shamed: the Sound of Silence
April 6th, 2022
FOOL-ish, i.e. lacking judgement or sense; ill-considered; unwise; preposterous; thoughtless; reckless; absurd; idiotic.
1 Corinthians 1:18: For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.’ (NKJV)
Isn’t the sound of silence deafening, and to me, it seems sometimes, the loneliest sound ever made. I wonder what it had to have sounded like during the four hundred years of God’s silence. Did humanity’s fool-ish behaviors and choices cost God His voice or simply us from hearing it?
The era was ripe with discontent and violence, perverse and lewd living. Mankind was beholden to himself, addicted to his own erotic and lascivious pleasures and indecently determined to not bow to anyone other than himself. It was a macabre time, and, remember the serpent, Satan? At this time in history, he is fully, but again fool-ishly, satisfied that his efforts toward stardom, God-dom, are paying off, as man worships him instead and self. The Lord withdraws, His voice growing quiet, and God-less generations would come and go, the godly few waiting again for Him to speak. After all, He promised He would, and His Word never returns void.
But it doesn’t happen at all in a manner the prophets long before predicted. Suddenly, a baby’s cry is heard, a whisper breaks the silence. The whisper of God’s love is born in the hearts of those who have been patiently waiting while the lost fool-ishly and recklessly live outside and die inside. The expense of silence.
A child is born. The Savior of the world has come, and He is almost missed. The lofty are expecting a king to arrive and the downtrodden are waiting for relief to appear in the form of assistance and reward. Hope is birthed in a backwoods barn in Bethlehem, but few realize it. The fool-ish are still waiting, still wondering when He will come, while those of us who know we are saved by His grace now await His next, final and eternal arrival. We know He came; He died in our place, taking our shame and nailing it to that tree; He went away as He said He would; but He sent His promised Spirit, our Helper, back in His place.
Did God leave His children when His voice grew quiet? And why? He would return in the form of a helpless baby, the next noise He made sounding through the cry of the infinite infant, confounding the wise. He will never leave us nor forsake us, but I wonder if we needed to experience the clamor of silence without His voice filling it so we could appreciate and anticipate and acknowledge His grace when it appeared. We certainly deserved the silence of the in-between, the noisiness and chaos of nothingness, so that the hearts of the children could return to the Father and the heart of the Father could turn to the children. This is exactly how the silent years began. The last verse in the last book of the Old Testament says, ‘”And He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”’ (Malachi 4:6, NKJV)
