Lester Start’s Works

1THE PRESENCE OF GOD

L. J. Start

July 30, 1989

First Baptist, Kalamazoo

It is a vivid scene recounted in the Old Testament story of Jacob’s ladder. Here is Jacob far from home or any familiar place, wandering in the wilderness. Weary, at the end of the day, he lies down, a stone for a pillow, and sleeps and dreams. And he sees a ladder stretching from that barren rocky place up to heaven, and he sees angels of God ascending and descending on it, and he hears the voice of acceptance of God and his promise for the future.

I have some trouble with this story. I’ve worked on a ladder. People just don’t climb up and down like that, no matter how divinely wrought. I picture the stones of that place being formed into a broad staircase stretching up –with plenty of room to go up and down.

Anyway, Jacob awakens from his dream, much moved by this vision and says, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not”.

The symbolism is clear. God bridges the gap between heaven and earth and His presence is there even in the wilderness where one might least expect it. This represents the enduring faith of the Hebrews that emerges again and again in their history: in the midst of desolation, privation and suffering, God reveals Himself. In the midst of Jacob’s isolation, loneliness and despair God appears, the gap of estrangement is bridged and one can say, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not”. There is a balm in Gilead.

My theme today is this — the presence of God, and I would urge with Jacob and the Psalmist that it is indeed ever-present. “Whither shall I flee from Thy presence?” God’s presence is where we might expect it in the sunny hours, but also where we don’t -in times and tasks and troubles where indeed the Lord was and we knew it not, because we failed to see Him.

Of course it is possible to look for God in the wrong way. I remember once quite some time ago my wife and I were startled to hear our six-year-old boy announce confidently at the supper table, “You can’t lean on God.” “Oh?” we replied with a question mark. (Sometimes “Oh” is the best response.) “No” he answered briskly, “I tried it in kindergarten today, and I fell right over backwards.” CI think it was his brother at a similar age who on occasion would whirl around to look behind him. It seems he was testing the teaching that God was everywhere, and he was sure that if he were quick enough he just might spot Him.) Religious

education does have its problems.

I remember, too, a saintly old lady in a church I was serving part- time. This was a long time ago. She was concerned that although she had been a faithful Christian all of her life, she had never had a vision of God. This troubled her, not having this assurance of salvation. I think I convinced her that her concern was unwarranted. And if I remember correctly, the hymn we just sang

was helpful in reassuring her. Remember? “I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies, no sudden rending of the veil of clay; no angel visitant, no opening skies, but take the dimness of my soul away.”

But in that same church (incidentally, there is no such thing as a part-time church; the work is always full-time - there are just part-time salaries) there was a middle-aged man who reported to me his vivid experience of several visions of God he had seen in the opening skies of the sunrise. Unfortunately this was curiously mixed up with a paranoid obsession with the threat of Communism everywhere. (This was the hey-day of Senator Joe McCarthy) I could not help him either with his visions or obsessions; he soon had to be hospitalized with severe mental illness.

How, then, do we find the presence of God? How do we recognize this presence? If visions are unreliable, perhaps undesirable, where is the presence of God? How might we say, with Jacob, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not”.

Of course, the most obvious answer is that we see God in His creation. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.” “The beauty of the earth, the glory of the skies over and around us lies.” “hill and vale and tree and flower, sun and moon and stars of light” — all attest to the creative power, the presence of God. As Browning wrote, when “The year’s at the spring, and day’s at the morn, morning’s at seven, the hill-side’s dew-pearled, the lark’s on the wing, the snail’s on the thorn — God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.”

But what do we say when the heavens weep and the seas roar, the earth shakes and the sky thunders and we are beset by a sea of troubles? Even here, Jacob’s ladder reminds us, God appears. This is the Hebrew faith that found a sign of God in Egypt when they were slaves — in the wilderness when they were starving and in exile far from home. Even here, one can say, “God is in this place and I knew it not”. He does not leave us comfortless.

Again, the Psalmist is helpful: “God’s way is in the sea” - not just the Eden- like green pastures and still waters of the sun-lit valleys the Hebrews loved, but in the tumult of the raging waters. So even if we take the wings of the morning or dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there God’s hand leads us. There is the presence of God.

How hard it is to see this! How natural to see God’s hand in our prosperity; how hard to see it in our distress! We feel deserted, lost, rejected when defeat and disappointment loom on the horizon. But Jacob’s ladder reminds us that in the wilderness experiences of life - and there are such for all of us - God appears. From how much bitterness could we be saved if only we could see that in our fears, our failures and disappointments, and loneliness - even here is the place of God, and we knew it not!

It is not the event but our judgment on the event that makes the difference between happiness and misery. So goes the ancient Stoic wisdom. All people suffer doubt, failure, Whether this is taken as final or as an occasion for a new beginning is up to the individual and his vision of the possibilities before him. And the infinite possibilities of renewal are ever before us. When night falls, the stars appear.

But why must there be so much suffering and evil in a world created by a good God and sustained by His presence? There are some answers but no real explanation. There is man’s freedom, for example, and the physical laws and moral rules of God’s creation. We are free to violate these, but we do not break God’s laws. We break ourselves against them. God is not mocked. We cannot be unfaithful and have fidelity as a result. We cannot be dishonest and inspire credibility. We cannot be insensitive to the feelings of others and have them be sensitive in return. And we cannot sow hate and reap harmony; spread deceit and get trust in return. And yet, when we consider the evils that come from the regular laws of nature and the inexorable moral law, would we really want it different?

