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Aug 26, 2012

The Dark Night

Passage: Job 1:1-42:17

Preacher: John Repsold

Category: Christian Walk

Keywords: dark night, struggles, silence, prayer, waiting on god

Summary:

Unexplained silences between people who love each other can be very troubling. How much more between God and his children. This message looks at what God may be trying to do with us in the dark nights of the soul.

Detail:

The Dark Nights of Divine Silences

August 26, 2012

 

When is the last time someone wouldn’t speak with you?  That’s such a great experience, isn’t it?  I don’t know about you but every time someone I count as a friend just sort of drops off the radar and stops talking with me, I find myself wrestling internally with a bunch of self-questioning sorts of thoughts. 

 

What thoughts naturally go through your minds at times like that?

  • What did I do wrong?
  • I must have really done something to tick them off.
  • What on earth is this really about?

 

The more important the relationship, the more troubling long periods of silence can be, right?

 When I’m on a flight that is packed full of strangers, I don’t feel the least bit slighted if all the people around me don’t launch into a deep conversation about the meaning of the universe…or don’t even greet me, for that matter.  In fact, if I’ve got a really good book with me, the introvert in me loves the silence. I deplane feeling refreshed and happy.

 

But it’s quite another thing to be on the same flight… in the same cramped seats…gnawing on the same bag of peanuts and sipping the same Ginger Ale, BUT surrounded by people I’ve known for years…and yet not one of them will say something to me.  What’s the difference?  Silence between strangers is fine.  But prolonged silence between friends and family is usually a sign that something has gone terribly wrong. 

 

I’m not talking about the healthy silences that happen with people you know really well and feel comfortable with, the kind that allow you to sit together for minutes (or even hours) and not feel like you have to say something.   

It’s quite another thing, however, to keep calling, writing, texting or Facebooking someone and not get a response.  Silences like that can and probably should cause a little bit of inner turmoil. 

 

No matter what the reason for prolonged silence between good friends, it feels a whole lot like outright rejection, doesn’t it?

 

Love longs to hear the voice of the beloved.

Real relationship needs to have real two-way communication periodically. 

 

The Bible is full of stories and prayers of people who felt at times like God was being way too quiet. 

  • One of the oldest and longest books of the Bible, the book of Job, is a classic study on one of the more troubling “silences” of God with one of His more amazing saints.

Job 30:16-20--“And now my life ebbs away;
    days of suffering grip me.
17 Night pierces my bones;
    my gnawing pains never rest.
18 In his great power God becomes like clothing to me;
    he binds me like the neck of my garment.
19 He throws me into the mud,
    and I am reduced to dust and ashes.

20 “I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer;  I stand up, but you merely look at me

  • Abraham, that great man of faith who heard God say some truly amazing things to him through the years, nonetheless spent thousands of hot days and dark nights not “hearing from God.”
  • And not a few of the Psalmistswrestled with God’s silences as they penned phrases like these:
    • David in Psalm 28:1 cried out to God, “To you, LORD, I call; you are my Rock, do not turn a deaf ear to me.  For if you remain silent, I will be like those who go down to the pit.”
    • Again in Psalm 22 David prays words that will later reverberate in the echo chamber of time when Jesus cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
          Why are you so far from saving me,
          so far from my cries of anguish?
      2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
          by night, but I find no rest.”
    • Asaph wrote in Psalm 83:1—”O God, do not remain silent; do not turn a deaf ear, do not stand aloof, O God.”

These are the cries of godly, sincere saints in the dark nights of their soul experiences. 

 

Q:  What is the real dilemma with the perceived silences of God?  [Solicit answers.]

  • We know silence should not be the norm in a healthy relationship…especially with a close family member.  So if we’re part of the spiritual “family of God” and Dad isn’t speaking to us, well, that doesn’t feel very healthy. 
  • God’s perceived silences tend to chip away at what we thought was a pretty secure belief system/theology about God.  We wouldn’t treat our own kids that way so why on earth would God ever give us the “silent treatment”?  We begin to question whether or not God really cares about us like we’ve been told.  We start confronting the thought that He must not be the kind of good, loving Father we’ve always hoped he was.  Perceived silences from God become a crisis of faith. 

If you don’t believe me, just look at Job.  What started out in submissive faith saying, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised,” turns into statements like this in chapter 27:2, “As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice, the Almighty, who has made me taste bitterness of soul, as long as I have life within me…I will never admit you are in the right; till I die, I will not deny my integrity…I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it….”  In essence he is saying, “God is evil and unjust while I am righteous and good;  I’m actually better than God.”  That’s a long ways from blessing the name of the LORD!

