Do you not know? Have you not heard? Have you not been made to understand? Israel, Israel, Israel. Silly little Israel. Can you not see that your God is right behind you? Israel has had a rough journey. They had left slavery in Egypt only to be stuck wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. They entered the promised land. After two hundred years in the promised land, civil war ensued, and the northern kingdom, named Israel, seceded, leaving the southern kingdom, Judah. The north fell to the Assyrians in 722 and the south to Babylonians in 586, and both kingdoms found themselves in exile.
When Israel had arrived in the promised land, they had arrived. After a while, they believed they had arrived there of their own accord, that their rulers were the ones who had brought them their peace and security. They began to point to all of their accomplishments as something they had made by their own hands. Now it was all gone. By the time these words were written, the temple in Jerusalem, the place where they believed God dwelled, had been destroyed.
Israel had asked for kings, rejecting God as their sovereign. Eventually, their kings led them astray, refusing to listen to the prophets, and seeking their own ends. “It is he who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” Israel mistook her exile and loss of sovereignty as a loss of God’s sovereignty. Because Israel wasn’t in control of her destiny, she though God was no longer in control. Israel couldn’t see God, so Israel accused God of not being able to see her.
Israel had tried to shrink God to fit Israel’s image. It was not until they had lost everything that Israel realized it was the withered plant, and that they were the chaff blown by the wind. “Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.” Their efforts to plant themselves, to arrive of their own accord, to choose whatever gods they thought would benefit them most, and their efforts to make themselves righteous had all come to naught.
And, as one of my professors has said, “Nothing is God’s favorite thing to work with.”
This is the place of brokenness and despair. Israel raises her fist to God, and asks, “Where are you? You promised me a different future!” They accuse God of impotence and injustice, forgetting that it was they – not God – who turned away. “Why do you say, O Jacob, and why speak, oh Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God?’” God has created you, has brought you up out of nowhere, and now you think God can’t find you simply because you’re in a mess? I’m stuck here on earth, all alone, and now even God can’t find me! Come on, Israel, how small is your God?
We are not so unlike Israel. Time and again, we shrink God to fit into the confines of our imagination, strangling God’s Word and God’s work in the world because it’s scary to have a God that is beyond our control. We quiet the voices within us that tell us to put it all on the line, to leave our comfort zones, to go to the gray areas and the margins. We want to shush God so that we don’t have to explain how little this faith stuff makes sense. So we leave God behind. And, after a while of trying to do it on our own, we despair, acting like we have been abandoned. We want to do it ourselves, to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, only to realize we are barefoot.
Funny, isn’t it, that we humans tend to wait until we’ve tried everything within our power to earn our salvation, to grow our churches, to cling to our ideas of righteousness, before we throw up our hands and give it to God? We accuse God of having looked the other way when it is we who have said to God, “No, thanks, God. Our church is doing fine without you. We’ll take it from here.” Surely not us, right? Surely we’re the exception, right? Let me ask this of all of us: when was the last time we prayed and listened – really listened – for the voice of God? The harder question, though, is: do we actually believe God is going to show up? We want to answer “yes” as quickly as possible. It is not, however, until we face the reality that sometimes our answer is, “No,” that we understand the miracle of faith.
As Frederich Buechner writes, “If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you're either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: "Can I believe it all again today?" No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer's always Yes, then you probably don't know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that's choked with confession and tears and. . . great laughter.”
Though we know the “right” answer is yes, faith is not so much about knowing the right answers to the questions. That part is easy. Faith becomes more complicated when God shows up, making a claim upon our lives. We want to claim the promises of God but we do not want to live in the reality of what it is to be claimed by God. We want faith to be something we can claim, not something that claims us. Understanding faith as something that claims us is deeply counter-cultural in our society today. This is deeply counter-cultural in our churches today. Despite whatever is said, despite whatever is preached, there is an implicit assumption that we claim faith, not that it claims us. The miracle of faith is not the morning we finally say “yes, I believe it.” The miracle of faith is when we realize that, all along, God has been saying “yes” to this fallen, broken, nasty world, continually creating, continually redeeming, and continually sustaining it despite humanity’s efforts to say “no” to God. The miracle is God’s yes to us.
The question, “Can I believe this all again today?” should not be the question we ask. Rather, we should ask, “Can I not believe this all again today?” Asking, “Can I believe this all again today?” shrinks God to fit our image. “Can I not believe this all today?” points to the bigger reality: if what the New York Times tells us is more true than what the Bible tells us, then we lose sight of what the truth is. The truth is that it is not we who claim our faith, but our faith that claims us. It is not we who fashion our gods, but our God who has fashioned us. God brings us out with Abram and says, “Count all these stars, if you are able.” You cannot even see all the stars, but I know them all by name.
“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth.” And the question comes: God asks, “Are you really willing to strike out on your own, to depend on a faith that you can understand, to find a god who fits the limits of your imagination? Or are you going to trust me, who imagined the stars in their places, the earth and all that is in it, and, while I’m thinking about it, the One who imagined you?”
The LORD’s understanding is unsearchable. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense that, after all the times Israel turned away, God’s promises would remain true. It doesn’t make any sense that God would allow her insolence, to accuse God of not being there when it was she who had turned away. It doesn’t make any sense that, after all the times we have turned away, God’s promises remain true. The truth of God and God’s promises, thankfully, does not depend on us and our “yes” but rather God and God’s “yes”.
Before the stars were named, God had claimed you as his own. When we have tried everything we know how to succeed, to survive, to make life make sense, when we come up empty-handed, it is then we are invited to rest in the shadow of his wing.
“Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD will renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like the eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
The God who has been there all along remains with us. Even when we have turned away, even when we have gone so far down the wrong path we think God cannot find us, God welcomes his prodigals home. Holding the door open for us as we limp in, our knees skinned and our chins bruised from trying to do it ourselves, God binds us up, reminding us that his promises are everlasting, that his mercies never fail. And each morning, when we ask ourselves if we can believe it for another day, we would do well to remind ourselves that it was God’s yes to creation that brought it to life in the first place. It was God’s yes to Abraham that made him a father of the nations. It was God’s yes to Moses that led he and the Israelites out of slavery. It was God’s yes to humanity that he sent his son. It was humanity’s “no” to having a God that hung him on the cross, but it was God’s yes that raised him - and all of us - to eternal life.
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