IS GOD SILENT OR WE ARE DEAF?

Erwin W. Lutzer in his book, Seven Reasons Why You Can Trust the Bible, narrates the story of Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish film director who one day stood next to a portrait of Christ in a cathedral in Europe and whispered, “Speak to me!” He only encountered dead silence after waiting enough while. It has been said Bergman was motivated by this experience to come out with a movie entitled Silence, which portrayed people who despaired in their attempt to seek God. Bergman’s frustration was evident in his words: “In our world, we hear only ourselves. No voice comes to us from outside the universe. When we seek a word from God, we are confronted with dead calm”.

Well, a portrait of Christ cannot speak. It is only Christ himself who can speak. Imagine I take a photogragh of the prime minister of Britain and pose a question to it. I will certainly be confronted with dead silence. Does that mean Britain’s prime minister never speaks? If we cannot hear from God, the most logical conclusion should not be that He is silent since there is another possibility of us being so deaf we cannot hear Him, or we seeking Him in just the wrong way.

One renowned atheist known as Richard Carrier stated, as one of the four reasons why he is not a Christian, that God is silent. He argues that if God really wants to save us, why wouldn’t He come to us individually with His own message about Himself? Why does He leave us in the hands of people who come to us at different times with different messages?

Isn’t it amazing that we can think we are intelligent enough to outline some line of actions or some criteria we think if there is a God He should satisfy or comply with? Can you give me 100% information about your body’s composition? The answer is an obvious no. What then should make you think you are qualified to tell us what God should do to prove Himself God and how He should do it if He is really God. You don’t even know the details of all the things that form your human body or make you a human being, how can you know what should make someone God?

We cannot know how God should be until God Himself tells us how He is. We cannot know how God should behave until He tells us the reasons behind His own actions. Your three year old daughter or little sister may be at sea with most things you do, such as fetching water to bath her at least twice a day or preventing her from eating too many sweets. Does her incomprehension make your actions wrong? She will grow and eventually learn to understand how right your actions were. Won’t she? This is analogous of the problem we have with God. Before the God of umlimited wisdom and boundless knowledge, our own knowledge, insight and understanding is too shallow to fully comprehend all of His deeds.

So is God really silent or we are actually deaf? Let me prove to you how so vocal God is and has always been, and how so deaf we are. First of all, God chooses His own way of speaking to us at any particular point in time. He is sovereign. He can choose to speak to you through dreams, visions, nature, circumstances, people, and other possible means. All the above means notwithstanding, God chose to communicate His most important message to the inhabitants of the earth through Jesus Christ.

God has indeed communicated a common message to us about Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ. But why Jesus? Before we worry about how God should save us, as Richard Carrier expressed concern about, we need to ask ourselves how come we need salvation in the first place, and from what do we need that salvation? Until these questions are answered we cannot fully grasp or appreciate the means by which that salvation should come.

One thing our conscience helps us to come to terms with is how bad we are.Throughout the day our conscience can prick us on several occasions when we do certain things which are not very right, at least.Our main problem as humanbeings is sin. If we can conceive of an all-righteous being we call God who is invariably interested in we being righteous, then we can also conceive of an all-evil being called Satan who is enthusiastically concerned about we being evil.

So how did we get into sin? Did Satan come to all of us one by one telling us why and how we can be evil or should be evil? Think about it for a moment. God does not also have to come to us individually in order to save us. The best path to use to come back to your right track is always the very path you used that got you out of the right way. We just have to return on the same path that led us astray.As through one man,Adam, sin came into the world, so through one man, Jesus Christ,eternal life has come to us (Romans 5:12).

Let me now teach you how we can hear from God. We seek God with our hearts, not with our minds. I have read an article by Edward Tabash, another American atheist, who said “after a lifetime of spiritual search”, he had come to a conclusion that there is no God.That could not have been a spiritual search; it was a mere intellectual probe. God says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13, NIV). That means there is a possibility of you not finding God if you seek Him a way other than with all your heart.

Say an honest heartfelt prayer right now, wherever you are. Tell God that you really want to know Him and to hear Him speak to you daily.Tell Him to teach you to hear His voice, however He may speak.God is waiting to hear that prayer from you.God will speak to you in His own way and you will know that He has spoken to you.

What great intellectuals could not find, you can find with just an honest prayer.You can experience a new, exciting relationship with God when you learn to hear His voice.You will begin to understand that the biblical stories about God having such a close relationship with people like Moses, Abraham, Joshua, Elijah and more others are not folktales.Your life will completely turn around because you will hear God.