  • Our experience with the silences of other people have conditioned us.  On the human plain we know things are not well when silences prevail.  ILL:  I’m naturally a pretty quiet guy at home.  But when I get stone silent, most of the family can pick up on that pretty readily.  And they know that’s a sign I’m probably discouraged or depressed about something. 

 

So WHY do we sometimes find it difficult to sense God’s presence and hear his voice?  In other words, what are the causes of this human-divine communication breakdown? 

While the answer to that can be in the billions of possibilities, let me try and simplify it down to two things.

1.)    Sin in some form is messing with the connection between God and us.  This is, in my opinion, what is happening the majority of the time when we fell out of touch with God.

2.)    While no particular sin has broken/messed with the connection, God is choosing silence with us for a time in order to take our relationship with him to a new level.  This would be the Job scenario:  God was doing something in and outside of Job that was not because there was some particular sin.  As a matter of fact, it was because Job was so righteous and upright that God chose to be silent and allow something to happen that was outside the norm of his relationship with Job for most of Job’s life.

 

So let’s start with that non-normal, Job scenario. 

Just this week I was reading a book in which the author took the position that God, being the best possible Father, would never do something that any good human father would find unthinkable.  He maintained, on this topic of communication with God, that God would not keep his children in the dark by maintaining silence towards them when they are desperately crying out to Him to communicate with them.  Since human fathers who might do that would be considered petty, mean or, at best, immature, God certainly would never do something like that. 

 

So what do you do with Job then?  Either God is acting worse than a sane, rational, loving human father would…OR he is acting in a way that is perfectly in order with all his character perfections—loving, merciful, just, righteous, kind, holy, sovereign, etc. 

            Since nothing in the Bible would allow us to describe God as worse than a human father, he must be relating consistent with his perfectly loving nature. 

Is it not possible that even our best mental composite of a “perfect human father” is flawed?  Would it not be appropriate for us to put God in a class all by himself? He is not simply the sum of the best father we can imagine.  He is SO much more. 

  • He values far more than any human father can value. 
  • He sees far deeper into our souls than any human father can. 
  • He knows  how much more growth can and needs to happen in every person. 
  • And he acts out of a much larger, sometimes hidden-from-human-view reality. 

God knew that Job had some more growing to do, and so he let him pass through what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul.”     

 

One author (Peter Scazzero) has described this experience as one of the seasons/stages of faith.  Great men and women of faith throughout the history of the church have written about these phases/seasons/stages of our faith-journey, people like Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, Evelyn Underhill and John Wesley.  Each stage naturally builds upon the other just like physical and psychological human development goes through the stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, parenting and old age.

Stage 1:  Life-Changing Awareness of God—This is the beginning of our journey with Christ where we become aware of his reality.  We realize our need for mercy and begin our relationship with Christ. 

Stage 2:  Discipleship—This stage is characterized by learning about god and what it means to be a follower of Christ. We become part of a Christian community and begin to get rooted in the disciplines of the faith.

Stage 3:  The Active Life—This is described as the “doing” stage.  We get involved, actively working for God, serving him and his people. 

Stage 4:  The Wall and the Journey Inward—These two elements are closely connected.  The Wall compels us into an Inward Journey.  In some cases the Inward Journey eventually leads us to the Wall.  This is God’s doing.  HE is the one who sets the schedule on this.

Stage 5:  The Journey Outward—This stage may initially look similar to the Active Life stage in that we begin once again to move outward to “do” for God.  But the difference is that now we give out of a new, grounded center of ourselves in God.  Having discovered experientially God’s profound, deep, accepting love for us, there is now a deep inner stillness that begins to characterize our work for God. 

Stage 6:  Transformed by Love—God continually sends events, circumstances, people, and even books into our lives to keep us moving forward on our journey.  He is determined to complete the work he began in us, whether we like it or not!  His goal, in the language of John Wesley, is that we b e made perfect in love, that Christ’s love becomes our love both toward God and others.  We realize love truly is the beginning and the end.  The whole of our spiritual lives is about surrender and obedience to God’s perfect will and love. 

 

One of the maddening things about the silences of God is that we don’t control them.  They happen TO us.  These “walls” or “dark nights of the soul” turn our world upside down. It may come through a crisis of some sort—perhaps a divorce, a job loss, the death of a close friend or family member, a battle with cancer, a disillusioning church experience, a betrayal, a shattered dream, a wayward child, a car accident, an inability to get pregnant, a deep desire to marry that remains unfulfilled, a dryness or loss of joy in our relationship with God or simply aging and loss we can’t control. 

            During these experiences, we question ourselves, God, the church.  We discover, perhaps for the first time, that our faith does not appear to “work.”  We have more questions than answers as the foundations of our faith feel like they are on the line.  We may feel like we have no idea where God is, or what he is doing, where he is taking us, how he is getting us there, or when it will be over.

