A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Roma E. Bryant is a member of St. Paul’s Church, Ottawa.
Disappointment with God. Philip Yancey. Zondervan Publishing House, 1988.
Philip Yancey is a noted author who has a penchant for delving into the unfathomable mysteries of God. In his book Disappointment with God he is making a supreme effort to provoke us to give more than a passing glance to three questions that are rarely asked aloud. He works from real life situations, and searches for answers to these three questions. Is God unfair? Is God silent? Is God hidden? Yancey retreated into solitude for a two week period in a mountain cabin with God as his only companion, and the Bible as his only reference book. This book deals with what people oft-times expect from their Christian faith, and what they actually experience. To quote Yancey himself, he says: “This is not a book of apologetics, I will not travel the path of pointing out evidences for God. I am dealing with doubts that are more emotional than intellectual. This is a book about faith, but it looks at faith through the eyes of those who doubt. I knew I would have to confront questions that have no easy answers. I also did not want to write a book that would dampen anyone’s faith.”
The young man Richard, whose story and loss of faith prompted Yancey to tackle this book, commented “if only God would solve these three problems faith would flourish.” The question is, “would it?”
For two weeks Philip Yancey read the Bible slowly, cover to cover, book by book, chapter by chapter, page by page in a supreme effort to find answers to these questions.
Out of his reading he encountered not a mist vapour but a Person. A Person who has deep emotions, feels delight, frustration, anger. He marveled at how much God lets human beings affect him. He hurts. He suffers. He loves. God wants us to love him as he loves us. We think too much of our feelings and do not listen attentively (by reading the Bible) to his feelings. God created. A new parent, holding their baby close for the first time, experiences something of what God felt when he completed his creation.
One theologian said: “Man is God’s risk.” a risk that God took when he gave man his freedom. As a human parent suffers when a child turns from him, so God suffers as man turns from him.
In earliest history, God acted so plainly that no-one could complain about his hiddenness or silence. If it was his intention to have a mature relationship with free human beings he certainly met with a series of setbacks. God tries again. Rather than trying to restore the whole earth at once he began with a pioneer settlement. To Abraham he said, “I will make you into a great nation. For years he carried his people, was not silent nor unseen. He spoke audibly, he made himself visible first to Moses in a burning bush, to the Israelites in a pillar of cloud and fire. Were the people more faithful, more loving toward him? Sadly – No! Repeated rebellions took their toll. God predicted a terrible disobedience and foretold his own response: “I will certainly hide my face on that day.”
Actually, being a “chosen people” had a cost, nothing could fall out of the purview of his laws, and ultimately the Israelites found it nearly impossible to live with a holy God in their midst. “Who of us can dwell with a consuming fire?” asked the prophet Isaiah. Is it possible that we should be grateful for God’s hiddenness, rather than disappointed? The prophets, especially Hosea, communicate one message above all others: God is the betrayed one. At the end of the Old Testament God had, indeed, hidden his face. Then Jesus came.
Is God silent? Jesus made God’s will clearer than ever before. Is God hidden? With Jesus, God actually took on a shape in the world. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Yet Jesus’ visibility, his very ordinariness, introduced a new problem. Jesus didn’t match the people’s image of what God should look like.
Is God unfair? This question produced most doubt about Jesus. The promised Messiah would swallow up death forever. Jesus did heal some. Some he did not. Unfairness? In the temptation of Jesus there is a haunting similarity between Satan’s “throw yourself down” and Richard’s cry to “show yourself.” In each case God demurred. God holds back. Why? He wants love more than he wants subservience. He chose the way of the Incarnation, love and death. Christ chose not to destroy evil by divine force but by love. His miracles were far too selective to solve every human disappointment; they served as signs of his mission and they did what he had predicted. To those who chose to believe they gave even more reason to believe. To those who denied him the miracles made little difference. To quote Yancey, “Some things just have be believed to be seen!” Touche!
When Jesus had left the earth the Holy Spirit came. God was now going to make his appeal through us. God takes the risk that we will represent him badly. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine of “the church.” God living in us. God doing his work through us. As Yancey said about his unbelieving friend, “Richard will probably never hear a voice from a whirlwind. He will likely never get a glimpse of God in this life. He will only see me.” What an awesome responsibility!
No book of the Bible is unstudied by Yancey, and his treatise on the book of Job is worth the price of the book itself. A tremendous battle was waged in the cosmos, and Job was an ordinary man in the seen world, called upon to endure a trial with cosmic consequence. Yet he ultimately could say, “tho’ he slay me, yet will I trust him.”
Is God unfair? M. Scott Peck opened his book The Road Less Travelled with three words, “Life is difficult.” The book of Job expresses a similar cry – “life is unfair” resounds from every page. “Is God unfair?” is the cry of the Christian and the non-Christian alike. Strangely, the non-Christian can always use a complaint against God as being unfair when things do not go according to his or her wishes.
During his work on this book Yancey made it a point to meet regularly with people who felt betrayed by God. He speaks of Douglas whose wife suffered from cancer. During this time Douglas himself suffered permanent injury in a car accident. When Yancey asked him about his disappointment with God, he was taken aback by Douglas’ response. “I didn’t feel any disappointment with God. I learned not to confuse God with life. I am upset and angry, but I believe God feels the same way I do, grieved and angry. I don’t blame him for what happened. We think life should be fair because God is fair. God’s existence, nor his love for me, does not depend on my good health.” A modem Job!
Meg Woodson watched two of her children, one, twelve, and, the other twenty-three, die a terrible and painful death from cystic fibrosis, and though she asked “why?” she never complained against God and never questioned him, but felt his stroking and his “I’m here, Meg.”
There is so much in this book that I find it very difficult to condense it into a logical review. Therefore, I encourage you to read it.
Philip Yancey closes the book with a brief, personal story of the father he never knew. His father was locked away in an iron lung, suffering from polio, yet Yancey knows his father thought of him, prayed for him, loved him. As he looked on the old, crumpled photograph that his father had kept in front of him of his beloved child, he picked up on the commitment that he had made years before. “Someone is there, someone loves me, which provoked a feeling of such wild hope, so new and overwhelming it seemed fully worth risking my life on.”
As I turned the final page and closed the book, I sat for a long time in quiet contemplation, and through my thoughts filtered the words uttered by someone dear to me, “it still remains a matter of faith; you either choose to believe or you do not.” I choose to believe.