KIlling God - Part 45: The Deafening Silence

 

The Deafening Silence:

                Silence is deafening! For Deists, God is always silent. Man is left to determine his own fate. Miracles cease when God is silent. True faith is when Christians stand by God even when there is silence!

                My spouse is silent at times. When she is disappointed with me, the silence is unbearable. I feel alone in my marriage. During those years of silence, seemingly so anyway, I miss the way things were. It’s as if there is a deadness and isolation. I use the expression that I am even alone in crowd.

                In other words, silence is an effective method of punishment. Silence estranges. It may be that I am in the wrong with my wife when the silence sets in but at any rate, the silence makes me want communion again. God works that way as well. When John the Baptist came, the silence was broken, and many were baptized for the remission of sins. There was communion with God again, and so was the time to enunciate the return of the Word. God was born in the flesh!

                Silence, when coming from a disappointed God is effective but in the hands of mankind silence estranges if taken to that extreme. A more effective way for husband and wife to interact is through communication. With God it is the same. God came down to earth to communicate with man. He was most alive for his short ministry. Love was the method of his communion, and love is good for marriages. In fact, Holy Matrimony is a simile of Holy Communion with God, and it’s not just the taking of the elements but praying and praising God. Prayer is breaking the silence. The same works in marriage for prayer is no more than communing with God.

                Prayer shows God that his people believe He is alive. Prayer removes God’s inhibition to commune. Prayer is a privilege, and that is keeping God alive to us! God doesn’t listen to all prayers. Prayer is how people seriously commune with God. ⁸²⁸

Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth.

Thus, only the prayer of peculiar people does God hear! That peculiarity is those with the born-again experience. The rebirth removes God’s silence. He makes Him alive to the person. Before God communes, one must repent – confess guilt and ask for forgiveness from God. Therefore, there must be a sinner’s prayer that God hears for that to be! There is not a prayer in the Bible called the Sinner’s Prayer. Many have made up their own prayer but mere repetition of words means little. It must be prayed in sincerity after one is convicted of sin, and felt the guilt resulting from conviction.

The best example of a sinner’s prayer in the humble opinion of the author is Psalm 51 which David prayed, especially the prelude: ⁸²⁹

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.

               

                Of course, this was the prayer of David’s restoration because he was already a man after God’s own heart. ⁸³⁰ To break the silence with God and revive Him in the lives of men, repentance must be heartfelt. David brought God back into His life with the prayer of repentance. Satan would have one pray the sinner’s prayer without remorse, thus being ineffectual. I often pray with lack of sincerity, and God is silent to me. God’s silence is deafening because He is seemingly dead to me in those times. Satan wants my prayers to be insincere because prayers not heartfelt kill God in the person’s lives.

                Prayer is calling on God. It proves to God that people think He is truly alive! Of course, prayer is conversational; more important than speaking is listening. Most people pray without listening. That silences God, not listening to God is exposing him to His Kryptonite – irreverence.

                With God silent for four-hundred years, He was dead to the world. During that period, especially, mankind did things their way. Even the Church was enslaved to the Devil, as even the priests were chained to the Law. They worked out their own salvation but not in conjunction with God. It must have been with the old serpent because God called them “vipers”! ⁸³¹ The scribes and Pharisees obeyed the Law but for wrong reasons. The Law was the metrics for love and they obeyed without loving. That is called legalism and is bondage to Satan from whom the truth sets free. The truth is that those who obey without loving are in chains of Satan. God came to break those chains!

                When God was born, He was born to die. That was His purpose – to save mankind from sin and the strict obedience to the Law. One is as bad as the other because neither display love.

                Even the gifts brought to God when He became incarnated were three: gold, incense, and myrrh. They represented His Kingship, his life, and suffering – death, respectively. God came to earth to be killed. The most important thing in scripture is why he did that! ⁸³²

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.

                God died on the cross for all the sins which were in the past. Throughout all the years before Jesus came, God forbore man’s sins knowing the time would come where His own blood was sufficient. No longer would animals need be slain nor grain sacrifices made. All along God had to die, and His time had come! Those patriarchs who believed in the Messiah and that God would die someday had great faith. The example of such great faith was the faith of Abraham – he had more faith that God would die than contemporary man has that God did die! ⁸³³

By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son.

                You see, Abraham knew in advance that God must die! He knew that the ram itself which he eventually sacrificed was not sufficient. On the other hand, Abraham’s faith that God would die on the cross was efficacious! God had to die to save mankind. Thus, are laid the grounds for killing God – ironically, He had to die in the place of Adam-kind even though He was innocent!

