(From the DA years)

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making us believe he didn’t exist.”

I respectfully disagree. 

The greatest trick he ever pulled was to make us believe that God’s love isn’t real or sufficient. 

This disbelief and mistrust of God’s love leads us to run to false or supplementary gods – power, wealth, food, lust, relationships, religion.  These gods, not being real, ultimately fail. 

I like what Philip Yancey writes about sexuality in his latest book, Rumors of Another World.  He makes a point that modern culture has idolized sexuality as the ultimate prize, but he notes that this idolization hasn’t lived up to expectations.  To illustrate his point, he recounts watching people on the subway.  Although statistically, about half of the people on the subway had sex the night before, they don’t look happier for it while commuting to work.  

The same point could be made about any other idol.  Work.  Religion.  We can immerse ourselves in project after project, bible study after bible study, and still feel empty.  I think some of us try to find meaning in the pursuit of goals.  It probably doesn’t take a wise man to see that the pursuit itself becomes meaningless after a while – the accomplishment of one goal only opens the door to another elusive one. 

In the Book of Job, God answers Job’s questions with a series of questions, but never answering Job’s petition for an explanation of the suffering he has endured.  This story has been explained as Job seeing God’s sovereignty and power, and Job being too stunned and humbled to ever question God again.  While I think this interpretation is correct, I also think that Job saw and experienced God’s love at that point.  In the light of seeing His love, all doubts and questions simply disappear.  A similar scenario occurs in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, (the only book Lewis wrote while he was briefly married and in my opinion, the best writing he ever did).  

I write this with the realization that I have many questions myself  that recur when I get assigned my cases or read the newspaper.  Although I think my questions are valid, I have a feeling that I should be asking different and better ones.  I’ve noticed that we like to ask for proxies.  We ask for the thing that we think will bring us what we want instead of asking for what we want directly itself.  Instead of asking for our insecurity, inadequacy, or loneliness to be taken away, we ask for a job, a thing, or a person.  All we may truly need to ask for is to experience and understand God’s love more fully. To be known and deeply loved by God.  If we truly believed this, and I think the point of growing in the faith is to know this better, all else would fall into place.  Our unanswerable questions, our feeble human attempts to comfort and guide others, our fears – they grow strangely dim.  As Augustine once wrote, our hearts are truly restless till we find ourselves in Him