When God Seems Silent

Now, last week, we talked about the same, had a little bit of same passage that

we're going to be looking at today.

But last week, we were talking about, it seemed that when Moses would talk to God, God listened.

And you've been there, where I am often at times.

It seems like we try to talk to God as if God is silent, as if our prayers bounce off the ceiling.

And we looked at Moses and his time and we understand that not only did he speak

to God, but he listened to God.

And I think that's pretty important. It's pretty hard for us.

I mean, most of us guys, now when our wife says something to us,

she tells us about how her day's been and the dryers on the fritz and this and that.

And already when our wife starts talking, what do we do?

Think of some way we can fix it, right? So we aren't really listening to her,

we're thinking of some way to already solve it, and then when our wife gets

done and we're telling her what needs to go, she goes, I don't want you to fix

that. I just want you to listen to me.

And that's what Moses experienced. He experienced that time that he just needed

to listen to God a few times.

We understand that he was a man of faith. He knew God. He knew God personally

and saw him face to face, and he was a man who obeyed God.

But this morning, have you Have you ever been looking for answers and felt like

they just weren't coming?

Have you ever been praying to be rescued from a certain circumstances,

and it seemed like the lights were being shut out for you?

I know there's times that we all do this. We're looking for something.

We don't know what it is. We're looking for something, but we know that when

we find it, we'll know it's it. Right? Right.

I mean, we were Nancy and I were looking for a dining room, a dining room table

for our house. This is when we were in Iowa.

We were looking for a dining room table. We didn't know what we wanted.

We just just knew what we wanted or knew we would know it when we saw it.

We were going through a store one time and I she was at one end and I was at the other.

Thank God for cell phones that you could text each other back and forth. Right.

I mean, that's how God really wants us to get a hold of each other is by text.

Something like that. Anyway, she was on one side of the store looking at Christmas decorations in July.

Anyway, and I was in another part of the store and I texted her and I said,

I found it exactly what we want.

And so I said, come on over here. And so she came over and she goes,

that's exactly what we want.

It was a triangular dining table, high countertop height with benches and stuff.

It was just perfect. It was like, boy, that's going to fit just perfectly in our house.

Now, unfortunately, it's time to retire that one. But anyway, we just knew what it was.

And that's sometimes the way it is with our time with God.

It's just, we're waiting for God to answer, and so often we're telling him how

we want him to answer us, right?

Have you ever done that? Nobody's ever done that before, right?

We never tell God what we want him to answer do we well i doubt there's a person

here today who hasn't had one of those dark night experiences.

At some time when god didn't seem to hear

our desperate cry for help or we didn't think he was listening worse than that

it seemed like he had broke contact with us and we were desperately alone when

those times come upon us we go through stages of questions anger frustration doubt and and even fear.

When we feel these things, we become vulnerable to behaving in ways we thought

could never be possible for us.

We're not that different from the people in our text that we're going to read this morning.

And before we read this passage of Scripture, we need to be reminded of the

experiences of the Israelites that they've had so far.

Now, I want to remind you, we've been going through the Old Testament,

starting in Genesis and now into Exodus.

We'll soon be done with Exodus, but those words mean not a whole lot to a pastor

when he says, we'll be done with this one, or in conclusion,

that doesn't always mean much.

But anyway, but we'll be getting through that. But we've been looking at the

faith lessons and how we can look at the Old Testament, how it's going to impact

our faith and make our faith grow.

So we've been looking at this, we've been experiencing what they've been going

through, what the Israelites had been going through.

Can you imagine experiencing the things the Israelites did?

And yet their faith was an up-and-down thing all the time. If you look and read

the accounts of the Israelites, it was like they were up on high.

Mount Sinai, they weren't, but Moses was, but they were up on high and then they'd get down to low.

These were ones who had experienced God's direct intervention in bringing the

plagues upon the Egyptian people, Pharaoh and the people, that would allow them to be freed.

They were miraculously kicked out of Egypt and experienced the Israelites,

or the Egyptians, favor toward them, even as they gave them clothes and jewelry as they left.

They said, get out of here and here's the stuff to go.

