Collateral Damage
Then they will cry out to the Lord, but He will not answer them. Instead, He will hide His face from them at that time because they have practiced evil deeds. Micah 3:4 NASB
Hide His face – Hebrew is a tactile, idiomatic language. It uses common life experiences to describe crucial religious concepts. Salvation is described as a wide and open space. Protection is the shepherd’s direction to still waters. Love is the cooing of doves, the fragrance of fruit trees in bloom. Terrible tragedies also have their idiomatic pictures. Nothing is more horrifying than a broken relationship between God and men. It is described in the language of faces. The worst thing that can happen is to have God turn away, hiding His face. When that occurs, purpose and meaning are lost. The people wander aimlessly in a wasteland.
Micah isn’t the only prophet to issue this warning.
“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “When I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and from the north even to the east; they will go to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.” (Amos 8:11-12)
But don’t think this happened because of pagan influences. The prophets are not describing the world outside Israel. God turns His face away in the midst of Israel’s religious culture. The religious environment didn’t prevent the break. What was missing was a thirst for listening to God. The Temple stood. Sacrifices continued. Communal prayers were performed. The feasts occurred. But there was no thirst for God’s message. The people had a religious routine, a priesthood, and a theology. They just didn’t have face-to-face intimacy. The collateral damage of their religious world was the absence of God.
I wonder if we aren’t the same. We have our services. We read our Bibles. We say our prayers and blessings. We observe the feasts. Is that what really matters? I wonder if we aren’t living like Abraham during those thirteen years of silence. Once upon a time God delivered His message personally. He turned toward us. We felt it, what Buechner calls “ . . . a subterranean presence of grace.”[1] But now something else is present:
“ . . . whatever it is that is truly home for us, we know in our hearts that we have somehow lost it and gotten lost. Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name—something we know best from the empty place inside us all where it belongs.”[2]
We can be very religious, very observant, dutiful, dedicated—and still find emptiness deep inside. God has turned away. Life has spoiled. Maybe we need to recognize something else is happening:
“Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away.”[3] We don’t have prophets to remind us, but we still need reminders. Emptiness is a spiritual disease cured by looking in the right direction.
“It is within man’s power to seek Him; it is not within man’s power to find Him. All Abraham had was wonder, and all he could achieve on his own was readiness to perceive. The answer was disclosed to him; it was not found by him.”[4]
Topical Index: face, turn, empty, religion, Amos 8:11-12, Micah 3:4
[1] Frederick Buechner The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Your Life (Zondervan, 2017), p. 62.
[2] Frederick Buechner Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (HarperOne, 2006), p. 76.
[3] Ibid., p. 19.
[4] Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 72.