                I intentionally avoided focusing on Jesus for a reason. God was “called Jesus” as was said before but it is important to believe that it was God who died on the cross. Mary and the birth process were merely God’s vehicles for obtaining flesh. God who created the universe much later created Himself in the flesh. Doctor’s cannot do what God did – create life in the womb without seed. God’s identity as Creator cannot be destroyed or the very notion of God dies! Creating is what gods do, and Yahweh is the only God who did it!

                Bill O’Reilly, in his book, Killing Jesus, wrote about the Son of Man dying by crucifixion. Let his work suffice. The actual manner of death is not as important, nor the tools God used for His own death. What is important is the reason God had to die. This book was about killing God but mankind killed him many times before by keeping God silent, and when he did speak, misappropriating God’s Word.  Again, taking God’s Name – Jesus – in vain is taking His death frivolously! If we do that, it kills God all over again. As such, the commentary within this text is about the Spiritual death of God.

                Christians are now the temples of God. God never wanted a constructed building before in which to reside. He always wanted living temples much like the tabernacle when He went where men went. The temples of the Holy Spirit are God’s dwelling place on earth. ⁸³⁴ God is in us if we are His. Eastern religions suggest that it is we who are gods. It is imperative to understand that God’s Holy Spirit within us is the Ghost of Jesus who God sent to Comfort His people. ⁸³⁵

                Because God lives within Christians, Satan endeavors to kill God by killing off Christians and destroying the Church in that manner. He uses two methods: (1) prevention, and (2) apostasy. The first method is easy pickings; he merely keeps mankind occupied with the things of the world. God is dead to most people without a nail being hammered. They don’t hear God because they don’t listen for him. He knocks but they don’t answer because for them the door is decorated by pleasure. ⁸³⁶ For them, the door is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

                For those who answer God’s knock, their door is the Tree of Life, just as were the doors when sprinkled with blood back at the Passover in Moses’s time.  Thus, Satan silences God’s knocking by offering pleasure. People can’t hear the knock for the beat!

                The second method is by apostasy. Satan does not want Christians to believe in that! If it doesn’t exist, therefore it can’t be done. Not to go into all the scripture, for there are much, mankind can by his won volition leave God. Of course, God will never leave nor forsake the Christian ⁸³⁷ but Christians can and do leave God. I like to use Job as an example. He was faithful to God (a Christian before they were called that), and God allowed Satan to tempt him. Job could have abandoned God (apostasy) but because of his strong faith he did not. Thus, faith is the Way to maintain the hope of salvation ⁸³⁸ to which you are nearer than when you first believed. ⁸³⁹

                It is time to examine one’s own inherited doctrine. People tend to believe what their parents believe or what their church denomination teaches without question. There is a built-in bias to stick to one’s belief out of pride. Pride is a killer of God by killing the Doctrine of God. Am I immune? Nope! On the other hand, I was brought up in many denominations and was caused to challenge my own beliefs. As such, I let God our of His Herrin box and allowed Him Be Him! By attempting to constrain God to our own doctrine is limited His Godhood. It is killing God with bad doctrine!

                Since Satan kills off God by killing Christians, there is some special precautions to be taken. David, when he killed Goliath, refused King Saul’s armor, and put on King God’s. ⁸⁴⁰ David kept the Church alive and saved God’s Spiritual life so to speak. How so? David put on the whole armor of God, and I believe that armor was David’s five smooth stones. The Word of God was the stone which killed God, and the other four were what protected him! ⁸⁴¹

                When we today wear the whole armor of God, we keep God alive in the world. He will not be silenced, and thus die to man, if we consider His Word whom by the way is called Jesus. The other four stones were keep the barbs of Satan which he continually fires at bay. We keep God alive by staying alive to Him. Those dead to Christ are the killers of God!

⁸²⁸ Holy Bible (KJV); John 9:31

⁸²⁹ ibid; Psalm 51:1-4.

⁸³⁰ ibid; 1 Sam 13:14; Acts 13:22.

⁸³¹ ibid; Mat 23:33.

⁸³² ibid; Rom 3:24-26.

⁸³³ ibid; Heb 11:17.

⁸³⁴ ibid; 1 Cor 3:17.

⁸³⁵ ibid; John 14:16.

⁸³⁶ ibid; Rev 3:20.

⁸³⁷ ibid; Jer 18:14.

⁸³⁸ ibid; 1 Thes 5:8.

⁸³⁹ ibid; Rom 13:11.

⁸⁴⁰ ibid; 1 Sam 17.

⁸⁴¹ ibid; Ephes 6:11-18.