Let’s consider some of their regretful and dangerous responses when God seems silent – or even absent – and learn through their lives.
Looking to our text, one of the first warnings leads us to consider that they gave in to
1. Desecrating their relationship with God
God’s people were in transition. Theirs was a situation of significant change. For 400 years their forefathers endured oppressive manual labour and extremely cruel and abusive bosses. However they did have places to sleep and food to eat. This generation in our text was born in slavery so they’d been use to leaders always present, always giving orders, always guiding them. As they set out on a journey never imagined, to a land only a dream, everything is different. Having now spent six weeks without their leader, Moses, who had been in a mountain talking to God, they yearned for the way things were. Old habits die hard. They went to Aaron, God’s chosen priest and practiced idol worship which was very common in their land of captivity.
They complained that Moses was “taking forever” (v1). The people questioned Moses’ leadership. When his decision-making did not sit well with the people their idea of fixing the problem was ditch the leader; find someone else or something else to replace him. Negative attitudes toward God’s leadership team tend to have repercussions on our relationship with God, especially when that leadership sincerely seeks to follow God’s direction. The fallout for rejecting God-appointed leaders is huge.
Leaders are critical to the success of any ministry or corporate structure. I well recall the shift in the International and National political climates when the office changed hands from President Clinton to President Bush and then to President Obama. My comment is not intended as negative toward one any more than positive toward another. It is simply to emphasize the value leadership plays in any given structure as leaders set the tone of the church, community or nation. Furthermore
We teeter in relationship with God when life doesn't make sense. C.S. Lewis, Irish Oxford Scholar and well-known author for his Narnia fiction series for children, wrote after the death of his wife, “Where is God? ...Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” Lewis articulates what many of us feel when our world appears to be falling apart.
We are dangerously tempted to desecrate relationships when tough times are upon us. It happens to the best intentioned people, even people of outstanding character and commitment. Author John Ortberg captures our dark night that leads us to desecrate relationships. He writes, “When it is so easy to see God all around me (in trees, in birds, in nature), why is it so hard to feel his presence – especially when I need him most?” He goes on to speak of the winter of the soul, saying, “We need a way of holding on to God when it feels as if God has let go of us…The hardest part of winter is that God seems gone.” And so we crave God but he seems absent.
There are haunting questions and experiences that can make skeptics of the most faithful and resolved.
They gave in to
2. Desecrating behaviour
To make the point of how terrible desecrating behaviour is, I want to share with you the novel written by Peter De Vrie. The novel is called The Blood of the Lamb. It includes the story of Don Wanderhope, whose eleven year old daughter had leukemia. The bone marrow transplant was working toward his daughter’s remission when an infection swept through the ward and she died. Wanderhope had come to the hospital with a cake for his daughter, went back to the church where he prayed for her healing and threw the cake at the crucifix. The cake landed just below the crown of thorns and covered Jesus’ face in dripping, coloured icing.
If any of us could witness such behaviour we might shout judgement, drag them outside and tell them never to come back.
The image of that action helps us understand the desecrating behaviour of our text. God’s people took matters into their own hands. They looked to God’s appointed priest, who discredits his leadership before he gets to his new office. The people pressed Aaron, “Do something” (v1). Instead of “being somebody” in a climate of anxiety they chose to do something. Their reckless behaviour led to a bad decision – “Make gods for us” (v1). Terrance Fretheim commentates: “The ironic effect is that the people forfeit the very divine presence they had hoped to bind more closely to themselves.” He goes on to teach how the gold calf was not an effort to replace Yahweh but to replace their leader, Moses, with something tangible and present. Another source says of this passage, “Their material minds depended entirely upon some tangible evidence of the Divine presence.”
When we face tough times, there is the real threat of idolatry. We may not do so knowingly but who of us has never done something to shape situations to more favourable outcomes because we grew anxious and afraid and didn’t wait for God to show up? Sadly our desires and actions often result in pushing God away from us rather than drawing us toward him. This is a serious problem for men. You know what I’m referring to. You’re talking to your wife or children or mother for that matter, who is relaying some problem or situation that causes them trouble and frustration. What’s our first response? We try to fix it. My good lady once said (well, she said it more than once), “I don’t want you to fix it; I just want you to listen.”