 

ILL:  My most significant journey through “through the dark night of the soul” came when I was embarking on what I thought was a very sacrificial and spiritual journey—becoming a missionary overseas.  I had chosen to leave friends, family and a wonderfully fulfilling ministry here in the U.S. to dive into a place I knew would be slow and hard. 

But what I didn’t know is that, in that process, God would take away from me things I had come to love more dearly than God himself.  And he would begin to reveal to me how idolatrous I had become with good things, how deeply addicted I was to the gods of success, respect of other people, fruitfulness in my work, even a happy, supposedly model marriage and family. 

 

There are really 3 routes we can take when we are in this “dark night of the soul.” 

One is to walk through the night and emerge into the light of a new relationship with God that doesn’t demand that God give us certain things in life or a certain kind of life; it instead knows that what it needs most is simply the presence of God himself.  It rests in waiting for God to answer in his way, his time and his wisdom.

That doesn’t mean there are not repeated experiences that test and reveal additional growth that is needed in letting go of things or people.  There will be.  But having tasted what it means to live in union with simply the love of God through Christ in the Holy Spirit, we now handle times of abundance and times of need differently.  As Paul said in Philippians 4:12, we have learned “the secret of being content in any and every situation,” namely knowing and experiencing Jesus Christ.  We have truly discovered that we can “do everything through [Christ] who gives [us] strength” (Phil 4:13).  Part of that “everything” are the dark nights of the soul.

 

But there are still 2 other possible routes out of the dark nights of the soul. 

            A 2nd  possible route is to get so angry with God that we throw overboard as much of our Christian faith as possible.  We do this through maintaining our rightness, our anger at God, our “right” to have a God who doesn’t subject us to these kinds of painful experiences.  We stop going to church, stop reading our Bibles, stop praying, stop, for all intents and purposes, living out our faith.  WE continue to demand that God give us life on our terms…and we get stuck at the wall, though to everyone else it may even appear that our faith has really disappeared at the wall. 

            And it may, in fact, feel like it.  But here is also where God will never let us go.  We may wish he would, but he won’t.  We may feel like we are running as far and as fast away from God as possible, but we will find that we just keep bumping into God again and again until we are ready to let go of our anger and demands about how life in Christ should be and truly surrender to this mysterious love that has us in this place we can’t understand.

 

            The 3rd possible route in the dark night is to go back to a shallower faith we were content to live before.  Some of us hide behind our faith to flee the pain of our lives rather than trust God to transform us through it.  We utter platitudes like “God uses all things for good” (Rm. 8:28).  We come to church, smile and sing praise songs about our victory in Jesus.  We stuff what we are really feeling so deep down that we refuse to admit that we are really bewildered, we don’t know what God is doing right now, we may be very hurt, angry, sad and feeling like God has forsaken us.  We don’t allow “the dark night” to really break us of our attachments and affections to false gods our soul has come to worship. 

 

Had Job taken this route, he would have started agreeing with his 3 “counselors,” stuffed his feelings and convinced himself that he didn’t really need God to answer him in the darkness…and he would never have experienced the unexpected and probably somewhat horrifying encounter with God and those dozens of questions from God which he could not answer.  Only after Job got the true picture of himself in the presence of God…in the middle of his “dark night”, could he finally let go of his demands and truly let his smallness rest in the unfathomable bigness and mystery of God who would allow him to go through such a purging fire. 

            You see, it is very easy for us to become attached to our feelings of and about God, mistaking them for an attachment to God himself.  These spiritual sensations, rich or empty, are not God but rather messengers from God that speak to us of him.  There is no other way, John of the Cross would say, for our souls to be strengthened and purified so that we don’t worship our feelings than for God to remove them altogether.  This is God’s way of rewiring our spiritual taste buds that we might taste of him ever more fully. 

[Much of this is taken from Peter Scazzero’s book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.  See especially chapter 6, “Journey Through the Wall.”]

            St. John wrote “[God] is purging the soul, annihilating it, emptying it or consuming it (even as fire consumes the mouldiness and the rust of metal) all the affections and imperfect habits which it has contracted its whole life….These are deeply rooted in the substance of the soul….At the same time, it is God who is passively working here in the soul.” 

 

Our great temptation is to quit or go backwards when the Refiner’s fire gets too hot for what we think we can bear.  But we must not forget that not only is God taking away and subtracting from our souls the false gods we have thought we must have in order to survive; he is also adding something into our souls.  He is mysteriously infusing his love into us.  He is powerfully invading us when we persevere patiently through the “dark night of the soul.”  God is inserting something of himself into our character that will mark us for the rest of our journey in this life with him. 

