come out come out wherever you are

On the Run

In the story of Jonah, one of God’s very own representatives turns from God’s calling and stubbornly tries to escape. Instead of going to the violent, unjust Assyrian city of Nineveh, Jonah goes as far as he can the opposite direction. Anyone who reads the story can quickly identify the foolishness of Jonah as he attempts to escape the all-powerful, always present God of creation.

Jonah, a prophet who knew God and the Old Testament Scriptures fairly well, stubbornly refuses to obey. He quite foolishly seeks to avoid God by means of a boat ride. One storm and whale adventure later, Jonah is in Nineveh doing what God commanded.

You may be amused as you consider or read the tale of Jonah. But don’t miss the very common human struggle in it. As imperfect, broken human beings, we have the sinful tendency to avoid, escape, or run away from God. And I worry that all too often we Christians, too distracted and wrongly prioritizing our lives, tend to ‘forget’ about God during portions of our day, week, or seasons of life.

One of my favorite Christian rock bands, Gable Price and Friends, put out a song a while back called ‘Magnetic Love’. This song is a beautifully creative reflection on the love of God as experienced by us. At one point in the bridge, the song says:

“Hide and seek is so unfair, because you find me everywhere
I can’t escape you
Hide and seek is so unfair, because you find me everywhere
I can’t get over you
Hide and seek is so unfair, because you find me everywhere
So ready or not, I’m coming after you.”

How often do you and I play hide and seek with God? A silly question, I know, but humor me for a second. We all are cognitively aware that the Triune God is everywhere, always present with His people. Christians are people who have been joined together with Christ as His Body. Those who follow Jesus are always intimately close to Him as individual and collective temples of the Holy Spirit.

Yet, I suspect that many of us fail to act as if this is always true in the same way we adapt and learn to respect the laws of nature in the physical world. Is God’s presence like gravity to you? Is it as real as the air you breathe? Is it as constant as the rising sun? Or perhaps the most telling question of all: Is He as real to you as these things on a moment to moment basis? I am sad to admit that I don’t always live my life as if He is literally right here.

Isn’t that tragic?

It’s a tragedy that I observe all too often, brothers and sisters (among whom I’m included), that even as we know the beautiful truths of God, we grow numb to them. Instead of learning to live every moment of life as if He is near, we often forget to behold the gifts of His presence.

Psalm 139:1-10 ESV

O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
² You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from afar.
³ You search out my path and my lying down
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
⁴ Even before a word is on my tongue,
    behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
⁵ You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is high; I cannot attain it.

⁷ Where shall I go from your Spirit?
    Or where shall I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
⁹ If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
¹⁰ even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me.

We cannot escape Him. It’s foolish to try. The Lord is not only ever present, He is forever faithful. Oh that we would not just know this, but comprehend it with a clinging devotion! ¹

A Losing Game

But throughout Psalm 139 it is not only God’s closeness that is marveled at but his intimate, relational knowing of us as well. Consider what David goes on to write in his song to the Lord:

¹³ For you formed my inward parts;
    you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
    my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
    the days that were formed for me,
    when as yet there was none of them.

There is a huge difference between the way the FBI can know a person through a detailed database of information and surveillance and the way a close, life-long friend can intimately know a person. God’s knowledge is expansive and comprehensive, but it’s also intimate and covenantal; the nearness of God to His people is powered by His very heart for us.

How often do we live our lives in opposition to or counter to the reality of His love, intimacy, and presence? How often are we forgetful and apathetic towards the mind-boggling heart of God?

Or even worse, how often do we flee God as Jonah did? In moments of shame, rebellion, or apathy, we foolishly run from Him. Deep down we know it’s impossible, but we still try to ignore or hide from Him in moments.

Unlike Jonah, we know how foolhardy it is to try to physically escape God; we’ve evolved past that kind of escapism. Now, our method of escape is willingly or passively allowing ourselves to be caught up in distraction.

Turn on the TV and binge.

Scroll on the phone for hours, jumping from app to app.

Embark on video game adventures and quests of a digital world of our own making.

