“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.
