Elie Wiesel, recalls the grisly death of a child in the Buna concentration camp in 1943.  Hung between two heavier adults, his youthful frame prevented his immediate demise, and his death struggles continued for more than a half hour.  Those incarcerated in the camp were forced to file past one by one and see his fate up close.  “He was still alive when I passed in front of him.  His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

 “Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: ‘Where is God now?’
 And I heard a voice within me answer him:
 ‘Where is he?  Here He is–He is hanging here on this gallows.’”

    “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him.” 2 Chronicles 16:9.  But sometimes to know more fully what was happening comes later.  When Satan came also among the sons of God, He was asked what He had been doing.  His answer: busily traversing the earth and fighting against heaven.  But if there was a smirk upon his face as he answered, it must have been wiped away by God’s pregnant question: “Have you seen my servant Job?”  Job 1:6-8.  God extolled Job’s faithfulness in life.  And throughout the book that describes his afflictions as he was assailed by the adversary, Job doesn’t necessarily know that it is Satan who is inflicting the suffering.
 
    Behind the curtain, a conflagration unseen by humankind is raging.  And we feel the heat.  A war featuring two conflicting moralities vying for supremacy lurks just beyond the pale.  And although its adversaries remain hidden from our eyes, the battlefield is not, for we stand upon it.  This earth is the stage and all the nations are participants.  The conflict is not dramatized; the battles are not mock battles; the kingdom of righteousness has been called into question and Yahweh is building His answer.
 
    Just as the Lord took His people on repeated journeys, He is taking all the universe on a journey.  He is in control.  He sits in the heavens, supreme; before His sight the nations have no power.  Their power is nothingness; all their might is as the strength of grasshoppers.  Isaiah 40:17, 22.  “He who sits in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision,” and no weapon formed against Him or His people shall prosper.  Psalm 2:4; Isaiah 54:17.  God is in ultimate control.  Yet He knows that we are curious about suffering; He knows that we wonder about why we are here.  He knows that the question is asked “Where is God?”

    So it is not because we demand, but because He is merciful that He sets before us an answer to this mighty question.  He may send His people on a journey that they know not the end of, but He goes with them, gently and mercifully.  Only as fast as we can follow, like Jacob and his flock after greeting Esau (Genesis 33:12-15), does He lead us.

    Since humankind’s creation, God has journeyed with them.  He walked with Adam and Eve in the garden in the cool of the evenings.  He accompanied Abraham on his journey from Ur to a place that God would show him only later (Genesis 12:1).  He heard the affliction of His people in Egypt and sent a deliverer (Exodus 3:7-8).  When they left Egypt He accompanied them by day and by night.  He commanded them to build Him a sanctuary–a portable dwelling place–that He might be with them in their journeys (Exodus 25:8).  When His people were afflicted, He was with them.  Always He was moving His people along toward an ultimate end.  Amidst the aimless cyclical perspective of the heathen nations surrounding His people, His people moved in linear fashion across the stage of history.  Each experience was crafted and commented on by God, made to provide meaningful examples for the future guidance of His people.  He led gently, but steadily.  From time to time he had to give them a gentle tug forward, but that was O.K.  He was their God and they were His people.  Ever He led them forward toward an ultimate end, and ultimate goal.

    An ultimate goal is still on heaven’s agenda.  The Lord who sits in the heavens shall laugh; He will bring to nothing the claims of the Satan–the adversary who sought to be worshiped.  He came before the Lord and provoked Him to destroy Job unjustly, and merely to advance his claims.  Among his claims was that Job served God because He bribed him too. (Job 1:9-11).  According to Satan it was in Job’s best interest to serve God and that was the only reason why he did.  If God took away his material possessions and prosperity, Job wouldn’t serve Him.  But events proved the adversary wrong.  So he came back again, and suggested that pure self-interest would prove Job to be indifferent to God–a mere serf–a worshiping time-server.  “Just destroy his health and watch what he does,” he virtually said.  But after Satan was permitted to bring great calamity, and clothe Job’s body with painful boils, still he stood faithful.  Satan’s charges were not sustained.  After the first two chapters of Job, Satan slides back into the background.  He is still present in the book, but not now face to face.  Now he is present undercover again, just as in the garden of Eden.  We still hear his voice in the words of Job’s comforters, subtly arguing, darkening knowledge about God (Job 38:2), inculcating ideas about the Lord that were not right (Job 42:7).

