Left Behind
I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. John 17:15 NASB
Out of the world – Why do you suppose God doesn’t rescue us? The world is a terrible place. Evil is everywhere. It would be so much better to leave it all and arrive on the heavenly shores. So why does God keep us in the trenches? Why are we resident aliens here instead of citizens there?
According to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the man of faith “thirsts for redemption—discipline, control over one’s self—and even wishes to be overpowered by God.”[1] He “has no single home. He is a wanderer” in continuous oscillation between community and uprooting. He is faced with the terrifying dilemma that “retreat from the world is opposed to the divine will and yet today’s man of faith feels impelled to withdraw.”[2]
“The role of the man of faith, whose religious experience is fraught with inner conflicts and incongruities, who oscillates between ecstasy in God’s companionship and despair when he feels abandoned by God, and who is torn asunder by the heightened contrast between self-appreciation and abnegation, has been a difficult one since the times of Abraham and Moses.”[3]
If we’re struggling with origin and destination, at least we are in good company. Abraham and Moses seemed to do the same. Inner conflicts and incongruities are part of the process, and, no, I don’t think it’s just a test. I think it’s much more like this: God is also lonely. He is in exile from His own creation. He has been castigated, turned away and rejected. No greater proof of this can be found than the fact that modern man really doesn’t know who he himself is. He can’t find God because he can’t find himself. He has rejected himself as the image of God and found that he is left with an accident or a machine. Neither one is palatable, so he buries his profound sense of loneliness in the accumulation of technological prowess. But the vacuum remains. Things cannot fill a void in the spirit. They can only numb the patient. Modern man is a self-medicated stranger.
Why are we still here? What if we’re here because we are the ones who are recovering from soul-numbing drugs? We are the ones at the table who have some semblance of sobriety from the world. We have discovered God sits across from us, having come to the same conclusion. We are here so that He will no longer be alone.
Topical Index: loneliness, Soloveitchik, John 17:15
[1] David Shatz, forward to Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Three Leaves Press, Doubleday, 1965), p. x.
[2] Ibid., p. xvi.
[3] Ibid., p. 2.
