Why Must God Be Shouted At?

"Why Must God Be Shouted At?"
Exodus 3:1-10

Why does God wait so long?

The Hebrew people were slaves in Egypt for nearly 430 years.  How many of those years had they been wailing to God under the weight of cruel taskmasters?  We look back at the marks of Egyptian civilization:  the Pyramids of Egypt; the Sphinx; great aqueducts; temples and tombs; all of which we now gaze upon, trying to piece together the mystery of how such feats of architecture and engineering could have been accomplished.  Little do we think of the human cost behind the "edifice complex" of those architects and Pharaohs.  People who were pressed into cruel servitude, paying the price with their own blood, under conditions in which even animals were treated better.

We may not be as bothered by that thought if those pressed into slavery were hardened criminals, or the dregs of society, non-productive types who were wasting their lives anyway.  But these were God's own people—God's Chosen.  These were God's Elect, subjected to an ancient gulag that could rival any of those in our day.  For over 400 years, their one, unison cry was for rescue and justice.  400 years is a long time.

Terrance De Pres has written a book titled, The Survivor: An Anatomy Of Life In The Death Camps.  It is an extremely graphic examination of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, weaving the memories of survivors together, trying to find common threads.  In the introduction of his book, Des Pres wrote:
My subject is survival, the capacity of men and women to live beneath the pressure of protracted crisis, to sustain terrible damage in mind and body and yet in those circumstances, remain sane, alive, still human. … Unavoidably, a spectacle of death and mutilation opens upon us, and an endless silent scream rising to a sky forever heedless of (people's) anguish (page v).

In the first Holocaust, in Pharaoh's Egypt, how many of God's people raised their voices to God, and only found "…a sky forever heedless of (people's) anguish."  It is a question that I have heard asked time and time again, by people who may not be slaves to Pharaoh, but they are under severe stress and oppression none the less.

But our question here must be asked a shade differently.  Because our question, arising from Moses' call and the Exodus, is not, "Why does God refuse to act?"  Which is Des Pres' question.  God eventually does act.  God calls Moses from tending his father-in-laws sheep, to herding a people through the wilderness of Sinai, away from oppression, toward freedom.

Instead, our question has to do with the "eventually" of God's actions.  Why does God delay, when it is already too late for some?  How many lives were lost in Egypt?  How many backs were scared?  How many bodies were permanently crippled?  How many spirits were broken?  How many, before God rescued God's people?  In the Nazi version of the Holocaust, over 6 million died before rescue came.

In the parable of the corrupt judge and the widow, even Jesus recognizes God's justice will come, but there is a delay—people still "…cry to God day and night."  In the final book of the Bible, describing the final days of God's recreation of the world, the souls of the believers who had been martyred sit in heaven waiting for God to mete out justice, and exterminate those who had cruelly killed them.  They literally shout at God, from the foot of God's altar in heaven, demanding to know when the persecutors will get theirs.

Why must God be shouted at?  Why must we be plagued with the question of, "How will I know if God will come to my rescue in time?"  How long must I endure?  How loud and long must I shout, before God will pay attention to my situation and "come down and rescue"?

I ask these questions delicately, not to disturb your faith, but only to face a hard reality that many people have shed tears about and lost lives over.  They are not easy questions to ask, nor are they easy to answer.  In my mind, I have run through all the trite answers that people give to such questions, and I have found them wanting.  There are two possible—I don't wish to call them answers—let us just call them "ponderings" that might be of help here.


The first is, to our modern day oppressions, whatever they may be for us individually, we do not fully realize what strength we have, what resources we have at our disposal, apart from God—qualities God has given us by which we might endure.

When I was playing basketball in college, our coach had his doctorate in kinesiology.  He knew everything there was to know about muscles.  All we knew was they ached after every practice.  The coach would push us and push us to levels of development we had no idea existed; but he did.  He knew the resources of the muscle system, and what kind of athlete they could produce.  There was a great amount of aches and pains in the production of those abilities.  We could not argue with the guy, or whine and complain because he was the one with the Ph.D.  The point is, we didn't realize the resourcefulness and possibility for strength that we had until we were pushed.

For some, who are enduring hardships on many levels, God may be slow in coming because God knows we have resources we have not even tapped yet.  Or we are willing to try.  We are not willing to push ourselves to a limit of endurance we do not know exists.