The old Hebrew dogma that evil and suffering is the result of sin is a pretty good dogma. Man is responsible for most of the suffering we experience. Man’s sin and greed cause all the evils from ecological disasters to violence in all its destructive farms. And when we consider the intermeshed relationships of human life in an ever shrinking globe, we see how the innocent suffer from the sins of others. Sins of fathers affect abused children. We are not separate atoms. We are, as Paul said, one body. No man is an island.

How does Jesus deal with this problem? One day he saw a man who was blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, “Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be manifest in him.” His blindness is the occasion of God’s power in curing him.

What Jesus is saying is this: The problem of evil, then, is a practical, pragmatic problem, not a theoretical issue. Evil exists so that with God’s power we might do something about it. As the Buddha once said, “If one is struck by an arrow, it is idle to stand and wonder why it came or whence it came - what is needed is to pull it out.” Jesus once said, “In the world you will have trouble.” He did not go on to say, “Let me explain why this is so.” Instead, he said, “But be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.” In the overcoming of evil through the power of God in Christ, there is the presence of God.

There is a sense in which evil seems to be a necessary part of the good. The occasions for evil and suffering are also indeed occasions for good. As Augustine said, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to have any evil at all.” As the story of the man born blind suggests, God’s power is present to bring about that which is good in all things.

There is a sense in which the process of life and the unity of creation break down into polar opposites working together in creative tension. There are the poles themselves in the earth and in the atom, north and south, plus and minus, day and night, male and female, mountain and valley, hard and soft, wet and dry, hot and cold, life and death, and so on. It is in this context that good and evil seem to imply each other as on the same scale.

Now this is an ancient view. The Chinese spoke of these principles as Yang and Yin united in the dynamic process of the Tao of the universe. The Greeks taught the principle of the tension of opposites. And the Biblical view reflects the basic opposition of the heavenly and earthly, God and man.

The tension of opposites provides a kind of law of compensation that suggests each moves toward its opposite which it requires to be a whole process. Day to night, night to day, summer to fall and winter, winter to spring and summer, life to death and death to life. Augustine said that all life is a series of little deaths in which something new is born. There is a cosmic pattern we come to expect, a swing of the pendulum. And so we say it is always darkest before dawn, and when darkness comes, the stars appear.

In such a way one can accommodate the opposites, the struggles, the conflicts and triumphs which make up the dynamic process of life, and evil can be seen as a necessary foil, something to be overcome.

But there is something unique in the Biblical view of this process. Unlike the Chinese and Greek view, the world process is not seen as a kind of pendulum swinging between opposite forces in perpetual harmonic tension. In the Biblical view God is seen as a part of the process itself, inserting Himself into history. Biblical religion is unique in seeing God as a part of human history, directing the process with a moral purpose.

This is why progress is a Western concept. And it is Biblical, not Greek. The Greeks saw history in terms of cycles that repeated. Asian thought presupposes a dynamic but stable cycle of the order of nature. But the Bible brings God directly into human affairs. That is why He is present as the ground of all our history. Only Islam which draws from our Bible has the same teaching of a God of history — which helps to explain the historic conflicts between Islam and Christianity.

Bible history teaches that God called Moses and directed him to lead his people to liberation in the promised land. God gives Moses the Law and injects His purpose again and again into the history of Israel. And what more vivid expression of God in history could there be than the doctrine of the Incarnation? God so loved the world! God was made flesh and dwelled among us. Through Christ God’s power is at hand among us to bring about that which is good.

In this Christian revelation, the world is seen as more than a balancing of opposites. The old image of a swinging pendulum is too static for God’s spiritual law. A divine purpose transforms the opposites and creates something new, a new heaven and a new earth.

Jacob’s vision is thus realized. The opposition between heaven and earth, God and man, is overcome not by a staircase of angels but by the mystery of the Incarnation, God’s act of redeeming love. It is love which reconciles opposites in the creative purposes of God. And the law for man is to follow God’s rule of love. “This is the first great commandment,” says Jesus, “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Only love overcomes hostility, alienation; reconciles the oppositions that divide us. There is a natural temptation to think in terms of confrontation. The other appears as an opposing or threatening center of action. And so we build walls, draw lines. But love breaks down walls, draws people together in a circle of care and concern. And here is where we find the presence of God. Jacob experienced God’s presence as he heard God’s promise and felt God’s love in his inner self, and responded.

It is a mistake to look for God in this place or that, in this event or that. As Jesus said, the kingdom of God does not come by observation. There will be no saying “Look, here it is” or “there it is”, for the kingdom of God is within you; is, in fact, among you.

The presence of God is not in a place but in a spirit. Gad is spirit, the spirit of love. Here according to the first letter of John is where we find the presence of God. “Where love is, there is God, for God is love.” Though God has never been seen by any man, God Himself dwells in us if we love one another. God is love and he who dwells in love is dwelling in God and God in him. We love because He loved us first. Let us then love one another for love is from God.

“And I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”

(Delivered July 30, 1989 by Lester Start at First Baptist Church)