God is strangely silent today—or so it appears to many people. Frequently men ask whether God can still be found and where he is. How are we to understand this seeming silence and answer these pressing questions at the Christmas season—a time when men momentarily turn their attention to Bethlehem, the manger, the Wise Men, and God’s great gift to men?
Between the Old and the New Testaments stands a period of time often called the four hundred silent years. It is a classic example of the apparent silence of God. During this period there were no writing prophets. Judah had indeed become the dry ground out of which Messiah was prophesied to come. The sceptre seemingly had departed from the house of David, and the glory of Solomon’s kingdom had faded.
During these silent centuries there was no new revelation from God. Some of the people of Israel had quietly laid aside their belief in a coming Messiah. Time and the failure of Messiah to appear raised persistent doubts that caused them to tune out from prophetic hopes and live only for the present. There were others whose hopes were not dimmed. Even they, however, no doubt were puzzled and asked themselves hard questions: Why doesn’t God do something? How long will it be before God breaks his silence and acts in history to fulfill his promise?
What we know, and what they should have known, is that God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts. He was waiting for the fullness of time to come. And when it came, he acted. He came visibly to men.
The Incarnation was like a flash of lightning in a midnight sky. In a darkened age there appeared the bright light of God’s new act. But even then his act had more darkness than light in it for many people. Most of those who looked for Messiah’s coming waited for a king born in a royal palace—with, so to speak, a golden spoon in his mouth. But God’s lightning flash revealed only a baby born in Bethlehem’s inn, the son of a peasant woman whose husband was merely a carpenter.
Yet the glory of what God had done could not be obscured by the lowliness of Messiah’s birth. It was grasped and propagated forever by the writer of the Hebrews: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a son.” God has spoken! He has sent his Son! He is not silent. And the shepherds hear the angel choir: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.”
Two thousand years have passed since God spoke to men through the coming of Jesus Christ. A cross and a resurrection have intervened. A few disciples were baptized by the Spirit and sent out to turn the world upside down for Jesus the Christ. His Gospel has spread from shore to shore until virtually every land and nation of the world has witnessed the establishment of his Church and the salvation of those who have embraced him. The records of God’s new act in Jesus Christ have been imperishably set down in the New Testament, which far surpasses all other books ever written in the number of copies printed and distributed.
The tide of the Gospel reached its fullest heights in the beginning of this century. Now as we go into the seventies the tide is running out, slowly and inexorably. The élan is evaporating, the passion is diminishing. Sloth and doubt take a heavy toll. For many, the effulgent glory of the God whose lightning crossed the darkened sky two thousand years ago has faded. Darkness has begun to descend upon the earth, and the voice of God seems silent, his Spirit’s restraining power lifted. Men grope in the darkness, reaching out to touch the hand that doesn’t seem to be there, straining to hear the voice that doesn’t seem to speak.
Have we who are Christians not yet learned that even when God appears to be silent he is speaking? Do we not know that in his silence he speaks thunderously? Is he not showing us for a time what life is like when he does not speak? Would he not remind us of the time when his own Son stood exposed to the merciless wrath of divine justice and suffered alone as the face of his Father was turned from him and the silence of God pronounced judgment upon sin? Is he not saying to sinful men that there is a final silence, a silence they will experience when he is totally withdrawn from them forever? Hell itself is neither more nor less than the absolute withdrawnness of God from men. Life without God is hell.
In Scripture there are few words more pathetic than those spoken of Samson, “And he did not know that the Lord had left him.” The presence of God was withdrawn and so great was Samson’s backslidden condition that he did not even know that God was gone, until he woke from his sleep expecting to use his strength, only to discover his loss, experience the pain of God’s withdrawnness, and later to search desperately for the return of the One who was missing. Is it not so that many of those who truly name the name of God somehow feel the loss of his presence in our dark and troubled age? Is there no answer to their quest?
We may be living in the closing days of this age. Perhaps the present silence and apparent invisibility of God is the prelude to a lightning bolt that once more will flash across the leaden sky. Maybe that time will soon come when he who shook the earth once will shake it again. “He has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.’ ” We Christians look back rightly to that once-for-all event that took place at Calvary. This was the purpose for which the Son of Man came—to seek and to save. But this same Son of Man has a still unfulfilled purpose, and it is toward this that we should lift up our eyes this Christmas season. This one who came the first time in humiliation is coming again in glory. The sky once more will be split by the lightning: “For as the light comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the son of man” (Matt. 24:27).God’s silence will not continue forever. Although he will never speak again through more Scripture, he will speak and act visibly and powerfully in history. This time the Son of his love will come in flaming fire, taking vengeance on those who do not accept the Gospel. But he will also gather to himself his saints, who wait in this silence for the unveiling of the Lord of hosts. Maranatha. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.
