Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud

by Philip Yancey

Consider a rather fanciful rendition of creation by William Irwin Thompson: Imagine God in Heaven surrounded by the choirs of adoring angels singing hosannahs unendingly . . . “If I create a perfect world, I know how it will turn out. In its absolute perfection, it will revolve like a perfect machine, never deviating from My absolute will.” Since God’s imagination is perfect, there is no need for Him to create such a universe: it is enough for Him to imagine it to see it in all its details. Such a universe would not be very interesting to man or God, so we can assume that the Divinity continued His meditations. “But what if I create a universe that is free, free even of me? What if I veil My Divinity so that the creatures are free to pursue their individual lives without being overwhelmed by My overpowering Presence? Will the creatures love Me? Can I be loved by creatures whom I have not programmed to adore me forever? Can love arise out of freedom? My angels love me unceasingly, but they can see Me at all times. What if I create beings in My own image as a Creator, beings who are free? But if I introduce freedom into this universe, I take the risk of introducing Evil into it as well, for if they are free, then they are free to deviate from My will. Hmmm. But what if I continue to interact with this dynamic universe, what if I and the creatures become the creators together of a great cosmic play? What if out of every occasion of evil, I respond with an unimaginable good, a...

My friend Richard described to me his deep sense of betrayal when God “let him down.” He felt exactly as he had when his fiancée abruptly cut him off. But the prophets, and especially Hosea, communicate one message above all others: God is the betrayed one. It was Israel, not God, who had gone a-whoring. The prophets of Israel had expressed a profound disappointment in God, accusing him of acting aloof, unconcerned, silent. But when God spoke, he poured out emotions pent up for centuries. And he, not Israel, was the truly disappointed party.

There are differences, of course, and my self-defense quickly fills them in. Richard was, presumably, sincere; I was needy; we were both asking God for help, not taunting him or demanding worship. And yet I cannot easily dismiss the haunting similarity between Satan’s “Throw yourself down!” and Richard’s “Show yourself!” In each case the challenge is the same: a demand for God to take off the wraps and prove himself. In each case, God demurred.

Dorothy Sayers has said that God underwent three great humiliations in his efforts to rescue the human race. The first was the Incarnation, when he took on the confines of a physical body. The second was the Cross, when he suffered the ignominy of public execution. The third humiliation, Sayers suggested, is the church. In an awesome act of self-denial, God entrusted his reputation to ordinary people. Yet in some way invisible to us, those ordinary people filled with the Spirit are helping to restore the universe to its place under the reign of God. At our repentance, angels rejoice. By our prayers, mountains are moved. The gain to God can be seen in a passage already mentioned: Luke 10. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” Jesus exclaimed exuberantly when the seventy returned with success stories. He responded like a proud father who had just seen his children perform far above what he had ever thought possible.

The weekend before she went into the hospital for the last time, Peggie came home all excited about a quotation from William Barclay her minister had used. She was so taken with it that she had copied it down on a 3 x 5 card for me: “Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.” She said her minister must have had a hard week, because after he read it he banged the pulpit and then turned his back to them and cried.

The problem of pain is a modern obsession, the theological kryptonite of our time, and the ancient man Job expressed it as well as it has ever been expressed.

When I began my study, I tended to avoid the “embarrassing” scene in chapter 1, but I have since come to believe that, whether drama or history, The Wager offers a message of great hope to all of us—perhaps the most powerful and enduring lesson from Job. In the end, The Wager resolved decisively that the faith of a single human being counts for very much indeed. Job affirms that our response to testing matters. The history of mankind—and, in fact, my own individual history of faith–is enclosed within the great drama of the history of the universe.

If you look to the Book of Job for an answer to the “Why?” questions, you will come away disappointed. God declined to answer, Job withdrew his questions, and the three friends repented of all their mistaken assumptions. Jesus likewise avoided the issue of the direct cause of suffering. When his disciples drew certain conclusions about a man born blind (John 9) and about two local catastrophes (Luke 13), Jesus rebuked them. From the biblical evidence, I must conclude that any hard-and-fast answers to the “Why?” questions are, quite simply, out of reach.

