Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?

by Philip Yancey

Only when I reach the summit does the entire landscape fit together. Until then, any conclusions I might draw would prove mistaken. The world is good. The world is fallen. The world can be redeemed. If this sequence describes the story of the universe, then I must learn to look at the world, and myself, through that lens. Faith means developing an ability to accept that point of view, which I will never fully grasp until I reach the summit, no matter how things look along the trail.

Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God; but everything is capable of becoming good.

our limited point of view guarantees that we will always come away with unanswered questions. Wolterstorff found a narrow ledge of trust by recognizing that “to redeem our brokenness and lovelessness the God who suffers with us did not strike some mighty blow of power but sent his beloved son to suffer like us, through his suffering to redeem us from suffering and evil. Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.”

Some people anticipate life with God to be a solution to their problems and choose God much as one would choose a spouse in a romantic-love culture, by seeking desirable results. They expect God to bring them good things; they tithe because they believe money will come back tenfold; they try to live right in hopes that God will prosper them. No matter what the problem — unemployment, a retarded child, a crumbling marriage, an amputated leg, an ugly face — they expect God to intervene on their behalf by arranging a job, patching together the marriage, and curing the retarded child, amputated leg, and ugly face.

“Good and evil, in the moral sense, do not reside in things, but always in persons,” wrote Paul Tournier4. “Things and events, whether fortunate or unfortunate, are simply what they are, morally neutral. What matters is the way we react to them.

In his book Great Souls, journalist David Aikman

The hymn ends, and the Christian story ends, with the promise that redemption will one day be complete, that God will vindicate himself with a burst of re-creative power, that personal knowledge of God will be as certain as the most intimate relationships we know on earth. “For now we see12 through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

In A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken7 described the process this way: “Choosing to believe is believing. It’s all I can do: choose. . . . I do not affirm that I am without doubt, I do but ask for help, having chosen, to overcome it. I do but say: Lord, I believe — help Thou mine unbelief.”

I. Packer12 chides the church: “With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Thus, we show a great deal more interest in the gifts of healing and tongues — gifts which, as Paul pointed out, not all Christians are meant to partake anyway — than in the Spirit’s oridinary work of giving peace, joy, hope, and love, through the shedding abroad in our hearts of knowledge of the love of God.”