Monday, February 5, 2018

Is God shouting at you? Then Listen!


Do you have an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like His?” 
Job 40:9.

     I thought of that verse after hearing the wall-rattling booms from Fort Hood this week. Those “sounds of freedom” from F-16s dropping 500-pound loads for target range practice may not be the voice of God, but they sure do get your attention (and the attention of the animals and a few car alarms).

     Even though I’ve lived here long enough to even appreciate those sounds of our military, I texted a friend who works on Fort Hood, just to make sure everything was okay. It made me think about the men and women who go through the “shock and awe” of actual battle. And even if it awakens us in the night, just knowing that those booms are from “our side” should give us a peace to go back and sleep at ease the rest of the night.

     Elsewhere in the book of Job, it says, “God's voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding” (Job 37:5).
Some rumblings and rattlings are not from God but rise to the deafening level that also gets our attention, causing us to try to understand things that are beyond our understanding.

     Romans 8 talks about groanings that are too deep for utterance of words. There’s a mystery about the thunder that rolls from one horizon to the other. In Rev. 10:4, John was going to write about the seven thunders he heard, when a voice from heaven stops him, “Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.” There are some things we simply will not know here.

     There are things that rattle our world that don’t quite make sense: the death of a soldier or sailor or airperson, random violence, political and social clashes that are increasingly inexplicable. Even the death of a beloved spouse after 60 years of marriage can be comprehended but only scarcely understood unless you’ve lived through it.

     Have you ever been rattled by God? Or by humanity’s insanity? Are you trying to make sense of senseless acts that perhaps even make you ponder the very existence of a God who would allow such things to occur?
Be assured, you and I are not the first to wonder aloud “where is God in all of this?”

     It’s found in the unforgettable lyrics of African American Pastor and Poet Charles Tindley, who penned the refrain of “We’ll understand it better by and by” in 1906. The toe-tapping melody can almost eclipse the real pain found in the rich lyrics about being “tossed and driven on the restless sea of time” and how “we are often destitute of the things that life demands, want of food and want of shelter, thirsty hills and barren lands” and how God often leads us as He “guides us with his eye, and we’ll follow till we die.”

     The wonderings about all the rumblings of this world’s thunder is also found in the memorable lines of apologist C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Problem of Pain, during the early stages of World War II. The later “Narnia Chonicler” wrote this in 1940, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

     Is God shouting to you? Then listen!

     The point of all this is simply this: if you are rattled by the world’s rumbling, don’t be alarmed. It’s merely the sounds of freedom, preparing us for life’s battles and eventual victory. The ultimate Victor of the battle of all battles, Jesus Christ, said this, “I have said these things to you, that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

     Tim McKeown is associate pastor of First Baptist Church of Killeen and blogger at www.johnoneday.blogspot.com.