When God Doesn't Seem to be There
Notes
Transcript
Have you ever been at a point where you didn’t think God was there any more? Or maybe that God just didn’t care since you didn’t seem to be hearing from him? I think we have all probably been there at one time or another over the years of being a believer.
I have heard countless stories of believers praying for someone for years and years before a break-through.
I have heard countless stories where after a time God answers prayers in marvelous and unexpected ways.
Ben Patterson in his book Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent writes, “It isn’t easy to wait. It demands persistence when common sense says “give up.” It says “believe” when there is no present evidence to back it up. Faith is forged in delay. Character is forged in delay. The forge is the gap between the promise and the fulfillment. As gold is purified and shaped in the white-hot heat of a forge, so we and our faith are purified and shaped in waiting.”
Jason Farman, in his book Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World writes,
“Part of our experience of waiting is cultural, and how time elapses while we wait can vary from person to person and context to context. We wait differently and we have different expectations that are grounded in our specific cultures—from the cultural expectations about waiting in lines in Japan to a common practice in Uganda of arriving hours early to the bus stop each morning so that people can wait together as a community gathering.
But while part of our perception of duration may be linked to these cultural experiences of waiting, part of our awareness of duration is also a cognitive process that is wired into how our brains function. After a period of working with a particular device, according to computer scientist Ben Shneiderman, our brains begin to set expectations for how quickly it should respond.
If these expectations aren’t met, we move on to the next task quickly (often around the two-second mark) unless something calls us back. How we wait is a combination of technological expectations (how quickly we believe that our technologies should be working), cultural expectations (how the contexts in a society set up certain expectations about how people should wait according to their position within that society), and how our brains are able to pay attention while waiting.”
Jason Farman, Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World, Yale University Press. 2018, Kindle Locations 1087-1096.
This morning, I want us to take a look at an example of waiting that we find way back in the book of Genesis. Let me set the stage a bit for us this morning.
Imagine you were going about your day, minding your own business, when God speaks to you and tells you something like this. “Go to that field over there and build a great big boat for there will be a time when you will need it because I am going to flood the earth. And by the way, it will be too big to transport to water and it is not to have any type of steering mechanism.” We would likely be thinking something like - What? God, are you crazy? Why on earth would we do that, it doesn’t make any sense?
Well, that is pretty much what God told Noah. God was planning on destroying all of the earth and everything in it, including humans. But then he saw that Noah was righteous and Noah found favor in God’s eyes. Then we see this command to build an ark. Remember how crazy it sounded for us to build an ark in a field around here? Now imagine hearing this in the middle of the desert, a place that hardly ever sees rain, let alone heavy rain. We don’t know how Noah responds, in fact, we never see a word of Noah’s recorded in Scripture, we just see that he was obedient. I’m sure that he had to have questions for God as probably all of us would.
So Noah gets this command and detailed instructions on how to build this ark and who/what to bring into it. Realize that this ark didn’t get build overnight. It was about 1 1/2 football fields long. It was three decks high. We do not know exactly how long, but it is safe to assume that it took quite a bit of time to build. Imagine the ridicule Noah received. There had to be times along the way that Noah questioned God and almost threw in the towel. But then the day came. Turn with me to:
1 The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation.
2 Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate,
3 and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.
4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”
5 And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.
Forty days and nights of rain. I found myself wondering what that would be like. Think about this. If it started raining today, it wouldn’t end until August 26. I cannot even fathom what that would be like, let alone in a 500 foot long, three story boat. Once these forty days came to an end, you would think that God would do something. However, we find that God remained silent even after the forty days of rain ended. Let’s pick up in:
17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth.
18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water.
19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.
20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.,
21 Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.
22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.
23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
It has now been 150 days since it stopped raining and still no word from God. I can only imagine what had to be going through Noah’s head at this point. Forty days of rain would last until August 26. Another 150 days would be January 23 of next year. To give a comparison, we are only approximately 120 days since the coronavirus shutdowns started.
It’s been 190 days in this small space, cramped with his wife and sons and their wives and all of these creatures. It had to smell and be damp and awful at that point. And on top of that, Noah knew that there was going to be no human or animal left other than the ones on that boat. Destruction was all around them, they were just floating along, unable to steer anything. I would imagine their supplies were dwindling and the cramped quarters were getting to them. He had to have had the thought that maybe God forgot about them.
Let’s pick up at the beginning of chapter 8.
1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.
2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.
3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down,
4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark
7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.
8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground.
9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark.
10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.
11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.
12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.
14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
15 Then God said to Noah,
16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.
17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives.
19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.
21 The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.
22 “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”
God hadn’t forgotten them. They returned to a dry earth - imagine how that must have felt to walk off that ark! What a relief.
In his book, Dr. Boone reminds us that Noah was God’s investment in memory, his forget-me-not. You see, Noah would tell the story of what happened, passing it down to the next generation. Without God’s investment in memory there would have been no Abraham, no Elijah, no Ezekiel, no David, and no Jesus. We see time and again throughout Scripture where God’s people think that God has abandoned them or forgotten them. But just like Noah, just like the Israelites in exile in Babylon God remembers his people. We just have to remember that answers will not always come in they way or timing that we might expect.
In many ways, 2020 has been a period where many find themselves wondering where is God in all this? I have some good news for you this morning friends - he is still right here, with us, the same yesterday, today, and forever. God is near and wants to do amazing things to build his kingdom even in the chaos of 2020.
As we close, here are four thoughts that I think we need to understand about waiting on God:
Be Obedient - Just like Noah, we need to be obedient to whatever the Lord is asking of us. We do not always know what is to come, but we must trust that God does.
Persevere - Don’t give up. Continue to pray and bring your request to God. We do not always know when his timing or answer may come.
Expect - We must expect God to answer
Be Patient - We must wait patiently
Wayne Stiles book, Waiting on God wrote:
Because the results of God’s sovereignty are delayed, waiting remains an act of faith. We believe results will occur one day. By waiting on God, we affirm our belief in his providence. We trust his timetable. We hope in heaven. Waiting on God is inseparably bound to our belief in the sovereignty of God to bring about the good he promises.
…Waiting is often the application of many other, more abstract, biblical qualities of character. Hope, for instance, requires waiting. Faith is all about waiting. Patience and waiting are yoked together. Trust requires delayed gratification. In fact, run down your mental list of the fruit of the Spirit and see if waiting doesn’t play into every single one of them (see Gal. 5:22–23).
Wayne Stiles, Waiting on God, Baker Publishing Group, 2015, pp. 16-17.