Such notions are not mere flights of fancy. High school physics students learn about theoretical astronauts of the future who will travel into space faster than the speed of light and thus return even younger than when they left. Theories that seemed wildly speculative just a decade ago are being proved by modern researchers who bounce laser beams off the moon and send atomic clocks into space. Science is fulfilling fantasy: “It is a poor memory indeed that only works backwards!” said the White Queen to Alice in Wonderland.

I have taken such a long diversion into the mysteries of time because I believe there is no other answer to the question of unfairness. No matter how we rationalize, God will sometimes seem unfair from the perspective of a person trapped in time. Only at the end of time, after we have attained God’s level of viewing, after every evil has been punished or forgiven, every illness healed, and the entire universe restored—only then will fairness reign. Then we will understand what role is played by evil, and by the Fall, and by natural law, in an “unfair” event like the death of a child. Until then, we will not know, and can only trust in a God who does know. We remain ignorant of many details, not because God enjoys keeping us in the dark, but because we have not the faculties to absorb so much light. At a single glance God knows what the world is about and how history will end. But we time-bound creatures have only the most primitive manner of understanding: we can let time pass. Not until history has run its course will we understand how “all things work together for good.” Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse. I have a friend who bristles at such a definition of faith: “You never blame God for the bad things and yet you give him credit for the good things!” In a curious sort of way, my friend is right. That, I believe, is also what faith sometimes requires: trusting God when there is no apparent evidence of him—as Job did. Trusting in his u...

But Job, along with the saints in Hebrews 11, points to a different kind of faith, the kind I have circled around in this book on disappointment with God. Childlike trust may not survive when the miracle does not come, when the urgent prayer gets no answer, when a dense gray mist obscures any sign of God’s concern. Such times call for something more, and I will use the musty word “fidelity” for that hang-on-at-any-cost faith.

Paradoxically, the most perplexing, Job-like times may help “fertilize” faith and nurture intimacy with God.* The deepest faith, what I have called fidelity, sprouts at a point of contradiction, like a blade of grass between stones. Human beings grow by striving, working, stretching; and in a sense, human nature needs problems more than solutions. Why are not all prayers answered magically and instantly? Why must every convert travel the same tedious path of spiritual discipline? Because persistent prayer, and fasting, and study, and meditation are designed primarily for our sakes, not for God’s.

According to the Bible, human beings serve as the principal foot soldiers in the warfare between unseen forces of good and evil; and faith is our most powerful weapon. Perhaps God sends us to dangerous posts with the same mixture of pride, love, anguish, and remorse that any parent feels when sending a son or daughter off to war.

Why rejoice? Not for the masochistic thrill of the trial itself, but because what God did Easter Sunday on large scale he can do on small scale for each of us. The afflictions addressed by James, Peter, and Paul would likely have ignited a major crisis of faith in the Old Testament. But New Testament writers came to believe that, as Paul expressed it, “All things work together for good.” That well-known passage is often distorted. Some people interpret its meaning as “Only good things will happen to those who love God.” Paul meant just the opposite, and in the very next paragraph he defines what “things” we might expect: trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword. Paul endured all those. Yet, he insists, “in all these things we are more than conquerors”; no amount of hardship can separate us from the love of God. It’s a matter of time, Paul says. Just wait: God’s miracle of transforming a dark, silent Friday into Easter Sunday will someday be enlarged to cosmic scale.

Paul endured trials and died a martyr, still anticipating his reward. Job endured trials, but received a fine reward in this life. So what, exactly, can we expect from God? Perhaps the best way to view the ending in Job is to see it not as a blueprint for what will happen to us in this life, but rather as a sign of what is to come. It stands as a sweet, satisfying symbol, a solution to one man’s disappointment that offers us all a foretaste of the future.

Some people stake all their faith on a miracle, as if a miracle would eliminate all disappointment with God. It wouldn’t. If I had filled this book with case studies of physical healings, rather than the stories of Richard and Meg Woodson and Douglas and Job, that would not solve the problem of disappointment with God. Something is still badly wrong with this planet. For one thing, all of us die; the ultimate mortality rate is the same for atheists and saints alike.