The Inviting Presence of God

Busy-ness makes us forget about the presence of God. We are so busy with so many things – some good, some not – we forget that as imagers of God, and as bearers of his Spirit, we are constantly in his holy presence. Our lives are burdened with chaos on a daily basis as we are constantly flooded with cultural noise from nightly news casts, web posts and messages, as well as our day to day grind. We hear many different sounds in our hectic lives that threaten to muffle the voice of God – the only sound that really matters. What is more, the chaos that is life demands our response. It demands our attention. It demands that we talk back to the cacophony of voices flooding our ears. And before we know it we are yelling and screaming, like everyone around us, to keep up with the busy-ness of our lives. In other words, we respond to the cacophony with more noise; we reply with noise of our own. Instead of limiting what we listen to and focusing on the things in life that really matter – faith and family – we respond in kind to a thousand voices by yelling, screaming, demanding to be heard by a chaotic cultural that simply cannot hear us.

 

The futility of chaotic communication describes idolatry. The prophet Habakkuk knew this kind of idolatry – yelling and screaming, demanding a response from an object that has no voice of its own. In Habakkuk’s day, Israel had become accustomed to this futile communication strategy where people who are made in the image of God craft an idol in their own image in order to pray to it. Think about the absurdity: people create something that they then believe has control over their lives. Who created who? Habakkuk points out the obvious irrational logic: the wooden idol cannot breathe so it has no voice with which to respond (“there is no breath in it,” Hab 2:19). And do not think yelling louder will help; it is futile. And so this is the communication of idolatry where idols make us chatter because they do not talk back. Before we know it, our lives are full of chatter. We chatter to the idols of our culture but they do not respond because they cannot respond. After all, we made them with our own hands; they have no breath in them.

 

Habakkuk aims his prophetic critique at such chaotic communication: “The LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him” (Hab 2:20). Simply put, God will speak if we will be silent and listen and stop chattering. He is our Creator and we are his creation. We bear his breath (Spirit) within us so there is always an open channel of communication between us and God. Habakkuk 2:20 should be read in its idolatrous context. It is not an isolated proof text for silent meditation but an exhortation to stop chattering to idols, to be quiet and listen to our Creator.

The phrase “awkward silence” has come to define us, and so we chatter. We deplore silence as a "gap" needing to be filled. In our busy-ness we chatter to anything and everything while focusing on nothing, to the point where we are restless, anxious, and tightly wound. I am reminded of Augustine who said, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you, Lord.” Throughout the Bible, silence is an invitation to enter the presence of God and to be reminded of the Creator-creature distinction. It is he who made us and we belong to him (Ps 100:3). Silence reminds us of God’s holy presence in our hectic lives. When we are tempted to chatter to a breathless idol we should remember that God is on the throne, and, in contrast to idols, has something to say.

While it may sound like I am offering silence as a personal spiritual discipline to practice alone while the world goes about its busy-ness, I think it has more an outward focus than an inward one. In other words, there is an outreach component to being silent and listening for the voice of God, for when we get silent and listen for his voice, only then will we who bear his very breath become his voice to a noisy world.