So they were favorably bestowed upon by the Egyptians as they left.

They had experienced the presence of God as a pillar of cloud by day and pillar

of fire by night that would protect them, hedge them in both front and back,

and it guided them on their way.

This same pillar of fire stood between them and the Pharaoh's army all night long.

And so when you're an Egyptian trying to take over Israelites,

and you see this big pillar of fire in front of you, you're blinded by this light.

You know you don't dare go any farther forward.

And so they were protected by this.

They were delivered from certain annihilation at the hands of Pharaoh.

When they passed through the Red Sea, probably 2 million people plus livestock

passing through the Red Sea as it was divided, and that the same Red Sea,

as soon as they got through, came back and crashed down upon Pharaoh's army and drowned them.

They really had seen God's power at work.

They had seen answers to prayer, evidence of God's help and his care.

We wonder sometimes how they could see all of those things and yet waver in their faith?

How could people have seen the hand of God working in their lives over and over

and over again and still not expect and take evidence of his care?

Now, when they got thirsty, they cried out to God for help.

Moses struck the rock instead of speaking to it, like God said, and water flowed out.

In fact, there's a place that you can—they say that there's a big,

huge rock that shows where the rock has split, even now, and there's a channel

that has come out of that rock and a riverbed, a dry riverbed now,

that they expect or suspect is the place where this happened.

You know, they grumbled because they were walking in the wilderness,

going round and round, 40 years to get to the promised land.

And they wandered through the wilderness, and they got hungry.

And they complained to God because they didn't have leeks, onions,

and garlics like they had in Egypt.

So God gave him manna, and he gave him quail. And when they began making banana bread and everything,

banana bread, excuse me, and everything else, they kind of got tired of the

same thing over and over, like we do with hospital food or school food.

They got tired of the same thing over and over, so they complained to God because

they were given too much of the same thing.

So the Israelites were wandering through, and in Exodus chapter 19,

Exodus 19 · chapter mention

we see that Moses had been called up to visit with God on Mount Sinai.

During that time, God had revealed himself to Moses and revealed his plan for

the Israelites, as well as he gave the laws to Moses, the Ten Commandments as

we know them now, by which the Israelites should live.

These were not Ten Commandments that God was just trying to take the fun out of life for us.

These were Ten Commandments. These were not Ten Suggestions.

They were commandments that helped the Israelites to know what it takes to live

a life where you get along with your God and with your neighbor for all time.

We're going to read Exodus chapter 32, verses 1 through 7, and then 19 through 29.

Exodus 32:1–7

Exodus 32, 1 through 7. When the people saw that Moses was so long and coming

down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said,

Come, make us gods who will go before us.

As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him.

Aaron answered them, Take off the gold earrings that your wives,

your sons, and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.

So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron.

He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast into the shape of

a calf, fashioning it with a tool.

Then they said, These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced,

Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.

So the next day the people rose

early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings.

Afterward, they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

Then the Lord said to Moses, Go down, because your people whom you brought up

out of Egypt have become corrupt.

Exodus 32, 19 through 29.

When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing,

his anger burned, and he threw the tablets out of his hands,

breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain.

And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire.

Then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.

He said to Aaron, Aaron, what did these people do to you that you led them into such great sin?

Do not be angry, my lord, Aaron answered. You know how prone these people are to evil.

They said to me, make us gods who will go before us.

As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him.

So I told them, whoever has gold jewelry, take it off.

Then they gave the gold and I threw it into the fire and cast out this calf.

Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get

out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies.

So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, whoever is for the Lord, come to me.

And all the Levites rallied to him.

Then he said to them, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel says.

Each man strap a sword to his side, go back and forth through the camp from

one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.

The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died.

Then Moses said, You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against

your own son's brothers, and he has blessed you to this day.

Some of that seems pretty harsh, doesn't it? But let's consider some of the

regretful and dangerous responses that the Israelites showed when God seemed

to be silent or even absent.

It seemed as they were wandering through the wilderness, there were times that

they didn't have all of these extravagant-type blessings from God.

It was the same old mundane thing day after day after day as they wandered in the wilderness.

