Sometimes God stands back. You probably know this, at least subconsciously. You’re familiar enough with the Bible to remember the 400 plus years of Israel’s captivity in Egypt. Or the 400 plus years of silence between the Old and New Testaments. Or even the experience of Jesus during his crucifixion, when he wonders out loud (and I mean, really out loud!) why God had forsaken him. You’ve read, or had read to you, that passage from Paul’s writings where he repeats three times in a span of nine verses that God “abandoned” people or “gave them over” to pursue whatever their wicked hearts desired (Romans 1:24-32).
This is not a new concept for us, really. We understand the principle of letting experience be the best teacher. After all, we’ve stood back countless times with our own children. How else would they learn to ride that bike? You know, the new one with the cool paint job and no training wheels? We helped them climb on. We steadied them. We started them moving with a gentle push, maybe even ran along behind with our hand on the back of the seat. But somewhere along the way, we removed our hand, didn’t we? We ran beside them as they wobbled down the sidewalk trying to balance a bicycle free of training wheels and without our hand to steady them. Oh, yes, of course, they would fall. But each time they got back up and got back on, they rode a little farther. Then one time, one glorious, celebration-worthy, time, they rode until they stopped themselves, by their own choice! We could have made it so they’d never fall, but then they’d have never learned to ride, either. For them to grow, we had to stand back.
We understand that God must, at least theoretically, do the same thing for us. We know that growth comes through, not in the absence of, failure. We acknowledge the power and supremacy of free will, that love and loving obedience cannot be coerced. Many of us have had to stand back ourselves when it became obvious that nothing we could say or do was going to deflect a child or a spouse or a friend from a certain course, no matter how destructive we knew it would be. Sometimes we’ve had to wait, to stand back, to let someone decide how or if they wanted to pursue a relationship with us. We had to let them choose. It was difficult but, we understood, necessary.
Still, we struggle with God’s silence. Somehow, we’ve developed this faulty theology that says God must speak to us whenever we demand or expect him to. We’ve wrapped ourselves in the fable of the all-commanding God who exercises his perfect will through us and to us at all times, in all ways, and in all (even the smallest, most inconsequential) things. We believe intellectually in free will, but we don’t live the concept. When God stands back, (whether to let us reap the consequences of our choices, to allow us freedom to choose, or because He simply has no preference in a particular instance), we become agitated and wonder if we’ve been wrong about God all along. We question our faith and began to suspect God may not even exist.
Well, I’ve got news for you. The god we’ve built up in our minds doesn’t exist. That god is a construct, a made thing, no more real or powerful than an idol of wood or stone. Again, we know this instinctively, but its so hard to let go of our familiar god, isn’t it? The good news is, the real God is in the business of not letting go of us, either—even as we clutch tightly to our make-believe god and wonder why bad things happen to good people. And this is why—one reason why—God stands back: we learn through trial and error our own limitations. We grow through adversity. We turn eventually to face the God of gods. And we submit. We yield. We allow God to be God, to live up to His name: I Will Be What I Will Be (Exodus 3:14).
As the Children of God, we are growing up to Be What We Will Be by His word and power. Part of that growing up is accomplished by God standing back to allow us to grow through our own trial and error. When this happens, he has not abandoned us. He is running along beside us, hands out to catch us as we wobble down the sidewalk on our new, training-wheel-less bicycle. He is cheering us on and celebrating every milestone right along with us, and when we fall and scrape a knee or bruise a heart, the God Who Stands Back steps back in to comfort and to heal. Be of good cheer; you are never alone (Hebrews 13:5).
