God Is Stranger

Finding God in Unexpected Places

Krish Kandiah

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830887064
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

- 2018 Creative Quarterly Professional Graphic Design Runner-Up Who is God?Many of us call God our Father, Lord, Savior, and Friend. But when we delve into the perplexing bits of Scripture, we discover a God who cannot be explained or predicted. Is it possible that we have missed the Bible's consistent teaching that God is other, higher, stranger?Krish Kandiah offers us a fresh look at some of the difficult, awkward, and even troubling Bible passages, helping us discover that when God shows up unannounced and unrecognized, that's precisely when big things happen. God Is Stranger challenges us to replace our sanitized concept of God with a more awe-inspiring, magnificent and majestic, true-to-the-Bible God.Allow yourself to be surprised by God as you find him in unexpected places doing the unexpected.

ADAM AND
THE STRANGER

The God who turns up only to drive us away

In which a naked man hides from a forbidding stranger

who throws him out of his home, and we ask why

friendship with God seems to be so impossible.

Sometimes the people we think we know the best turn out to be the ones we know the least. Recently I was shocked to hear the story of a young woman in my town. She was happily married to a commercial pilot. His shifts meant that most weeks he would be away from her and their young children a couple of nights at a time. But it was manageable. Then the opportunity came up for him to embark on further training that would boost his chances of getting more regular work, closer to home. Eventually they decided to go for it. It was a huge investment, but they reasoned it would benefit them all in the long run. They remortgaged the house, and he left for a couple of months, bound for Canada where he would take the course. One day she got a phone call. Her husband had been injured in an accident and was in the hospital. It was all going to be all right, the stranger on the phone told her, but his medical insurance had lapsed and so they needed her to wire money across to cover the bills. She took the details, but after the call ended she felt uncomfortable: something felt wrong. She checked the incoming number and discovered it was from Italy. What was going on? It felt like a scam.

Over the next few days she uncovered more details, but as she gradually pieced together the story, it was her husband who was the trickster. He had never intended to further his flying career. Instead he had taken their hard-earned money and used it to fund a whole secret other life. Another relationship. Another family. Suddenly the young woman found herself deserted. She and her children lost their home. What would become of them?

When she first told me the story, I struggled to believe her. It sounded like a plot for a novel written solely to be optioned by a Hollywood studio. But sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction; it is certainly more tragic. It is hard to imagine the betrayal this woman experienced. The person she thought she knew the best in the world, her closest friend and confidant, was actually a stranger to her. Their history together, their future together, everything she thought she could rely on, was blown out of the sky. His manipulating lies enabled him to live a double life, while she lost the only life she knew. Perhaps you know the pain of broken promises, betrayal, and abandonment. Perhaps you have been left high and dry to pick up the pieces in a world that suddenly looks very different. Or perhaps your biggest fear is finding out you have been betrayed by the ones you trusted the most. How would you cope if your nearest and dearest turned out to be strangers? At least God is there for us, even if everyone else fails us.

Right? God, the same yesterday, today, and forever, can be totally relied upon. He is that friend who sticks closer than a brother. He is our rock, our rampart, our refuge. He who loves us unconditionally will never leave us or forsake us. These are timeless, biblical truths that have helped countless Christians through the centuries. They are the promises we cling to when life takes unexpected turns.

But what if we have misjudged our relationship with God too? What if he doesn’t seem to come through on those promises? What if he is not the friend we thought he was? What if the one being in the universe we have been told is utterly reliable actually turns out to be a stranger too?

I clearly remember the day I first decided to “make Jesus my friend.” For several months my Sunday school teacher had made a persuasive case as to the immediate and eternal benefits of such a decision. So one Sunday morning, after the sermon, I made my way nervously up to the front of the building. It was a Salvation Army church a stone’s throw from my home, and at the front of the hall was a polished dark wood bench into which were carved the words “Jesus Saves.” I knelt down in front of it, and a dear elderly woman, dressed in the black Salvationist uniform, complete with bonnet and shiny black shoes, knelt alongside me and put her arm around me. She explained to me that Jesus would be the best friend I could ever hope for, because he had laid down his life for me. I sensed a ring of truth in what she was saying. Over the previous months I had received a warm welcome from this strange new community, even though, as the son of immigrants from different religious backgrounds, I stuck out like a sore brown thumb. The offer of a life-changing friendship with God sounded very attractive to a boy who felt socially isolated because of his skin color—and his annoying habit of asking too many questions.