We look for God in tangible ways – new job, any job, or our answers for healing prayer. We strain to see a favourable solution to a tough situation we’re asking God to deal with. When things begin to work out the way we expected we give him credit and praise him for what he’s doing. But when the tangible doesn’t occur we wonder what’s happened to God or question what we’re doing wrong to deserve this kind of treatment. Why is God ignoring me? That’s the dangerous box of “tangible evidence of the Divine presence.”
It is so hard to simply listen. God doesn’t want us running around trying to fix things. He wants us to hear the words of Psalm 27:14 “Wait for the Lord. Be strong and let your heart take courage. Yes, wait for the Lord.”
They gave in to
3. Desecrating their purpose
One thing led to another. Someone said this passage implies that “many of the follies and most of the crimes [people] do, in fact, happen rather than are intended.”
Aaron would report to Moses that the people brought their gold, he threw it in the fire and ‘out came this gold calf’. The gold, given them by the Egyptians as a sign of deliverance, became a sign of slavery and bondage no better than when they were in Egypt.
Aaron may have tried to redeem the situation and likely was not intentionally rejecting God. He designated a “Feast day to God” (v5). They were well-intentioned but how often have we been sincere about something but found to be sincerely wrong. The feast we’re told “turned into a wild party” (v6) and God told Moses to get back to camp because the people “have fallen to pieces.” (v7). God called them “stiff-necked people” (v9) or “stubborn, hard-headed people” to which one commentator paints the picture of an animal stiffening it’s neck muscles to fight against the direction it’s owner tries to pull it in. (i.e. Donkey base-ball early 2000s!)
Sometimes – not always – the pain and trouble we experience is the result of not seeing the bigger picture or trusting that God has a plan.
So, what now? Why broken relationships, corrupt behaviour and life that is empty of purpose? There could be many, many answers but I think they can be summed up in one underlying truth.
We fail to understand as did the people in our text that
4. God was shaping destiny
The events that led to this point in Exodus 31 actually started in chapter 24 (actually God began shaping their destiny when he told Abram in Genesis 15:13 that his descendants would be enslaved for 400 years at which point he would come to deliver his people). God invited Moses to go up the mountain. They talk of things to come as their identity as God’s people takes shape. They discussed the Ark of the Covenant, the Chest, the Table and Lampstand, Tabernacle details, the Dwelling, Courtyards and Altars. The Ten Commandments were issued in this journey on the They move on to details about Oil, Priestly garments and Vestments. There’s Ephods, Breastplates, Robes, Atonement money and taxes. The list continues through to this point in our story. That’s what was keeping Moses out of town for six weeks.
All this time, when the people thought Moses and God had vanished off the scene they were in session shaping the destiny of God’s chosen Nation. The people confused silence for absence or maybe disconnected from how they were feeling. It led to devastating results.
The point of all of this is the good news that silence is not absence. It is God acting in the best interests of His children!
Henry Nouwen authored more than 40 books and was pastor to the mentally handicapped people of l’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto. His words on loneliness and solitude are fitting for our needs because when God seems silent or absent we can feel desperately alone or lonely. Nouwen writes, “Loneliness is one of the greatest sources of suffering today. It is the disease of our time. But as Christians we are called to convert our loneliness into solitude. We are called to experience our aloneness not as a wound but as a gift – as God’s gift – so that in our aloneness we might discover how deeply we are loved by God.”
If you feel God is nowhere to be found, know that he is as close as the mention of His name! When you think He’s not listening, He’s working for your good! When you think nothing makes sense, God is shaping your destiny! When God seems silent, embrace silence as God working for your higher good. Choose to see life above the temporal pain and challenges and aim higher, see further and know God more deeply!
WRAP
- Life can corrupt our relationships especially our relationship with God
- We can behave in ways that we thought wasn’t possible. Remember 1 Corinthians 10:12, “Let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall.” It can happen to you.
- We can lose sight of what our purpose is, what we’re suppose to be focusing on.
- When things seem to be falling apart, remember that God is shaping your destiny!
