A Face: Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father - whatever Jesus is, God is. To answer these questions he gives an amazing overview of the Old Testament and ends with an examination of the book Job. Our Heavenly Father understands our deepest emotions, especially those rising from pain. I also noticed a telling pattern in the OT accounts: the very clarity of God’s will had a stunning effect on the Israelites’ faith. He will only see me. Job is the primary book Yancey goes to in the latter half of the book, but he certainly does not limit himself to Job's struggles the entire novel. He desires not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but the mature, freely given love of a lover. Jesus, who presumably could work a wonder any day of his life if he wanted, seemed curiously ambivalent about miracles. A single elegant sentence from Isaiah summarises God’s point of view: “in all their distress he too was distressed.”” God may have hidden his face, but that face was streaked with tears. Highly enjoyable book but I do not think it will offer much comfort to the doubters and those who have given up on believing in a merciful God. He is preparing to obliterate Israel - wait, now he is weeping, holding out open arms - no, he is sternly pronouncing judgement again. The second Voice - the voice modulated with Jesus, the Word made flesh - it was a normal human voice, and though it spoke with authority, it di not cause people to flee. But God is not life. For who can know what the Lord is thinking? How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods! Disappointment with God is real and even the most mature of Christians come to experience the great well of anger or sorrow when stripped by the harshness of life. If you've ever asked these three questions of God, and, let's be honest, w. Philip Yancey is a great storyteller, and his willingness to be open and honest about things that he struggles with really resonate with me. The other day in Sunday school one of my 6th grade students asked, “Why doesn’t God do stuff today like he did in the Bible?” Having spent much of my adult life as a missionary in the developing world, I am aware that God intervenes supernaturally much more in contexts where he is just beginning to be known than he does in places like North America. He acknow. And then he wrote a book to warm the heart and strengthen faith. Taking his readers through the entire Bible, Yancey examines disappointment with the Old Testament's God the Father; then with the Gospels' God the Son; and then with God the Holy Spirit, of the Acts and the Epistles. 2. In Job, God deflects those questions of cause, and focuses instead on our response of faith. ... would it be too much to say that, because of Jesus, God understands our feelings of disappointment with him? Both those human relationships contain elements of what God has always been seeking from human beings. Sad, tired mostly. The author chooses the situation of Richard, the person suffering the least of the examples (but a fellow author), to follow throughout the book. I hesitate to say this because it is a hard truth and one I do not want to acknowledge, but Job stands as merely the most extreme example of what appears to be a universal low of faith. In earliest history, then, God acted so plainly that no one could grouse about his hiddenness of silence. The results of this covenant based on a ‘fair’ system of rewards and punishments. Although Jesus’ miracles were far too selective to solve every human disappointment, they served as signs of his mission, previews of what God would someday do for all creation. I went back to it because the emotion has come up several times in recent conversations and I have known it in my own life. God the Father who could have helped his Son on the cross did not act. They are the body of Christ. Richard was feeling a pain as great as any that a human being experiences: the pain of betrayal. God gave Solomon everything he wanted, yet Solomon squandered those gifts and wandered spiritually later in life. The Torn Curtain: Both for God and for us, he made possible an intimacy that had never before existed. Colossians 3:2 says "Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth." Instead it substitutes another question, “To what end?”. Is God hidden?” and scour the Bible methodically, looking for clues. It looks frankly at the ways in which our relationship with God is different from human relationships. Included in this anniversary edition is a study guide with questions about these perplexing questions of faith that the author confronts. And all that God asks of us is not to reject God when everything around us is darkness and despair. Three large questions about God that seem to lurk just behind the thicket of our feelings: 2. Re Joseph’s trials and disappointments - God unfair? In this 25th Anniversary edition of Disappointment with God, Philip Yancey tackles the questions caused by a God who doesn't always do what we think he's supposed to do. Jesus had one splendid opportunity to silence the critics forever. Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey. Who wants to stay in kindergarten forever? Yancey does a phenomenal job in this two-part book (one book but really two halves: how we are disappointed and a case study of disappointment via Job) of never glossing the real anger and pain we can feel toward God. <A HREF=”http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fwwwphilipyanc-20%2F8010%2F07f9acd0-de6c-4aa9-9cd1-f510f50ed837&Operation=NoScript”>Amazon.com Widgets</A> For Yancey, reading offered a window to a different world. You can easily detect the shift by scanning the OT, which gives lengthy accounts of the first three kings of Israel - Saul, David, and Solomon; but after Solomon, stories of the kings sped up into a forgettable blur. He lashed out, stormed and wept. Perhaps a clue can be found in the first ‘event’ in Jesus’ ministry, the Temptation. Job felt the weight of God's absence; but a look behind the curtain reveals that in one sense God had never been more present. When he decided on a medium, paint on plaster, he limited himself. If he had yielded to the Temptation, Jesus would have earned his credentials, not just with Satan but with all Israel, establishing himself beyond dispute. A third group of people evade the problem of unfairness by looking to the future, when an exacting justice will work itself out in the universe. This--everybody who has ever even tangentially been connected to Christianity should read this. Is God unfair? But Adam and Eve had another distinction as well: alone of all God’s creatures, they had a moral capacity to rebel against their creator. Publication date 2000 Topics God -- Knowableness, Theodicy, Faith, Large type books Publisher Walker Collection inlibrary; printdisabled; internetarchivebooks; china Digitizing sponsor Internet Archive Contributor Internet Archive Language English. 3. No artist, no matter how great, escapes this limitation. We go through tough times and wonder where God is in all of that, but really, another way to view it is where are we in all of this? . Jesus ‘learned obedience’ through what he suffered). It was the only way God could work ‘within the rules’ he had set up at Creation. yet those early interventions shred one important feature - each was a punishment, a response to human rebellion. He does not give cheap answers to the problems of life. Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love. Mainly, he wants to be loved. Is he hidden? CHALLENGE OUR EXPECTATIONS. Even Jesus cried from the cross, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” Both a summary of his human side’s emotions and a quote from Psalms 22. Refresh and try again. What a classic treatment of a generations long issue. Actually, disappointed is too gracious of a word. Subscribe to Philip Yancey’s blog here. If I had to reduce the plot of Genesis to one sentence, it would be something like this: God learns how to be a parent (not learning in the sense of gaining knowledge, but in the sense of taking on new experiences, such as the creation of free human beings. Think of the condescension involved: the Incarnation which sliced history into two parts had more animal than human witnesses. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Philip Yancey earned graduate degrees in Communications and English from Wheaton College Graduate School and the University of Chicago. Is this what God had in mind? Apparently not. God talked back, defending the way he ran the world. In producing this book,Yancey did not just sit down one day and begin to write. Belief in an unseen world forms a crucial dividing line of faith today ... according to the Bible, human history is far more than the rising and falling of people and nations; it is a staging ground for the battle of the universe. As often as not, spiritual giants of the Bible are shown contending with God. 2. Is he hidden? The relatively short treatise (300 odd pages), borne out of approximately half a decade of study and many more years of experiencing the subject for himself, is also accompanied by a linguistic and stylistic flair, which few, at least those in the genre of Christian literature, can emulate; and that I suspect, has much to do with Yancey's professional experience as a journalist. But when His solutions do not coincide with ours, we experience discouragement. Be scandalised by the questions that it raises (cf Job’s friends). He had spoken his will for the Israelites in a set of rules, codified into 613 laws that covered the complete range of behaviour from murder to boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk. God’s covenant with the Israelites. Anyone who thinks about disappointment with God must pause at Gethsemane, and at Pilate’s palace, and at Calvary - the scenes of Jesus’ arrest, trial and execution ... Jesus experienced a state very much like disappointment with God. Michelangelo knew that no trompe l’oeil would give the Sistine Chapel ceiling the three-dimensional reality he had achieved with his sculptures. Well- that is my perspective, and that's what this book explains. So we must look at things through the lens of God’s character. Not Yet: The writers of the NT were convinced that Jesus had changed the universe forever. I believe that Satan’s challenge was a true temptation for Jesus, not a staged, predetermined contest. You produce something that did not exist before, yes, but only by ruling out other options along the way. He agreed with them and then explained why he was keeping his distance. Had he deliberately ‘pulled back’ to allow Joseph’s faith to reach a new level of maturity? Why doesn't God answer me? Disappointment occurs when the … With these three questions in mind, Yancey sets the stage in the first section, "God Within the Shadows." The powerful image of a jilted lover explains why in his speeches to the prophets, God seems to ‘change his mind’ every few seconds. God did not play hide-and-seek with the Israelites; they had every proof of his existence you could ask for. When it comes to God, I feel something like betrayal.”. The indwelling life of Christ is what births endurance, faith, and hope. “What else can I do?’ God’s poignant question to Jeremiah points up the dilemma of an omnipotent God who has made room for freedom. The state of the earth continued to deteriorate toward a point of crisis which the Bible sums up in the most poignant sentence ever written: ‘The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain”.