Right from the outset of my newfound faith I had questions about what it meant for God to be a friend to me, and as I have grown up they have not entirely gone away, despite decades in full-time paid Christian ministry and the world of theological education. These questions keep coming up. Do I really know God? Does God really know me? To what extent is Jesus my friend? Is that expectation of mutual trust, support, and affection realistic? Why do I often feel so distant from God? Why does God often fail to turn up when I ask him to, and then turn up when I don’t need him, often only to complicate things further? In my experience the nice and easy Sunday school idea of relationship with God does not work in the real world. It accounts neither for the complexity of the world nor, critically, for the complexity of God. And so our relationship with God can easily swing toward a desperate hope that it is all true or an obstinate determination to hold on come what may—a disgruntled resignation that this is not what we expected it to be. We can easily end up with a halfhearted faith in a God we only half believe in. We struggle to share this sort of faith with our friends and neighbors. We struggle to hold on to this sort of faith in difficult times. We struggle to rely on this sort of faith as we face the future. Despite the words of that godly elderly lady in that life-changing moment for me as a child, I have learned over the years that we can be profoundly mistaken about the God we claim to have a friendship with. And we can be profoundly confused about the nature of that friendship.

Last week my aunt was happy to sing the praises of the God who had been a trusted friend to her. This week she sits in a nursing home having lost her husband, her health, and her home within the course of a few days. Who could blame her for being angry that a lifetime of friendship with God has now turned out this way? I also spoke with a lady who stuck with God through the terrible years of young widowhood and then multiple sclerosis. But now she will not come to church any longer because of the atrocities of ISIS. She is ashamed of the way God seems to turn his back while terrible acts are committed in his name. As I listen to their accusations, I too wonder again why the God who is supposed to be our friend often feels quite the opposite—an enemy, or at least a stranger. Who is this God, who has the power of creation yet seems to be either powerless or uncaring when disaster strikes? Who is this God, who lets human beings wreak such destruction against each other? Who is this God, whose friendship seems so uncertain?

In some respects, it is no surprise that we struggle with the idea of friendship with God. His invisibility and intangibility are always going to be difficult for us, especially compared with the immediate presence of people around us. The instant gratification of an encouraging word, a warm welcome, or an affirming embrace can appear so much more real and meaningful. Or, in the absence of God’s felt and seen presence, we can be in danger of refashioning God into a sophisticated form of imaginary friend. Just like a child’s relationship with their self-generated illusory companion, we may end up substituting a friendlier, more manageable god, who asks very little of us, for the real and mighty God. When we are tempted to abandon friendship with God in favor of friendship with others, or when we are tempted to substitute friendship with an echo-chamber god who only speaks the words we give him, we are effectively acknowledging that the invisible God is a stranger to us.

The unpredictability of God is far more of a challenge to our friendship with him, though. An invisible God we can manipulate and misrepresent without obvious consequences. But when God actually turns up, when we see him in his true colors, he often appears to treat his friends pretty badly. In Scripture, Abraham and Sarah were summoned away from the safety and security of their homeland, then told to sacrifice their only son. When God turned up in Moses’ life, he was driven away from the home he had made for himself in Midian and sent back to face the wrath of Pharaoh. Job was stripped of his wealth, health, and even his family because of a divine wager that God made with the devil. The list goes on. Jesus even admitted to sending his friends out “like sheep among wolves” (Matthew 10:16), more or less promising them persecution and pain. This pattern of behavior is a frightening one. The repeated occurrences in Scripture that seem to show God doing his best to drive his own people away could lead us to conclude that if God treats his friends like this, who needs enemies?

