Godspeak

By Brain Heflin

Many times I have heard it called a crutch for the simple-minded, short-sighted and weak, and now I am getting to the point where I am beginning to completely agree. I can barely contain how frustrated I get over the inadequacies of this book. To find any threadbare comfort at all in such a relic, you can only be desperate, foolish, or both. I could probably even argue my point of view using the Bible itself as my authority.

If you accept the existence of an infinite, Almighty God as a given, does it really seem reasonable to believe that this is the best communication He has come up with in all the millennia since the dawn of time — just this fragile combination of paper, ink, leather, and glue we call the Bible? Even in the Bible itself, the voice of GOD is described as melting the mountains, shaking the wilderness, and splintering the forest. Compared to that, this collection of books can hardly be considered the masterstroke of divine expression. In my estimation, even the “still, small voice” heard by the prophet Elijah (literally, the thin hush) eclipses any portion of scripture that you ever would care to recite, just as a letter cannot compare to the intimate immediacy of first person communication.

But why doesn’t He just speak to us?

Wouldn’t it make things easier to write His message in the sky for all the world to read?

According to the book of Genesis, there was a time in Eden when humanity was able to communicate with God more directly, face to face even. That was in the time before people chose Away-From-God, before they embraced and ate of Distrust. His being had not yet become cluttered and clogged with the Staining of fear and shame. In his untainted state he could safely resonate with the voice of God and endure a much higher pitch than we could probably ever imagine. After man chose Away-from-God, his channels of intimacy became diseased and constricted. What once imparted life to his being now caused him death and distress, because he was filled with Dissonance. Basically, all that man became capable of hearing from God were veiled versions of His voice; the very most he could withstand — dreams, visions, angels, and perhaps the rare divine visitation to a prophet. Even then, those prophets were said to fall down, shake, and tremble when such an event occurred. Such Proximity was unbearable to them.

Genesis also tells us God spoke the world into existence. Now, as much as we think we would have wanted to attend that first poetry recital — Fuhgetta-bowtit. There is no possible way we could have survived eavesdropping on that primordial power-poem. We would have shattered on the solidity of those words. I think of the opera singers who are reputed to be able to hit pitches of such height and intensity that they can shatter crystal glasses with a sustained note — THAT is a little how I imagine the voice of God.

If you really heard God Speak, only a few shards and splinters would remain to tell the tale.

Which, as a side note, makes me laugh at how glibly I sulk and demand of God “just speak to me.” How do I ask for that without trembling like a flag whipping in a storm?

That is one reason why I see it as God’s mercy that He does not speak as clearly as He is able. I think it has something to do with the dynamic of Accountability. Think of Accountability as your Flammability Factor. The closer you approach the heat of the “Consuming Fire” the more refined you must be. The clearer you see and hear, the more you are responsible for that knowledge. If you are loaded down with flammable baggage, it is dangerous for you to snuggle up close to the bonfire.

If this metaphor holds up, it suggests to me that what we name God’s “wrath” is nothing more than the times God does draw close, and as a result, impurity goes up in flames. Those who get roasted are just too entwined with the Rubbish. When the garbage man comes for the trash, those clinging tight to the trash will have a very unpleasant encounter. The Scriptures recount many times that God’s glory would manifest; without exception, things would start to heat up something fierce and toasty. Perfect Love is absolutely incompatible with Unloving, yet is there anyone that is so distant that they are completely cut off from any glimmer of warmth and light from that Blaze?

Is He really so silent after all?

I am amazed when I consider the astounding lengths that God has been willing to go to in order to express Himself to us in a way that we could handle. The cosmos is this majestic, stupefying masterpiece that defies our ability to comprehend, and yet it is like reciting a few sentences out of a first-grade reader for an infinite Creator. Even expressed in the vast intricacies of creation, God’s voice is still trimmed back somehow. It is almost as if it serves as a buffer zone between us and the sheer intensity of His direct communication; at the same time as it speaks, it also shields. He wanted a way to keep calling out to us no matter how incompatible we make ourselves with His song. Though He may be invisible to the senses directly, still His voice is heard reverberating through the mix - “the heavens declare the glory of God..” It is still God’s voice, but it has been drastically muted for our intake. The humility of that kind of communication — that God would tone down the volume and talk baby talk for us to be able to understand — baffles me.