And we can learn something from them. So keep in mind, Moses was God's representative

among the Israelite people.

In fact, he was considered almost next to God.

And so when they saw Moses, it was as if they were looking at the very evidence

of God's intervention in their lives.

So with Moses absent, once again, the Israelites, the Israelite people began

to grumble and take things into their own hands.

We would never do such a thing, right?

So I wonder if we don't have the same tendencies when God doesn't seem to be

doing exactly the miraculous things

we think that he should in the timing that we think he should do it.

Do we ever have the tendency to believe that God is being silent?

Looking at our text this morning, one of the first warnings made to us to consider

is that the Israelites gave in to the temptation to turn away from God.

We would never dream of doing that. We would never dream of going our own way.

We would never dream of depending on ourselves and ourselves only, right? Wrong.

God's people were in transition. For 400 years, their forefathers had endured,

oppressive manual labor and extremely cruel and abusive bosses.

We don't know anybody like that. Just saying.

However, they did have places to sleep and food to eat.

We're told when they exited Egypt, it was 430 years to the day of when Jacob

brought his family into Egypt.

430 years to the day, exactly. This generation, this generation now was born into slavery.

They They didn't know anything else. All they knew was getting up,

going to work, going back home, getting up, going to work, going back home.

It was like the Dunkin' Donuts man that kind of met himself coming and going.

You remember those commercials, got to make the donuts, and he walks out the

door, and sooner or later, he meets himself coming back in.

It's like that's all they had to do. There was nothing different.

They knew no different life.

They knew nothing different than being slaves. They didn't know what it was like to be free.

In fact, even in their life of slavery, they might have thought they were free.

So now, as they set out on this journey, never imagined to a land that was only

a dream, everything was different.

They had a new leader by the name of Moses, who was everything to them.

He said, let's go out of here. God is taking us out. And they wander,

go out into the wilderness, and they begin to wander because of their disobedience.

You know, the old joke is, do you know why the Israelites took 40 years to get

through the wilderness?

Because men never stop and ask directions. right?

Anyway, but that's not it. They wandered in the wilderness because God was not

ready for them to go into the promised land.

So now they set out on this journey, having now spent about six weeks without

their leader who was up on this mountain talking with God, six weeks up on Mount Sinai.

They yearned for things the way that it used to be.

Old habits die hard. And so they went to Aaron, God's chosen priest,

the representative for Moses, and began to manipulate Aaron.

They asked him to lead them in idol worship, which was very common in the land

that they were now living.

They complained that Moses was just taken forever up there.

He wasn't there at their beck and call. He couldn't provide them manna and quail

and water and everything else that they had. He He wasn't their servant anymore.

He was up on the mountain. So they began to question Moses' leadership.

What kind of leader was he to desert them at such a time as this,

when they were stuck in the wilderness doing nothing?

Have you ever been stuck someplace doing nothing?

Oh, my goodness. The things our minds work through, right?

When we're not doing anything, idle times are the playground of the devil, right?

So what kind of leader was he to desert them? When Moses' decision-making did

not sit well with people, their idea of fixing the problem was to get a new

leader, to ditch that leader and get another one.

So remember this. We've said this before, but the root of all sin is self.

When we start thinking about what's best for us, that's where temptations and sins start to creep in.

We start looking not at what is best for others or best for God.

We look at what can we do to get our own way.

And they were not getting their way. God was just not handing everything they wanted.

They didn't have a quick trip around the corner to go get milk and eggs and bananas.

So they decided to take things into their own hands and do things their own way.

Without Moses there to get God to do everything for them, they decided to call

on the idols of the people in the land where they were living.

Maybe they could be coerced into giving them what they want.

I mean, that's really smart.

You ditch a leader who is the representative of a living God and begin to worship

a statue who is the representative of an inanimate thing.

That makes a lot of sense to me, doesn't it?

No. But it seems that's what they've done.

Does this ever happen in our lives if

god doesn't seem to be answering our every request do

we tend to take matters into our own

hands do we tend to do what our selfish human nature wants us to do when facing

the red sea on one side the egyptian army on the other side god had the israelites

to stand firm and watch the deliverance of the lord that's what he said when

they were up against the Red Sea, he said, stand firm.