Perhaps more significantly even than God’s invisibility and unpredictability, it is God’s sheer incomprehensibility that makes friendship with him so difficult. God is just not like us. “‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8). There is a bigger gap between us and God than there is between a human being and a bacterium. God is the Creator—we are the created. God is infinite—we are finite. God is spirit—we are embodied. God is eternal—we are temporal. It is no wonder that we face “crosscultural” communication issues, because God is simply a different order of being to us. When he graciously condescends to relate to us, it is not surprising that we find he is from a strange place, with a strange language and a strange way of doing things. He appears foreign, mysterious, and incomprehensible. And it is tempting to behave like the boorish tourist who shouts at the locals, complaining that they are backward and ignorant because they don’t do things “our way,” while he himself makes no attempt to understand and appreciate the host culture. So how should we, as guests in God’s universe, make sense of a God who does not do things in the way we want or expect? How can a friendship be forged over such a great divide?

This hat trick of challenges makes the practical outworking of friendship with God, which seems so simple when we come to faith as a child, or when we introduce young children to faith, incredibly complex in actuality. Yes, we need to recapture the true meaning of friendship with God, but we also need to recognize and appreciate its limitations. God can be a friend to us, but he is also a stranger to us—and this is both bad news and good news. To start our exploration of these rich and vital themes, we need look no further than the strange first pages of the Bible. In its introductory chapters we are given an explanation of the sense of estrangement we feel from God and the world we live in. However familiar we may be with these chapters, the more we understand of them, the less we will see God as familiar and known, and the more we will see him as a stranger. The opening passages of Scripture offer us the origin story of the cosmos itself, so that we might be better able to discern our place in the universe.1 Like the establishing shot of a movie that helps us to understand the context in which the ensuing drama will take place, in Genesis we are first presented with the backdrop of human history, with the creation of galaxies and stars, against which we quickly zoom in on the key theme—the interaction between God and humankind. The story starts so promisingly, yet within a couple of pages God is driving his people out of their home. Whichever way we interpret the opening chapters of Genesis, whether as historical narrative or as metaphorical parable, there is no doubt that they graphically portray something of the limitations of divine-human relationship.

The first humans begin by being utterly aware of God. Adam and Eve get to see God—visibly and with predictable regularity, it seems—as they walk with him in their perfect garden in the cool of the day. The designer world they lived in was in perfect sync with both human aspiration and divine purpose. A world with God present was all they knew, and friendship with God came naturally to them. Our ancient ancestors began their existence untroubled by the incomprehensibility of God we may struggle with, as he made himself accessible and available to human interaction.

It is hard not to be jealous of Adam and Eve. The privileges they enjoyed are what most of us long for in our relationship with God. They lived out the profound paradox of being both the dust of the earth and the image of God: humbly and yet wonderfully made, imbued with glory and knowing unspeakably great privilege, yet with no embarrassment, nor any need to prove themselves. Those first humans knew the honor of a face-to-face relationship with God himself. They knew the pitch and timbre of the very voice of their Creator. They were given clear direction from God as to how to invest their time and energy. They inhabited an environment that reflected God’s glory in all its splendor. They had every good thing they could ever ask for. They enjoyed God’s provision, sensed no shame or fear, and felt at home in God’s company. God was no stranger to that first family.

Then, one day, the one fruit that was off-limits became the one fruit they had to have on the menu. A moment of weakness led to a bad decision. That was when God turned up to turn them out.

So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

Cursed are you above all livestock

and all wild animals!

You will crawl on your belly

and you will eat dust

all the days of your life.

And I will put enmity

between you and the woman,

and between your offspring and hers;

he will crush your head,

and you will strike his heel.”

To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;

with painful labor you will give birth to children.

Your desire will be for your husband,

and he will rule over you.”

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

Cursed is the ground because of you;

through painful toil you will eat food from it

all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow

you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:14-19)

This may well be a familiar passage, and yet it is surely one of the strangest in the Bible. What on earth is going on here? Why is there an evil snake in a perfect garden in the first place? And did animals really talk in Eden? Was there an anatomical change in the snake after human sin? How come the snake ...