But He goes even further. Besides speaking constantly through creation, He even chose humans as His instruments of communication, entrusting our error-prone minds and inadequate language with His pleas to return to relationship with Him... like the prophets we mentioned before. Then, as the ultimate demonstration of His willingness to speak to our level of understanding, He buries Himself up to the flesh in us, in the form of Jesus the Nazarene. He took on all the growing pains, secretions, excretions, heartaches, desires, passages of life, and limitations of our physical condition to meet us way so much more than half-way. Think about that one for while if you want to tear a brain tendon.

It’s like that little girl in Aliens who was the only one who managed to survive the alien invasion of her space station. She was so traumatized that she could not respond to the rescue party’s attempt to lure her out of her hiding place in the cramped recesses and corridors of the ventilation system. Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, had to squirm her way down through the passages of that girl’s little world and try to reach her in a place where she understood that she was safe. After so long alone, grieving and terrified, she had pretty much lost the ability to interact with reality, let alone another human being.

This has been the long way of getting around to saying that the Bible is another example of God’s humbling Himself to speak to us. Even though His message is subjected to being ignored, scorned, misinterpreted, or mistranslated, He was willing to allow His majestic voice to be constrained to words on a page. To me it speaks of a Being so Extravagantly Extended Towards Us that He is willing to allow His glory to be diluted so that we may be able to ingest it, AND for it to still be potent enough to pull us back on the road to life

The way I approach Creation is quite similar to how approach the Bible . There is enough God-breathed beauty, wisdom, and instruction in its pages to last a lifetime of study and you would never exhaust its simplicity or fathom the mysteries of its depths. I even wonder if God hasn’t been actively involved through the centuries in preserving His love-history-to-us and keeping it intact. I don’t think error-free is even the most important issue. I think what is absolutely vital is that we are open to the Spirit of Truth breathing life and understanding into what we are reading. Jesus said it was the Spirit of Truth that was to guide us into discerning truth and error. 

The Bible is not God, though we sometimes treat it so. I was not designed to have a relationship with a book. This book is not adequate to meet the needs of my heart or mind. Imagine that you were separated from the most perfect love of your life and think of the difference of being reunited with them face to face or reading a letter they left posted for you on an internet message board hoping you would run across it. I want to know God in Real TIme, not through a recorded account. I think that many of us have given up on the idea that it is possible to have anything more than that. We will just endure with the minimum in this life, and save all the good stuff for Eternity.

So, when I say the Bible is puny, it’s because it IS puny compared to the phenomenal Real Time voice of God that I long for. I think frustration with the “inadequacies” of the Holy Writ is the right response to this ever-deepening sense of how great my need for His Presence really is. Understand that the word of God is a very much-needed crutch precisely because I am so feeble and short-sighted — having seen my face in a mirror thousands of times, I would forget what I looked like if I couldn’t keep going back to be reminded. It is because I am such a simple-minded child that God bent down to say, “Until you can chew the real thing, here’s the Gerber version.”

The Bible is too puny to represent God adequately. I, on the other hand, am too puny even to grasp the Bible adequately . I will always lean heavily on these words of life, but I do not set aside my hunger to become whole enough to hear directly from His lips, even in this life.

To close this out ... remember that little statement from the beginning? “To find any threadbare comfort at all in such a relic, you can only be desperate, foolish, or both.”

Well, because of my great gift of redundancy and overstating the obvious... you can probably already guess what that was all about. Those who are aware of their foolishness and desperation will find comfort in such a Relic.... And I am just such a one, desperate to hear any inkling at all of the voice of God. So I pursue Him everywhere: in the pages of reason, in the pages of relationship, in the pages of creation, in the pages of experience, in science, music, in art... Probably more than other place though, it has been this book of books that has informed my desire, guided my hunger, and stirred up the longing to seek His face. But still, I can’t wait till I never have to turn to it again.

* This article is provided by www.strangerthingsmag.com and was originally titled “Godspeak”. Written by Brain Heflin © all rights reserved.

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