Well, he said through Moses, stand firm and watch the deliverance of the Lord.

So they were in fear, trembling.

Here they were, two million people against an army of charioteers and horsemen and military,

maybe, maybe 50,000 strong, and they were trembling. bling.

And they stood still and Moses said, don't worry, stand firm,

watch the deliverance of the Lord.

But we tend oftentimes to take things into our own hands.

They at that time even wanted to say, let's go back, let's give ourselves up

and go back to the land of Egypt where we had these pots of food for us.

Sure, life was tough, but we'd know what we were doing every day.

Negative attitudes toward God's leader began to well up within them again and

again, and so they called on the Spokanes for their group, Aaron,

to become their new leader.

But they really didn't want him to lead them. They wanted him to do everything they requested.

You know, oftentimes we come into churches and we don't want the pastor to be

the pastor, to be the leader.

We want the pastor or to serve every one of our needs. And I understand this.

I've been there too. At one time, I was a lay person too.

And we seem to want the leaders to do everything we think they should do instead

of leading us into the presence of God.

When we have the worship team come up here and their purpose is to lead us into the presence of God,

how often times do we just go through the motions of singing the songs and not

really reflecting on the fact that we are coming into the presence of an almighty

God who has created us and done so much for us?

That's not in my notes. That was for free. But when God seems to be silent,

the danger is for us to worship things, other things, even our own abilities.

Sometimes we do like the Israelites and try to drum up worship in one way or

another to get someone to answer.

If we think we're not being heard, we sing or shout a little longer or dance a little faster.

The Israelites wanted answers, and now they didn't know how they were going

to get them, so they decided to call on someone else other than God to give them their answers.

And again, the root of all sin is self.

In rejecting Moses and elevating Aaron to take them into worship their way,

they were really rejecting God.

We teeter in our relationship with God when life doesn't seem to make sense.

C.S. Lewis, the Irish Oxford scholar and well-known author for the Narnia fiction

series, He wrote this after his wife's death. Where is God?

Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find?

A door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the

inside. After that, there is only silence.

So even C.S. Lewis, who wrote those great books of faith.

Has had those times when he struggled and wondered whether God was even answering

his prayers and even thinking of him.

He articulates what we so often feel when our lives seem to be falling apart.

Have you ever lost a job suddenly, and you get that pit in your stomach,

that anxious pit that's an annoying pit? It's called worry.

But more than that, It's just you don't know what's going to happen,

and you are out on a limb by yourself, and you seem to be sawing the limb off

on the other side of you, on the wrong side.

It seems like there are times like that. Author John Ortberg captures our dark

night that leads us to destroy relationships.

He writes this, When it is easy to see God all around me, in the trees and in

the birds and nature and other people, Why is it so hard to feel his presence,

especially when I need him most?

And when we crave God the most, it almost seems like he's being absent.

And yet we know that he's not. Our heart tells us that he's not.

Our mind kind of senses that maybe we're out on our own.

There are haunting questions and experiences that can make skeptics of even

the most beautiful among us.

So the Israelites gave in to these temptations, the temptation to turn away from God.

But we also see that the Israelites gave in to destructive behavior.

Have we ever known alcoholics, or drug addicts, or pornography addicts,

or any other kind list of destructive behavior?

To make the point of how terrible destructive behavior could be,

I want to share with you something from a novel written by Peter DeVry.

The novel is titled The Blood of the Lamb.

It includes the story of Dan Wanderhope, whose 11-year-old daughter had leukemia.

The bone marrow transplant was working toward his daughter's remission when

an infection swept through the ward of the hospital, and she died.

He had come to the hospital with a cake for his doctor, but left to go back

to the church where he had just prayed for healing, and he threw the cake at

the crucifix at the front of the church.

The cake landed just below the crown of thorns and plastered the face of Jesus

with dripping colored frosting.

If any of us would have witnessed him doing this, we would have immediately

called judgment down upon him, drung him out of the church, and told him never to come back again.

And yet the image of that action helps us understand the destructive behavior

in our text this morning.

