Hearing What Is Not Said
He will not fear evil tidings; His heart is steadfast, trusting in the LORD, Psalm 112:7
Tidings – Bad news. No one likes it. We do all we can to make sure it’s not on today’s agenda. But life has a way of delivering the bad news anyway. The real question is not how to avoid it but rather how to respond to it. And the answer is found in what is not heard.
The Hebrew word, shemu’ah, is really a form of the verb shama (to hear). It literally means, “what is heard”. In this case, it is a passive form implying that the subject (that’s you and me) didn’t go out looking for this news. It just arrived and it affected us directly. The sounds we heard were an evil report. But if we are followers in the Way, what we also heard was something else; something that didn’t make a single sound. We “heard” the call to trust in God. Only followers in the Way have this double-sense hearing. No, we are not immune from the trials and heartaches of this world. We get as much bad news as anyone else. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, and so do hailstones. But spiritual ears hear different things in this world. In fact, if you asked me, I would tell you that God is speaking to us all the time, not just on those unusual occasions when we proclaim we had an answer to prayer. I think that God constantly communicates with His children. He is a God of words. He spoke the world into existence with words. Why wouldn’t He on talking to His beloved creation? We have the wrong picture (or maybe the wrong audio disk). We think that God speaks only very rarely and so we do not expect to hear Him in every fleeting moment. Somehow we have become comfortable with a God who utters proclamations once a century and the rest of the time acts like a hermit. That’s not the character of the God I know. God likes to talk. The problem is that we don’t have the ears to listen.
The world chatters at us all the time. That’s why there’s so much bad news. The world is a constant stream of useless sound, generally aimed at keeping each of us so occupied that we never learn to listen. God doesn’t chatter. He speaks. But, because we are so attuned to chatter, we dismiss the spoken word of God by ignoring it like all the rest.
“That thought did cross my mind,” we say. Really? And where did it come from? “It was just a fleeting imagination.” Who spoke it to you? “For a moment, I thought . . ” Why did you think that thought? Do you suppose that if you were more attentive to all the whispers in your head you could learn to hear what God is saying?
The reason a blessed man does not fear bad news is simple: he hears God too.
Do you?
