The Story Continues On
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God Speaking, Teaching and Acting
as we can take . . . is learning to meditate on Scripture—learning first to hear God’s word, and let it inform and take root in us. This may be extremely difficult, for the churches have no courses on meditation, despite the fact that it is an art that must be learned from those who have mastered it, and despite the fact that the supreme task of the church is to listen to the Word of God.
Elizabeth O’Connor
Oh, let me tell you how much God desires our presence. How much God longs to hear from us. How much God yearns to communicate with us. At the very heart of God is the passionate disposition to be in loving fellowship with you . . . with me. From the human side of this equation it is meditative prayer that ushers us into this divine-human fellowship.
A Place to Stand
The biblical foundation for meditation is discovered in the great reality of God speaking, teaching and acting that lies at the center of the scriptural witness. God brought the universe crashing into existence by the word of his command. God said, “Let there be light,” and the big bang occurred.
In the Garden, Adam and Eve talked with God and God talked with them—they were in communion. Then came the Fall, and in an important sense the experience of perpetual communion was ruptured, for Adam and Eve hid from God. But God continued to reach out to his rebellious children, and in the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and Abraham and so many others we see God speaking and acting, teaching and guiding.
Moses learned, albeit with many vacillations and detours, how to hear God’s voice and obey God’s word. In fact, Scripture witnesses that God spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex 33:11). There was a sense of intimate relationship, of communion. As a people, however, the Israelites were not prepared for such intimacy. Once they learned a little about God, they realized that being in his presence was dangerous business and told Moses so: “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die” (Ex 20:19).
This marked the beginning of the great line of prophets and judges, Moses being the first. But it was a step away from the sense of God’s immediacy, the sense of the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night.
Then under Samuel the people clamored for a king. This disturbed Samuel greatly, but God told him not to be discouraged, “for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Sam 8:7). Under Moses they rejected God’s immediacy; under Samuel they rejected God’s direct rule. “Give us a prophet, give us a king, give us a go-between so we do not have to come into God’s presence for ourselves,” they said. So it is today. We do not have to look at religion on the contemporary scene very deeply before we see that it is saturated with the dogma of the mediator. “Give us a pastor, give us a priest, give us someone who will do it for us so we can avoid intimacy with God ourselves and continue to reap the benefits,” we say.
Still, in the fullness of time Jesus came and taught the present reality of the kingdom of God and demonstrated what life could be like in this kingdom. Jesus showed us God’s yearning for the gathering of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God himself at its heart as its prime Sustainer and most glorious Inhabitant. Jesus established a living fellowship that would know him as Redeemer and King, listening to him in all things and obeying him at all times.
Jesus in his intimate relationship with the Father modeled for us the reality of this life of constantly hearing and obeying. “The Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (Jn 5:19). “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge” (Jn 5:30). “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works” (Jn 14:10). When Jesus told his disciples to abide in him, they could understand what he meant, for he was abiding in the Father. Jesus declared (and continues to declare to us today) that he is the good Shepherd and that his sheep know his voice (Jn 10:4). He made it clear that the Comforter would come, the Spirit of truth who would guide his people into all truth (Jn 16:13).
In his second volume Luke clearly implies that after the resurrection and ascension Jesus continues “to do and to teach,” even though the people can no longer see him with the naked eye (Acts 1:1 NIV). Both Peter and Stephen point to of the prophecy of Deuteronomy 18:15 that a prophet like Moses would arise who would speak and whom the people would hear and obey (Acts 3:22; 7:37). In the book of Acts we see the resurrected and reigning Christ, through the Holy Spirit, teaching and guiding his children: leading Philip to new unreached cultures (Acts 8), revealing his messiahship to Paul (Acts 9), teaching Peter about his racial prejudices (Acts 10), guiding the believing fellowship out of its cultural captivity (Acts 15).
And the wonderful news is that Jesus has not stopped acting and speaking. He is resurrected and at work in our world. He is not idle. He is alive and among us as our Prophet to teach us, our Priest to forgive us, our King to rule us, our Shepherd to guide us, our Friend to come alongside us.
Two Enriching Words
Two Hebrew words deeply inform and enrich our understanding of meditative prayer: . Our English Bibles most often translate both of these words with the simple word “meditate.” Actually these two Hebrew words convey a host of nuances: to mutter, to moan, to whisper, to reflect, to rehearse, to muse and even to coo like the dove (Is 59:11).
Often the emphasis of these words is on silent reflection upon God’s works in nature (Ps 143:5; 145:5) or God’s Word (Ps 119:15, 23, 27, 48, 78, 148). At other times it involves audible murmuring, especially when the object of our meditation is Torah, or the Law of God: “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it” (Josh 1:8).
