There exists a reality beyond what’s immediate and most apparent. The scriptures speak of it repeatedly, from apocalyptic writings of the prophets to Jesus’s own discourses in the gospels; as time beyond this time, as the truth beyond current events. Frequently this is how the biblical authors confronted situations which might otherwise lead to despair: they sought reason to rejoice and take comfort, even when circumstances didn’t make it easy.
I know plenty of people who have faced difficulties in their own lives, or who have witnessed tribulations in the lives of those around them. The burdens we bear don’t always undergird the idea of a loving God. When all is going well, it’s easy to invest in concepts of benevolence: the sun shines on us, and it’s easy to feel blessed. But what about dark days? As someone I know articulated it recently, “how can I believe in God when…?” We can fill that “when” in as we choose. When wars follow one another in endless succession. When natural disasters claim the lives of innocents. When bad things do, indeed, happen to good people, and with alarming frequency. If there’s a God and that God loves us, why doesn’t He stop it all? Where is our peace?
Responses which guarantee that God does love, and is invested, probably don’t always strike us as sufficient. We want something more immediate, something more obvious, than the assurance that God is with us in our pain. We want concrete solutions. Yet the scriptures don’t conflate God’s love with the granting of all our wishes. They promise an eventuality wherein pain no longer exists, wherein petty unpleasantries cease to rule us; but that eventuality is always either in a future spot, or is to be found in inner sanctuaries, in a spiritual peace and confidence which must be cultivated.
In Haggai, the prophet is positioned in a historical place wherein waiting ruled. The exiled Judeans had been permitted to return to the land following the fall of the first Temple, and had been granted a mandate to rebuild. During the time of the prophet, that rebuilding had yet to be completed. Yet the prophet knew the time approached: “greater will be the future glory of this house than the former”, the people are assured, and in the meantime, “‘I am with you,’ sa[id] the Lord of hosts…’my spirit continues in your midst’” (Haggai 2:9, 4, 5). Even when the land is stark and the promises of the past seem to have been broken, God persists. What is immediate is symbolic; the grandeur of God’s love defies circumstances.
Job, too, anticipates a future season, enigmatically speaking of a time wherein “after my skin has been… destroyed, …in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26). This seems contradictory—how can Job see God in the flesh if his earthly body has been destroyed? But the joy Job anticipates, the moment of revelation, has nothing to do with earthly bodily existence; no matter what Job endures on Earth, he can look forward to a heavenly existence which makes earthbound concerns seem miniscule, even like conceit.
Again and again, we hear echoes of these promises for the future. The seventeenth psalm is given in a period of persecution, yet through despair, the psalmist asks that God “keep me as the apple of [his] eye, hide me in the shadow of your wings,” and has confidence that God will show his “wonderful love” (Psalm 14:8, 7). Paul, in 2 Thessalonians, assures his church that persecutions are endurable precisely because they initiate the apocalypse, the revelation of the one true God who brings peace: “the day of the Lord is already here,” he asserts, and the churches can know this because “the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction” (2 Thessalonians 2:2,3). Rome persecutes; but Rome is, ultimately, ephemeral, and the persecuted will be vindicated.
The gospel passage, too, waxes on this peculiar theme, as Jesus uses the example of marriage and remarriage to display how what we consume ourselves with here is insignificant in consideration of heaven: “the children of this age marry and remarry,” he says, “but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels…” (Luke, 20:34-36). We are both of this world, and more than it; we both persist within it and await assumption into God’s love in a mysterious beyond.
Jesus isn’t encouraging people not to invest in now. There is no assumption in the verse that people will stop marrying, or remarrying, or otherwise engaging in the world, simply because they’ll someday be ‘like angels’. On the contrary, most of his imperatives are concerned with now. He consistently enjoins people to make the world better, taking special care to elevate the despairing and disadvantaged among them. Engagement is a given.
But so is a God above it all, who watches with interest and love as we navigate this confusing world. Who is pained when we are pained, but who doesn’t stop pain. At least not as it immediately occurs. At least not when it is transitory. And perhaps this is because He’s a God who lovingly anticipates the moment when we become like angels, who knows that we’re more than our individual situations..that this reality is not the only reality.
It’s easy to see how this “answer” may be received as a non-answer. Traditionally, telling someone who is experiencing pain, or who is facing injustice, that ultimately their pain is dwarfed by God’s love isn’t terribly helpful. Understandably. Such news comes across less like a warm embrace than a frigid wall, even a slap in the face. But then, it’s not our job to deliver such news. It’s our job to comfort, as Christ comforted. And we’re even entitled to our own pain, as it comes.
What we feel here is real. Injustice is a reality. Joy is as well, and so is God’s love. All that we experience might not seem like proof that God exists, and cares; but it’s not our responsibility to formulate proofs. Our job is to remain steadfast in faith, to maintain a glimmer of it even when what we’re faced with doesn’t seem to cohere with our belief.
Most often, attempting to answer the question for others is a mistake…at least, in words. There’s no great response to “how can I believe in God, when…?” Our responsibility, rather, is to be the living witnesses of a loving and higher power; to respond to the precepts He gave us and treat others with the utmost respect and consideration. We can’t prove that God exists; but we can be a comfort to those who are burdened with real fears that He does not, or does not care. Not answering the question overtly, but simply being there for people with a Christ-like love, gives people the space to rediscover the reality of God’s love for themselves. And, hopefully, others who believe will be able to do the same for us when we’re in our own moments of pain, or despair, or doubt.
For every instance of “how can I believe in God when…?”, there’s someone doing the work of “mak[ing] a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break[ing] forth into joyous song and sing praises” (Psalm 98:4). There are those who evince that there’s a reality beyond transitory pains, and that love permeates, and that God is always.
That life fluctuates between emotional and experiential poles doesn’t make things easy. It would be most convenient to exist always in the glow of love, and to not have to worry about moments that lead us to question. Convenient, but not characteristic of here.
God is beyond, as much as He is here. His will isn’t always easy to discern. It’s not always necessary to discern it. We have to rest in the knowledge that it’s waiting; that all which seems to obscure it is finite; and that nothing lasts as long as it does.
Beyond this reality stretches a brighter one, unscathed by tempestuous earthly occurrences. We must strain our hearts toward its light, even when reasons seem hard to come by; peace awaits us there.
photo credit here
1 comment:
What science and religion thought impossible has happened: history now has it's first fully demonstrable proof for faith!
"The first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged is now a reality. A teaching that delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable, direct cause and effect, evidence based truth embodied in experience. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must contend with a claim to new revealed truth, a moral wisdom not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof, an objective basis for moral principle and a fully rational and justifiable belief! "
Revolutionary for those who can get their head and heart around it? More info at http://www.energon.org.uk
Post a Comment