Genesis closes with a single family, small enough for the Bible to name all its sons, settling into the friendly haven of Egypt. The next book, Exodus, opens with a swarm of Israelites toiling as slaves under a hostile pharaoh. Nowhere in the Bible will you find an account of what happened during the intervening four hundred years.
I have heard many sermons on the life of Joseph, and many more on Moses and the miracle of the Exodus. But I have never heard a sermon on the four-hundred-year gap between Genesis and Exodus. (Could some of our feelings of disappointment stem from a habit of skipping over times of silence in favor of the Bible's stories of victory?) We tend to speed ahead to the exhilarating stories of liberation from slavery. But think of it! For an ellipsis of time twice as long as the U.S.A. has been in existence, heaven was silent. Surely the Hebrew slaves in Egypt felt profound disappointment with God.
You are a Hebrew, a descendant of Abraham. You grew up hearing about the wonderful promises God gave that great man. "Someday your race will become a mighty nation and will live at peace in their own land" - God swore that in person, first to Abraham, and then to Isaac and Jacob. As a child you obediently memorized those promises. But they now seem like fairy tales. Independent nation? You and your neighbors serve the most powerful empire on earth; daily, you suffer the insults and feel the whips of Egyptian taskmasters. Your own infant brother was slaughtered by the pharaoh's soldiers.
As for the vaunted Promised Land, it lies somewhere to the east, divided under the dominion of a dozen kings.
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Four hundred years of silence, until Moses, when suddenly anything a skeptic might have wished for happened. First, God appeared in a burning bush, introducing himself to Moses by name. He spoke aloud. "My people have suffered enough," said God. "Now you will see what I will do." Next, he let loose with the most bravura display of divine power the world has ever seen. Ten times he intervened on a scale so massive that not a single person in Egypt could doubt the existence of the God of the Hebrews. Billions of frogs, gnats, flies, hailstones, and locusts gave empirical proof of the Lord of all creation.
For the next forty years, the years of wilderness wanderings, God carried his people "as a father carries his son." He fed the Israelites, clothed them, planned their daily itinerary, and fought their battles.
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Is God unfair? Silent? Hidden? Such questions must have troubled the Hebrews until, in Moses' lifetime, God took off the wraps. He punished evil and rewarded good. He spoke audibly. And he made himself visible, first to Moses in a burning bush and then to the Israelites in a pillar of cloud and fire.
The response of the Israelites to such direct intervention offers an important insight into the inherent limits of all power. Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love. The ten plagues in Exodus show the power of God over a pharaoh. But the ten major rebellions recorded in Numbers show the impotence of power to bring about what God desired most, the love and faithfulness of his people. No pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence could make them trust and follow him.
We do not need the ancient Israelites to teach us this fact. We can see it today in societies where power runs wild. In a concentration camp, as so many witnesses have told us, the guards possess nearly unlimited power. By applying force, they can make you renounce your God, curse your family, work without pay, eat human excrement, kill and then bury your closest friend or even your own mother. All this is within their power. Only one thing is not: they cannot force you to love them.
The fact that loves does not operate according to the rules of power may help explain why God sometimes seems shy to use his power. He created us to love him, but his most impressive displays of miracle - the kind we may secretly long for - do nothing to foster that love. As Douglas John Hall has put it, "God's problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God's problem is that God loves. Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life."
And when his own love is spurned, even the Lord of the Universe feels in some ways helpless, like a parent who has lost what he values most. The Bible records a kind of diary of God's tender relationship with the Israelites:
On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised.
Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, "Live!" I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew up and developed and became the most beautiful of jewels. Your breasts were formed and your hair grew, you who were naked and bare.
Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.
I bathed you with water and washed the blood from you and put ointments on you. I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put leather sandals on you. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments. I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck, and I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears and a beautiful crown on your head.
Yet God, all-seeing, knew the ultimate, tragic destiny of the Israelites: "I know what they are disposed to do, even before I bring them into the land," he said. As his people gathered beside the Jordan River, in an upbeat mood for a change, God allowed a remarkable glimpse into what it feels like to be God. He did not share the spirit of anticipation in the camp, and he visited Moses in the Tent of Meeting to explain why.