This passage from Joshua underscores a central element of the biblical view of meditation: obedience. This is in marked contrast to the various forms of meditation in many religions around the world. The biblical stress is always on ethical change, character transformation, obedience to the Word of the Lord.
Philosopher Ken Bryson of Nova Scotia observes, “ moves through silence to dwell on a spirituality of words, namely, the precepts, statutes, words, and commandments of the Torah.” So in the biblical witness we have this dual nature of meditation on stillness and action. This is why I constantly seek to define Christian meditation in terms of “hearing and obeying.” Always this double emphasis. On the one hand we are called to silence, to stillness, to quieting “creaturely activity,” as the old writers often put it. On the other hand we are called to action, to right behavior, to obedience to the will and ways of God. Hearing and obeying. Always hearing and obeying. These are things we learn from haga and siach.
Oh, may our hearts and minds be saturated with the longing of the psalmist: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Ps 19:14).
Beyond Earthquake, Wind and Fire
Elijah and his shattering experience in the cave at Mount Horeb might become for us something of a paradigm for meditation. A metaphor for listening prayer, if you will.
You may remember the story recorded for us in 1 Kings 18 and 19. How Elijah triumphed over the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel. How Jezebel sought to kill him. How Elijah ran for his life. How, exhausted and frozen with fear, Elijah asked for death under the broom tree: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). How the angel of the Lord touched Elijah and gave him a hearty breakfast . . . twice. How on the strength of those meals he journeyed forty days and forty nights until at last he came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And how he entered a cave and spent the night there . . . desolate, lonely, defeated.
You know, sometimes the pressures of my own life crowd in and I want to cry out, “. Let me crawl into your cave with you.” Perhaps you too have known times of discouragement and depression and have wanted to join Elijah in his cave. Mount Horeb’s cave is a place of despair, desolation and dejection.
But now we will see why Elijah’s story on Mount Horeb is a metaphor for meditative prayer. God coaxes Elijah out of his cave of depression and onto the mountaintop: “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by” (1 Kings 19:11). Those words, “the Lord is about to pass by,” call to mind another mountain—Sinai—where in dramatic fashion God met with Moses and gave forth what we today call the Ten Commandments. We remember the story well, of course . . . and so did Elijah. The burning bush. The tablets of stone cut by the finger of God. The fangs of lightning. Boulders split apart. Trees reduced to embers. Roaring winds and deafening thunder rolling out across the canyons. Then we remember—and so did Elijah—how Moses hid in the cleft of the rock as the Lord God, the Almighty, passed by in a heart-stopping display of divine glory.
And now, here on Mount Horeb, God is about to pass by Elijah. On Sinai God’s presence came forth in a massive fireworks display of natural phenomena. On Horeb there were indeed ferocious winds, shattering earthquakes and scorching fires. But God was not in any of these things. This must have been a shock to Elijah. Nothing of God was in the earthquake, wind or fire. It was only after all of nature’s fireworks passed away and there was perfect stillness that God came to Elijah in a still small Voice, in the divine Whisper, in “a sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12). The Lord speaks to Elijah not in the ferociousness of nature but in silence, in “the soft whisper of a voice” (1 Kings 19:12 TEV).
On the mountaintop Elijah stands in utter humility before God. His humility flows from a desperation seen in his terror of Jezebel and in his own desire to die. And it is in that humility of heart that Elijah hears the debar Yahweh, the word of the Lord. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote:
of our desire Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.
Oh, may we in quiet humility adopt the heart of Elijah. May we with humility of heart heed the counsel of the psalmist: “Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him” (Ps 37:7).
You may remember that Elijah stood upon yet another mountain of God: Mount Hermon, the mountain of the transfiguration. There on Mount Hermon he stood alongside Moses—together representing the law and the prophets. There on that mountain they saw Jesus, the Christ, transfigured, “and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Mt 17:2). There on that mountain Elijah and Moses carried on an intimate conversation with Jesus, experiencing the fulfillment of all they had longed for, dreamed for, worked for (Mt 17:3). What a conversation that must have been!
The Story Continues On
Since that moment, faithful disciples of Jesus for two millennia have witnessed to the reality of a with-God life, the reality of “.” How unfortunate that we today know so little of the vast sea of literature on Christian meditation by faithful believers throughout the centuries! From Catholic to Protestant, from Eastern Orthodox to Western Free Church, we are urged to “ in uninterrupted fellowship.” The Russian mystic Theophan the Recluse said, “ with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all seeing, within you.” The twentieth-century Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when asked why he meditated, replied, “.” The witness of Scripture and the witness of the devotional masters both invite us to experience, in the words of Madame Guyon, “ Christ.”