    And where was Yahweh during the conflict over Job?  He was there.  He was present.  He was listening.  He was watching and protecting.  And although Job even at the end probably didn’t understand fully the grand showdown that had occurred in his backyard, He humbled himself before the Lord.  He restored his misguided friends, and ran his course.  Won’t it be an interesting day when Job rises from the dust and learns about that extraordinary conversation that began that day in heaven when God brought up his name.  “Hast thou considered my servant Job?”

    And what of heaven’s purposes?  Why is sin permitted to be?  Isn’t it all so meaningless?  But that is just the point.  The existence of sin cannot be justified.  It has no legitimate meaningfulness.  It is an alien, an intruder in the system of Yahweh.  To make a universe full of free, intelligent beings that were not automatons, He must let them learn instead of force them to be.  To bring forth a human race in His image, He must guide them through their mis-steps.  Life is not meaningless, but meaningful.  It is sin that is inexplicable and out of place.  God’s divine plan is to end purposelessness.

    And he accompanies us on the journey.  He knows we are curious; He made us that way.  He takes us along, encourages us along the way.  We are on a journey to a situation where there will be no more hate or suffering or sin, or any vestige of all the despicable turmoil washing across the shores of time and splashing tendentiously on His peoples.  He loves to much to abandon us to emptiness or hopelessness, yet He works out steadily a plan to silence all the injustice and indifference of man, and finish what he began but what sin interrupted.  And as time wears on the drama waxes to its greatest intensity.  And you and I may wonder if we can withstand the flowing tide.  But then a reminder comes; a word of hope is given.

    God is present in the affliction of His people.  Isaiah 63 portrays God’s victory march of vengeance upon the oppressors of His people, and their prayer to Him.  And in their prayer bursts forth the strong reminder of their past trials in company with their God.  “In all their affliction, He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them: in His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and carried them all the days of old.” Isaiah 63:9.  This text literally reads “In all their straightness,” or “in all their trials,” “He was not an enemy.”  And if He was not their enemy, He was their friend.  He was their guide.  He was their Saviour.  When they suffered, He suffered with them.  He was not the inflictor, but the Liberator!

    In the final end, God takes vengeance upon His enemies, the inflictors of injustice upon His people.  He is slow to anger, but woe to those who further the affliction (Zechariah 1:14-15).  In the little book of Nahum and the destruction of Ninevah is foreshadowed the ultimate end to which Yahweh has been moving.  “What do ye conspire against the Lord?  He will make an entire end of it.  Affliction shall not rise up the second time.” Nahum 1:9.  The same word for affliction is used here as in Isaiah 63:9.  “Straightness” on this order shall never rise up again.  A finished, tried, tested, polished creation will soon stand in the light of His countenance.  All of the Satan’s charges will have lost any ring of authenticity.  All of the deceptions and inflictions of our foe will be overturned when our God comes to take vengeance upon those who have joined Satan in conspiracy against the throne of Yahweh.  “He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” Psalm 2:4.
 
    In all of our suffering, our Father is with us.  In all of our affliction, He is afflicted.  He is not our enemy.  He is our Redeemer, our Revenger, our Healer.  The Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6) will bring about His peace so that sin will never rise up again.  Once will be more than enough.  But in order to let us see the purposelessness of suffering and put all suffering into the grave once and for all, He takes us.  He goes with us.  He feels our despairing cry.  Like the young boy dangling on the gallows in the inhuman strangulated death in Buna, there is God.  He is there.  He suffers with us.  He longs for the day when all suffering will cease, and all is put right, and from the dust rise His people to take up their abode in the land.  And Abraham rises too, only then receiving his inheritance in its fullness.  And the ultimate journey, the end of which only God entirely knows, draws nearer.  We participate in the pilgrimage of a world.

    But a warning calls out from the shadows on this world’s pathway: Beware!  For if we grow too numb and our hearts freeze to stone, we will harden and become incapable of seeing the greatness of our God.  And in the pale darkness a being will laugh, because for a moment in time he triumphed.  He doesn’t want us to hear the answer to the question “God, where are you?”  Because that answer destroys him.  And he stands forth to intercept that answer, because the voice of Yahweh cries out to us: “Where is man?”  “Adam, where are you?”

    For God’s answer is ready: “I Am right here.”

Last Modified 23 March 2000