People had taken matters into their own hands. They had looked for a new leader

when theirs didn't seem to be there when they wanted him to be.

They discredited his leadership before he even had a chance to get there.

And so the people pressed Aaron, do something. Don't just stand there, do something.

Instead of being somebody in a climate of anxiety, they chose to do something.

They didn't sit and rest in the presence of God. Maybe they didn't have the

same experience with God that Moses had.

Maybe, probably, true.

There was reckless behavior that led to a bad decision.

They said this, make gods for us that we can worship.

We may not desert God intentionally.

We may not face any real danger and just make the conscious decision to walk

away from God, but when we begin to depend on ourselves instead of God,

we begin to take on that destructive behavior,

we begin to take on that behavior that is rooted in self.

Let me tell you, this is especially a problem for men, as I was stating before.

So often, we aren't looking for ways to listen and to hear and to obey.

We're looking at ways to just fix something.

By the way, I am a man. I do the same thing.

When I'm listening to my wife, so often my mind is wandering to the next thing.

What are we going to do next?

We have to sit and say, listen, we are people together in this.

Let's share some time together.

You see, we look to God in tangible ways. We want a new job when our job has been taken away.

We want answers for healing prayer. We strain to see a favorable solution to a tough situation.

When things begin to work out the way we expected them, we give him credit and

praise him for what he's doing, but when the tangible doesn't seem to occur,

and when we don't see God answering us the way we want him to,

we wonder what's happened to God. Where has he gone?

Why is he hiding from us? David did this in the Psalms. You read throughout

the Psalms, and this is often the case in his writings.

Romans chapter 8, 7 and 8. Chapter 7 tells us Paul says he struggles with sin

Romans 8 · chapter mention

when he really wants to do what is right, his humanity takes him to do what is wrong.

And chapter 8 tells us what a great blessing it is to be in the Spirit of God.

What a victory it is to live in the Spirit of God. But so often we try to do our own thing, don't we?

It's really hard for us to simply listen and wait for God.

Man, oh man, have you ever been in your private place of prayer,

waiting for God to speak?

And you go through Scripture upon Scripture. You think, well,

I'm going to read this, and God's going to answer me in this.

And then you start telling God what you think he should be doing.

When God is saying, would you just be quiet and listen, isolation,

separation, quietness before the Lord is one of the hardest spiritual disciplines

I have. Maybe you are too.

We're social creatures. We want to be with everybody.

But to be alone with God like Jesus stepped aside to be alone with God is just really difficult.

Difficult it's really hard for us to simply listen

and wait for god then to the

israelites gave into the habit

of abandoning their purpose what was their purpose israelites

were brought into this as god's chosen people

his royal people his holy people his nation given

to god they were sent and were there

were being sent at this time into the

promised land where they could be at the the very center of

all of commerce all of life in

the center which is israel at that time was the center

of the north and the south of the east in the northeast northwest excuse

me they were to be in the very center of all the highways going through that

area and we see in history that they simply hid in the high hills and didn't

want to be where they were to be influenced aaron would would report to Moses

that the people brought their gold.

It says prior to that that he constructed this golden calf, but then he was

telling Moses, he says, yeah, the people brought me all their gold and silver,

and I threw it in the fire, and poof, there was a calf.

Kind of like a Big Bang Theory, don't you think? And how true is that?

He reported that it just happened, that they came out, and so obviously it was

a sign that they should worship this calf.

But what really proves this is that people don't want to take responsibility

for their own tendency to walk away from God.

Instead of saying, yes, we took it upon ourselves to create this idol for us

to worship since we hadn't heard from God or Moses.

They just said it just poofed and it came. Kind of like the beginning of the

Bible when Adam and Eve sinned and ate the fruit from the forbidden tree and

God asked them why they did it and what did Adam say?

It was the woman that you gave me that caused me to do this. Not my fault.

Aaron may have tried to redeem this situation and likely was not intentionally

rejecting God, but he did.

He was being manipulated by those around him. Instead of standing firm and saying,

no, we're going to worship the only God there is, the true God,

he did what the people wanted to do, and it turned into a wild, rampant party.

