24. God of Communication (3)

Getting to Know God Meditations:  24. God of Communication (3)

Psa 19:4   “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

Clarification:  I have commented in the previous two studies that there are two sides to this coin, first the side that is about the communication that comes from God (and we have really only lightly touched on that) and then, on the other side, the need to hear and indeed listen to God.  It is that latter part that we need to be considering here in this present study. In this study we will only be able to start thinking about the idea, and so will need to continue in a further following study to see how it works more fully. This study comes, I think, as a bridge between speaking and hearing.

Imperfectly Seeing God: We have been suggesting again and again in these studies that all of this is about God’s initiative to reach out to us. That is what is there behind the biblical narrative. Yes, we have to acknowledge that in our present state it is rather like looking through a dirty glass window or looking in a dirty mirror, or as the Message version paraphrases it, “We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!” (1 Cor 13:12) That’s how it is now, but one day when we pass on from this life, we will see Him face to face and all will be clear.

Not Seeing but Hearing: Now we have indicated that the Bible shows us that we cannot ‘see’ God and any ‘revelations’ have been visions, that were perceived in the spirit but not with physical eyes, not the real thing in other words, and we suggested  that the reason for this is that God is so incredible, so great, so beautiful, that our minds cannot cope with it. When we get to heaven, there will be new abilities and thus we will be able to see and be seen, face to face. The best this phrase ‘face to face’ can be understood in this present dimension, is how it happened with Moses. When the Lord was chastising his siblings, He said of Moses, “With him I speak face to face,  clearly and not in riddles;  he sees the form of the Lord.” (Num 12:8)  Even with Moses he was only able to catch a sense of the ‘form’ of God manifesting His presence to him. So if there is limitation of sight, how can we know anything of God, what is the Bible all about? The answer has to be in ‘hearing’ which dictionaries define as, ‘the process, function, or power of perceiving sound’.  So there is ‘sound’ to be heard, but that is simply how it is in the material world. Or is it?

Hearing by Seeing: Have you ever heard or read, “but his silence spoke volumes”?  Maybe it referred to a suspected criminal being questioned and he refused to speak. It may be assumption but it suggests something about him – he is guilty. Or it may be friends who refuse to communicate with another on social media; it is a sign of their rejection and more. Silence speaks volumes. But listening to a piece of beautiful music can ‘speak’  to listeners and someone responds, “That was amazing, it spoke to my soul and really moved me.” The same thing applies when David the psalmist wrote, as our starter verses showed, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” (Psa 19:1-4) What a perfect poetic description of this, that creation ‘speaks’, creation reveals the wonder and greatness of God, whether it be the enormity of space through the stars on a clear night, or the beauty of a sunset. Something in us is touched, we are moved, communication has taken place.

The apostle Paul understood this when he wrote of, “people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Rom 1:18-20) What is he talking about? The creation all around us. So often we are so inward looking, so taken up with our own little affairs, that we are unable to see the wonder of the world around us. Back in the nineteenth century, philosopher William Paley introduced us to the ‘watch analogy’, basically saying that it was a fool who looked into a mechanical watch and said it came about by accident and not design; the same was true of the universe. Many a sceptical atheist has derided that analogy but it is only spiritual blindness that cannot see the truth of it, and one day God will challenge them face to face on it.

Hearing through Reading: At one point, in discussion with his detractors, Jesus said to them, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” (Jn 5:39,40) This was amazing. These people, Jewish leaders, prided themselves of knowing the scriptures, the scrolls of what we now refer to as the Old Testament and yet those same scriptures were full (over 300 some say) of prophetic references to a coming Messiah, and the things said about him were exactly reflected in Jesus – but they couldn’t see that! Their prejudices blinded them. See the word Jesus used – testify – which means to speak out, but they refused to ‘hear’. Theologian William Barclay, pointed out how a person can listen to a wonderful piece of music and have no appreciation of it – they have no music in their soul, and he compared this as to how people can read the Gospels and be utterly unmoved by the wonder of the person that was Jesus Christ – just like these religious leaders who felt threatened by Jesus.

And Us? We’ve just given three illustrations – Creation and the Bible and Jesus. Each of these ‘speak’ to those who become aware of them.  But what are we like on the inside? It is not only our literal ears that hear, we’ve demonstrated that, it can be our soul or spirit. In the Gospels we find Jesus saying, “Whoever has ears, let them hear.” (Mt 11:15)  and, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” (Lk 8:8, 14:35)  The implication was that we have various senses that enable us to ‘hear’. Will we use them? The ‘voice’ is there but do we hear Him? When we look at the enormity and wonder in the clear sky at night, does it evoke worship in us? When we pick up and read, say the psalms, do we find the descriptions of God there breath-taking?  When we read the Gospels, do we see the wonder of Jesus Christ, and marvel, wonder and give thanks? If we do not do these things, if these are not our responses, it is an indication of a certain sort of blindness and perhaps, if we do not want to miss out, we need to pray, “Lord, please open my eyes that I may see.”