I counseled a young man one time whose main quality of life was despair.  Nothing was going right and his life was circling the drain.  At least in his own eyes.  From my perspective, he had great potential for success, and many things to his advantage.  I tried to point that out to him.  I gave him several specific suggestions about what he could do to pull himself out of his swirling problems.  But each time he came back at me with some lame excuse as to why this or that suggestion would not work.  Yet, in the midst of his struggle, he demanded to know what God was doing all this time—if God had taken a vacation from watching over him.  This young man's final solution to some of his financial woes was to bet on the dog races and hope for the big payoff.  I'm sure you can surmise how well that went.

I think one part of the reason God appears slow in coming to the rescue is that, for many of us, we have not begun to exhaust our options.  We have not exerted enough of our own God given energy.  As John Paul Jones' infamous battle cry goes, "We have not yet begun to fight!"  There are some people who are derailed by the smallest of woes, and to them God might be saying, "You are not to the point of needing Me yet."


My other pondering about the apparent lateness of God's rescue is a thought that dovetails with the one I just offered.  God took the initiative to rescue the people from Egyptian servitude.  But how does God do it?  Through the man, Moses.  "Now I am sending YOU to the king of Egypt so that YOU can lead my people out of that country."  God works through willing (and sometimes, unwilling) people.

I suppose God could have beamed the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, a la Star Trek, and then beamed them down into the promised land.  But that is not how God chose to work.  Instead, God has consistently chosen people to carry out the details of God's plans of salvation, all the way to the Cross and beyond.

I ask myself, How many people walked past the burning bush before Moses came along, noticed, and approached?  How many saw the bush, approached, heard the details of God's mission, and refused?  Because Moses could have refused.  We have to understand that he had that power to say "No" to God.  He tried.  But he went anyway.

The truth is, most forms of people's oppressions can be dealt with through others who are willing to respond to God's initiatives, are willing to get involved, take risks—some of them great—and be part of God's rescue  operation.

The issue, then, is not God's slowness in responding.  Instead, in terms of the people of Israel, God may have been trying to bring about a rescue for 400+ years, but no one was willing to cooperate with God's plans.  It is not so much God's problem, then, as it is ours.

How many people do you know who are really hurting?  Maybe you think they are hurting in some way, but you are not sure, and have not checked your assumptions out.  Think of those people for a moment.  Bring them to a conscious picture in your mind.  What kind of oppression are they under?  What kind of rescue are they crying out for?  What is the level of their suffering?  What kind of slave drivers are lashing their whips across their backs?  Most importantly, though, what are you doing about it?  How are you responding to God, allowing God to rescue them through you?

"I just do not want to get involved."
"I don't know what one person can do."
"It is too risky."
"They do not want my help."
"There is so much pain there; I know that if I get involved, I might end up hurting, too."
And so go many other such rationalizations rattled off in Moses-like fashion.  As we speak our rationalizations, good people continue to be oppressed.

But is not that the real question here—the real issue?  By our inaction, we allow human suffering and injustice not only locally, but on a global scale.  Instead of taking action against others injustice and cruelty, we simply get used to it, fooling ourselves into thinking it is all just a part of life.  And, if it is ever to go away, then God needs to wave God's magic wand and make it disappear.  And where is that God, anyway?  It's all up to God.

Gordon Stofer and I chat every other week or so.  He watches the news.  I read the news on the internet.  We are both upset and frustrated with the world.  Alan Luttrell does not even watch the news anymore, it gets so upsetting.  After about an hour of this, Gordon and I come to the conclusion the world/our culture is totally screwed up and fatally broken.  In the end, we try to think of something funny, so we can laugh and go our way.  But it is messed up out there.  Every level of government has totally lost its way.  People continue to commit heinous crimes against innocents.  In too many countries there are no-brain demagogues with their finger on the button of mutually assured destruction.

It is more than we can take, and we throw our hands up and give up.  How little we think that we are God's agents of change in this world we find ourselves—that we are never to get used to the world the way it is, but to be willing to get our hands dirty in the work of relieving people's oppression.  We may not be called to free the Israelites, but we might be called to take a risk and relieve the suffering of a neighbor, to fight injustice and prejudice in some small way, so that someone might say, "God has come to rescue me, and God has done it through you."

It must be terribly frustrating for God to work rescue in this way.  For in so doing, there is the waiting.  The waiting that someone will come along and see the bush that is burning, someone who is willing to respond to God's bidding.  Certainly we have heard it said, or maybe said it ourselves, "Why doesn't somebody do something!?"  How many times a day must God utter those same words, as cruelties mount up, and we allow them to do so.

Why must God be shouted at?  Why does God delay?  God is probably wondering the same thing about us.


(If you want to talk back to me about this sermon, join our adult class at CREW, Wednesday night.)