And God told Moses he better get back there because the people have fallen to pieces.

In fact, God was really thinking about destroying them and starting over with Moses.

And so Moses went down and he saw this and he destroyed the golden calf,

ground it into powder, and made them drink it.

So what now? Why are we in the situation we're in?

There could be many, many answers to why the Israelites were in the situation

then, but we fail to understand, as did the people in our text,

that God was shaping their destiny.

He was working all of this for the good. Romans 8, 28, for God works for the

good of those he loves, and those who are called according to purpose.

These people were called, and God was working everything out to get them into

the direction they needed to go.

The events that led up to this actually started in

chapter 24 when god confirmed his

covenant with the people of israel and they replied that they would

do everything he said god invited moses to go up higher on the mountain where

he would talk to him and and even this day you'll find a mountain over there

that has a smoky looking top i understand it's basalt rocks but it was during

this time that that it says the

scripture says that he was up on the mountain in what appeared to be a consuming fire.

And it was there he met with God.

And it was where God gave him the.

The instructions for the Ark of the Covenant, for the chest,

the table, the lampstand, the tabernacle.

God gave him the Ten Commandments that the people would be using,

the laws that would govern them.

And at this time, when the people thought God and Moses had both vanished off

the face of the earth, like as if God really could vanish off the face of the

earth, they were really in conference together, shaping the destiny of God's chosen nation.

God and Moses were deciding and getting the blueprints for the way the Israelite people would be.

Henry Nouwen writes, Loneliness is one of the greatest sources of suffering today.

Think about that. Loneliness is one of the greatest sources of suffering today.

We wonder where God is, but we don't ask the question, who has abandoned whom?

God, where have you gone? But in some way or another, we have walked away from

him when we don't know his presence.

We can experience our atonement as a gift from God, meant to bring us closer

to him, not farther away.

If we feel God is nowhere to be found, know that he is as close as the mention

of his name. When you think he's not listening.

When you think nothing else makes sense, God is shaping your destiny.

When God seems silent, embrace that silence as an opportunity for God to work

all things out for the good, for those who loved him and are called according to his purpose.

So here we go. When God seems to be silent, don't turn away from his direction.

Oftentimes that's what we do, though, isn't it? When you think God is being

silent, be careful not to take things into your own hands.

Just like the people of Israel in this story, the prophets of Baal and Asherah

danced around harder and harder, slashing themselves,

shouting louder and louder, trying to call out the gods of Baal and Asherah,

hoping that these dead idols would answer them in some way.

And Elijah, in that story, just stood there, sacrificed the animals, praying for God.

God, don't do this for me, do this for you.

And Scripture tells us that God rained down fire from heaven and consumed his

sacrifices, even lapping up the water that was poured over the sacrifices.

You know, oftentimes we want to do things in our own hands, in our own way.

And we need to be careful not to lose sight of what our purpose of existence is.

Our purpose Purpose in life is to reveal the glory of God.

Ephesians tells us that we were created for good works to glorify God.

Our whole purpose, in fact, Westminster Catechism says the chief aims of man is to glorify God.

That's what we were created for.

And how can we do that? In everything we do, say, and think.

And remember this, when things seem to be falling apart, when things seem to

be going from evil to evil, God is still simply shaping your destiny.

He wants to create you in his image for the purpose of showing him to a world that needs Jesus.

I close in our messages, is oftentimes I close our services.

Go now and serve a world that desperately needs Jesus. Here's my closing today.

Go now and be the people of God, revealing the nature of God in Christ to a

world that desperately needs Jesus.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we close this time, we are cautioned by the

evidence of the times in our own lives in which we fall short. Scripture tells us.

Lord, help us to be the hands and feet of Jesus, the hands and feet of God,

very representation of God in our community.

That's in how we live, how we act, how we speak.

Forgive us where we fall short, but lift us up to be the people that you want us to be.

Father, I pray that your presence, that your Holy Spirit will invade us in a

way that we haven't known.

Scripture tells us that we can You will do more than all we ask or imagine That's

a lot And Father, we ask that you would do it through us In Jesus' name, amen.