More than anything, God longed for the covenant to succeed: "Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!" But the repeated rebellions in the wilderness had taken a toll. God predicted a terrible disobedience to come and foretold his own response: "I will certainly hide my face on that day." He spoke with rueful resignation, like the parent of a drug addict, helpless to stop his own child from self-destructing; like the husband of an alcoholic who hears a blubbering promise to do better tomorrow or the next day, a promise his wife has already broken too many times to mention.
Then God gave Moses a very odd assignment. "Write down a song," he said, "and make the Israelites learn it as a witness to history." The song set God's point of view to music: the lament of a lover grieved to the point of desertion. Thus at the birth of their nation, euphoric over the crossing of the Jordan River, the Israelites premiered a kind of national anthem - the strangest that has ever been sung. It had virtually no words of hope, only doom.
They sang first of the favored times, when God found them in a howling wasteland and treasured them as the apple of his eye. They sang of the awful betrayal to come, when they would forget the God who gave them birth. They sang of the curses that would afflict them, the wasting famine, deadly plague, and arrows drunk with blood. With this bittersweet music ringing in their ears, the Israelites marched into the Promised Land.
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Like a bloodhound on a trail, I keep zigzagging back to the wanderings in the wilderness to poke around for clues. The tabernacle luminous with God's presence, the miraculous breakfast food, the throng of unhappy Israelites shuffling along in the desert sand - somewhere between the bright promise and the blighted futility of those forty years lies the mystery of disappointment with God. What went wrong?
I have often longed for God to act in a direct, close-up manner. If only he would show himself! But in the Israelites' dreary stories of failure I can perceive certain "disadvantages" to God acting so directly. One problem they encountered immediately was the lack of personal freedom. For the Israelites to live in proximity to a holy God, nothing - not sex, menstruation, the content of clothing fabric, or dietary habits - could fall outside the purview of his laws. Being a "chosen people" had a cost. Just as God found it nearly impossible to live among sinful people, the Israelites found it nearly impossible to live with a holy God in their midst.
Petty things seemed to bother the Israelite most - witness their constant complaints about food. With a few exceptions, they ate the same things every day for forty years: Manna (meaning, literally, "What is it?") that appeared like dew on the ground each morning. A monotonous diet may seem a trivial exchange for liberation from slavery, but listen to the grumbling: "We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost - also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!"
In addition to these mundane issues, a far more serious problem arose. The closer God drew toward his people, paradoxically, the most distant they felt from him. Moses laid down an amazing elaboration of rituals necessary to approach God, and no margin for error. The Israelites could see clear evidence of God's presence in the Most Holy Place - but no one dared enter. If you want to know what kind of "personal relationship with God" the Israelites enjoyed, listen to the words of the worshipers themselves: "We will die! We are lost, we are all lost! Anyone who even comes near the tabernacle of the Lord will die." And again, "Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire anymore, or we will die."
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Once, as an experiment, the great scientist Isaac Newton stared at the image of the sun reflected in a mirror. The brightness burned into his retina, and he suffered temporary blindness. Even after he hid for three days behind closed shutters, still the bring spot would not fade from his vision. "I used all means to divert my imagination from the sun," he writes, "but if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the dark." If he had stared a few minutes longer, Newton might have permanently lost all vision. The chemical receptors that govern eyesight cannot withstand the full force of unfiltered sunlight.
There is a parable in Isaac Newton's experiment, and it helps illustrate what the Israelites ultimately learned from the wilderness wanderings. They had attempted to live with the Lord of the University visibly present in their midst; but, in the end, out of all the thousands who had so gladly fled Egypt, only two survived God's Presence. If you can barely endure candlelight, how can you gaze at the sun?
"Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire?" asked the prophet Isaiah. Is it possible that we should be grateful for God's hiddenness, rather than disappointed?
"Unfiltered Sunlight," Philip Yancey, pp. 69-75, in Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud, Zondervan Publishing House: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1988.
