He Heard My Cry

Week of Monday, May 6, 2002

At one of our faculty fellowship meetings at Stanford, a professor told a revealing story about his religious upbringing that I believe speaks to the experience that many of us have in our relationship to God. As a little boy, he said, he always loved the story of the thief on the cross (Luke 23:32, 39–43). He found it difficult to feel the love of God, and very easy to feel like God was angry with him, far off, hidden, silent, or perhaps even capricious. But that beautiful story in Luke about the thief whom Jesus welcomed into paradise upon his dying breath is so wonderfully and wildly improbable—yet true—that the professor felt that there was, then, perhaps hope for him too. Perhaps God would also hear his own cries as a little boy.

The Psalmists in particular capture this common human experience. They variously describe what another professor shared with me over lunch, how sometimes it feels like we don't even have a relationship with God. Job despaired that God hid his face from him (Job 13:24, Psalms 88:14, 89:46). Others cry bitterly that He does not answer when they call (Psalm 22:2), that He is stone deaf to their cries (Psalm 28:1), that God stands “far off” from us (Psalm 10:1), and that He even forgets us due to some sort of divine amnesia (Psalms 13:1, 44:24).

Hagar, the Egyptian slave of Abraham and Sarah, felt like this (Genesis 16). Sarah was barren, so she commanded Abraham to produce a child with Hagar. He consented, was successful, and Ishmael was born. As would be expected, when Hagar conceived, producing the very child that Sarah desired, Sarah despised her and complained that Hagar despised her in return. When “Sarah treated Hagar harshly,” the powerless and pregnant maid fled. But in the tenderness of God, “the angel of the Lord found her” in the desert by a spring of water, and promised her that God had, in fact, heard her cries for help and given heed to her affliction. Her son's name would always remind her of this, for Ishmael means “God hears.” In the end, Hagar worshipped Yahweh, saying, “Thou art a God who sees me,” and named the well there Beer Lahai Roi, “the well of the Living One who sees me.”

In their better moments, and despite other experiences to the contrary, the Psalmists also remind us of this truth that Hagar discovered, that God sees us and loves us, that regardless of how we might feel, He hears our cries. “I love the Lord, for He heard my voice; He heard my cry for mercy” (Psalm 116:1). He has not, ultimately, hidden his face from me (Psalms 22:24, 38:9, 139:15). In the prophetic tradition, Isaiah is quite insistent, challenging Israel, “Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and the justice due me escapes the notice of my God’?” (Isaiah 40:27).

In the last week or so my one year Bible has taken me through the book of Judges. The very last verse of the entire book summarizes this period in Israel's history when the nation was without a king and when “every person did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). This sounds like moral and political anarchy. Most of the book records a recurring pattern: Israel sins, is oppressed by an enemy, cries out to Yahweh in repentance, and then is delivered by a judge. At one level it is a very dark period of Israel's history, spiritually-speaking, but even so Yahweh had not forgotten them. Despite their idolatry and infidelity, at one point the writer says that God “could no longer bear the misery of Israel” (Judges 10:16). And remember, in the book of Judges most all of Israel's misery was of her own making. But no matter how egregious their sin or superficial and short-lived their repentance, He lovingly heard their cries for help. He could not forget them.

It seems clear that at times what we feel about God can be a poor and mistaken indicator of His ultimate posture toward us. My professor friend as a little boy, Hagar the dispossessed, pregnant slave, and the highly emotional Psalmists all cried out bitterly and openly about how they sometimes felt forsaken, and there is no reason we might not do the same. That is a normal part of life, but it is not a psychological space where we want to dwell or stay. In his book The Screwtape Letters, Satan tells his lieutenant Wormwood that one of the surest ways to defeat the followers of the Enemy (God) is to somehow get them to divert their gaze from Him and who He really is to their own sinful selves with all their contradictory feelings and experiences:

Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.¹

The truth of the matter, whether we feel it or not, is put nicely by one of the most favorite and justly famous of all the Psalms (103:8–14):

The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.