February 23 2022
IS GOD GONE?
There’s a curious text in Deuteronomy 32: 20:
I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.
That’s us. There is good side to that: God has granted us independence: we resemble young people, leaving the parental home and striking out on our own. Yes, God is the ultimate pedagogue, full well knowing that the best way to learn is to try. The Bible tells us so: in 1 Thessalonians 5: 21 he urges us: “to test everything; hold on to what is good.” That’s what we did up to a point.
Looking back 2,000 years, and knowing a bit of history, we have come a long way, especially in the last 50 years. After a quiet 19th Century, the next 100 years became the bloodiest ever, with 10% of all those alive in 1900, dying prematurely in the following 50 years, due to 2 World Wars, the Spanish Flu and Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine.
Then from 1950 on, the world saw tremendous economic growth and an astounding increase in Carbon-inspired technology, feeding a population explosion, quadrupling in my life-time from 2 billion to almost 8 billion.
However, in our supposed self-sufficiency we eliminated God from our world. Without God history is reverting toward barbarism. We have an authoritarian strongman in Russia, invading his neighbor, a rapidly expanding dictatorial China, waging genocide on its people and threatening Taiwan, cyberattacks playing havoc with the world order, democracy in retreat everywhere, thuggish populists across the West undermining democracy, from Turkey to Hungary to, yes, the USA as well. Even the weather is in tune with the global barbaric behavior, boding ill for the coming summer, with the CO2 count galloping and the far more lethal methane in the Arctic bubbling up out of control.
APPROACHING THE END.
More than 30 years ago I bought THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD by Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of Hebrew: an outstanding book, displaying tremendous insight into both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible.
Friedman deals extensively with both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, two troubled authors of tremendous talent; two brilliant men brought up in strict religious families, struggling with the concept of the death of God, both proclaiming that “Without God, all is permitted”: today’s headline.
Friedman points out that when God is close-by, a daily or semi-permanent presence, people often rebel. He points to the Israel tribe, wandering in the desert for 40 years, daily provided with ‘angel’ food, with wonder water, with a cloud by day, sheltering them from the hot sun, yet always yelling against Yahweh. He concludes that people cannot stand God’s proximity.
I see some similarity there in our church practises by hiding behind rites and confessions, shielding us also from God’s immediate presence through the intermediary of priest or minister, because we are afraid to deal directly with God and Jesus.
God is gone into hiding.
God is gone for those who, in the name of God, rebel against the legally elected government. God is gone for those who, in the name of God, destroy his creation. God is gone for those who, in the name of God, condemn colored, homosexual, transgender, Islam people. God is gone for those who, in the name of God, wage war. God is gone for those who, after destroying the earth, expect to go to heaven.
When Jesus was tempted by the Devil, (see Matthew 4: 8) the Satan offered him the entire world. Just before He was crucified, Jesus prayed to protect you and me in a world dominated by the Evil One, a world to which we don’t belong (John 17). We belong to the world to come, because in today’s world we have eliminated God, who has hidden his face to see how we manage without Him.
Now, through his wounded world, God is unleashing his righteous anger, through which, combined with human evil, God is showing his irresistible powers to punish us for mortally molesting his holy work of art, as infinite as God is infinite.
Yes, on the public scene, God has gone, Today, in our arrogance and ultimate stupidity, we were convinced that we could shape the cosmos in our own image, with satellites and space journeys, with clever machines and instant communication: a world without God.
God is gone, but not in the lives of his people. I feel his presence continually. But from the public scene he has been barred, because we, by destroying his creation, have killed him also.
After the Flood, God promised not to repeat that process, fully well knowing that this time around, by hiding his face, we ourselves would accomplish the world’s destruction.
Now, with The End in sight, the world is ready for renewal, already. accomplished by Jesus Christ. Maranatha.