 

When that happens, you will eventually find yourself coming out into a new dawn that will have the following characteristics:

1.)     You will live a greater level of brokenness that will free you from living, speaking and sitting in judgment on others.  Realizing how broken and flawed you are, you will not need to sit in judgment of others.  As Karl Barth notes, “the root and origin of sin is the arrogance in which man wants to be his own and his neighbor’s judge.”  Before we go through the dark night we prefer to exercise the right to determine good and evil rather than leave this knowledge to God.

ILL:  My shame in language school at seeing how arrogant and judgmental I had been of others.  My new-found appreciation for broken people who simply came to minister the grace of Christ rather than beat me over the head with more challenges to be a “better Christian.” 

2.)    You will have greater appreciation for Divine Mystery.  We all like control, don’t we?  We like to know where God is going, exactly what he is up to, the route he is taking and when the most recent “hard part” of the journey is going to end.  We like to remind God of his need to behave in ways that fit in with our clear ideas of him. 

But God is too big for us.  He is beyond the grasp of my best concepts of him. He is and ought to be at various times incomprehensible.  We must come to realize experientially that God is not an object I can master, possess or command.  He doesn’t play by the rule we would like to set up which says, “God, I’ll obey and keep my part of the bargain.  Now would you please bless me the way I want to be blessed…and don’t allow any serious suffering into my life?”  J

            But God is much more than our personal secretary or assistant.  The dark nights of our soul remind us that God is so very close yet so utterly above and far from us.  Yes, God is knowable, yet he is unknowable.  He live inside and beside us, yet he is so far beyond and outside of us.  This may be why Augustine wrote, “If you understand, it is not God you understand.”  

Face it, most of the time we have no idea what God is doing. 

            ILL:  There is an old story about a wise man living on one of China’s vast frontiers.  One day, for no apparent reason, a young man’s horse ran away and was taken by nomads across the border.  Everyone tried to offer consolation for the man’s bad fortune, but his father, a wise man, said, “What makes you so sure that this is not a blessing?”

            Months later, his horse returned, bringing with her a magnificent stallion.  This time everyone was full of congratulations for the son’s good fortune.  But now this father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a disaster?”

            Their household was made richer by this fine horse the son loved to ride.  But one day he fell off his horse and broke his hip.  Once again, everyone offered their consolation for his bad luck, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this is not a blessing?”  A year later nomads invaded across the border, and every able-bodied man was required to take up his bow and go into battle.  The Chinese families living on the border lost 9 of every 10 men.  Only because the son was lame did father and son survive to take care of each other. 

            The dark nights of the soul lead you to realize that the more you know about God, the more there is to know about him and the less you feel like you really know about him.  Walking through the dark nights of the soul will bring a deepened love for the mystery of God.

 

The new dawn after a dark night will also bring… 

3.)    A deeper ability to wait for God.  Going through the wall of the dark night breaks something deep within us—that driving, grasping, fearful self-will that must produce, that must make something happen, that must get it done for God (just in case he doesn’t…J). 

Failure to wait on God can produce some of the biggest mistakes of our lives.  If you don’t believe me, just ask people like Abraham and Hagar, or Moses and the dead abusive Egyptian, or David and Bathsheba, or Joshua and the grieving families of the dead warrior at Ai.  Waiting on God runs through the souls of people of the dark night. 

      The Psalmists understood this when they wrote in Psalm 27:14, “Wait for the lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”  Psalm 130:5-6—“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.  My soul waits for the Lord.” 

 

APP:  What is God asking you to wait FOR of IN today that your tendency is to chafe against and demand that he work or act your way? 

 

4.)     Growing through the dark night of the soul will produce a greater, healthier detachment from the wrong things and a greater, healthier attachment to God.  The critical question will no longer be, “Am I happy?” but “Am I free from the false gods of my life?  Am I growing in the freedom God wants to give me in holding only to Him?”

 

Detachment is one of the secrets of interior peace.  It is SO easy in life to get affectionately attached to behaviors, habits, things, and people in unhealthy ways.  And we often don’t realize how attached we have become until God removes that thing or person and we find ourselves demanding that it be reinstated in order for us to be “happy.” 

Dark nights cut off our attachments to who we think we ought to be, or who we falsely think we are.  Layers of our counterfeit self are shed.  Something truer, that is really Christ in and through us, slowly emerges. 

 

Thomas Merton summed up our challenge well when he wrote this.  “I wonder if there are 20 men alive in the world now who see things as they really are.  That would mean that there were 20 men who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by an attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God.” 

 

God sometimes chooses the silence of the dark night to purify and grow our souls in ways we would never choose of our own accord.  While we may feel like he has totally abandoned us and vacated our universe of experience, the reality is that he is probably closer to us…and we closer to Him…than ever. 

 

COMMUNION:  That closeness and never being abandoned is what we celebrate.