Dive into a world of music, poetic lyrics, and self-centered, God-less reflections by our favorite music artist of choice.

Or perhaps we never put down the homework, never lay aside our career endeavors, or cope with our inner struggles with yet another social engagement and group of friends.

Maybe we are not aware of what’s really happening when these things in our lives consume us. Or to be more candid, when we CHOOSE to be consumed by these things. We are, in our own way, getting on the boat to Tarsus. We are fleeing the God of the universe, diving into our own worlds of imagination and stimulation. And the more we allow ourselves to be consumed by an unhealthy portion of these things as a mechanism of escape from God, the more forgetful, apathetic, and weak our affections and desires for Him become. Like a plant never watered or tended, our hearts and minds towards God wither. And yet He never leaves us.

This is the sad reality of the modern world we inhabit. We have found new ways to run from God. But as the Gable Price and Friends song suggests, this game of hide and seek is notoriously unfair. How could we escape Him?

I speak from experience.

It’s all too easy to lose myself in these things. Sometimes, even as a seminary student, the challenge is to not lose sight of God and His glorious presence in the endless amounts of reading, theological reflection, and studying that I am tasked with.

Psalm 16:11 ESV

You make known to me the path of life;
    in your presence there is fullness of joy;
    at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

The question that has weighed on me in the last year or so has been centered around this passage. Do I really believe that His presence is where the best kind of happiness and fullness is to be found? Does the way I live my life functionally embrace the truth that eternal pleasure is sourced at the feet of Jesus?

I’m afraid far too often, I look elsewhere for pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment; far too often, I settle for lesser kinds of happiness rather than diving into the streams of life-giving joy that the Triune God offers. The result? I live shallowly. I live tepidly.

Unfortunately, I fall into this game of hide and seek with God far more than I should.

It’s a losing game every time. You and I will never win.

David rhetorically cries out to God, “Where can I flee from Your presence?”

Stepping Into the Light

You may be thinking to yourself that this isn’t what you do. Are you so sure? Imagine if Jesus decided to pop down to earth, swing by, and visit you and spend all day with you for a week. Would you live the same kind of life? Would anything change? Jesus claims in John 16 that it’s better for Him to go so the Holy Spirit can indwell His followers. But as intimately close as God is to us – both in space, relationship, and knowledge – we get so caught up in our tiny little constructs of our own lives and dollhouse aspirations that we forget the Living, Almighty God who is for us, among us, and in us.

We render more zeal to partisan campaigns and patriotic wars within politics than to His Kingdom and His way of life.

We care more about our favorite TV show or the lyrical depth of some pop artist than the Story of the Bible we are actively a part of in the here and now.

We get more excited over the materials and activities in creation we enjoy than the Creator. (see profound quote on this below). ²

Oh that we would learn to behold Him! Oh that we would learn to see Him rightly! Oh that we would learn to never forgetfully settle for anything less than the treasure and riches, the marvelous glory, and the wonderful, endless love of God!

Oh that we would train ourselves to never play hide and seek with Father, Son, and Spirit.

May we learn from the story of Jonah and the testimony of David. God is near – inviting us close when the storms of life attack our apathetic escapism or stubborn rebellion. Will we wait for a whale to be sent our way to return to Him? Or will you and I learn to follow Him, to really follow Him; to walk with Him instead of running away.

This involves far more than studying the Bible for cognitive information and theological gems. As a seminary student who is always learning something, I promise you, cognitive-exclusive discipleship will not ultimately lead us to the abundant life of discipleship to which Jesus invites us.³ Ironically, sometimes the theological endeavors in and of themselves are distractions.

We need to draw near to Him. But His presence isn’t just found in the quiet, the stillness, or the solitude. Sure, there’s a profound depth and marvelous wonder to those moments with Him. But He doesn’t ever leave our lives.

We need to seek Him holistically – with all our affections, with all our mental capacities, with all our effort, and with all our resources; we need to seek Him in an all-encompassing pursuit.⁴ I am learning so much about this kind of radical discipleship from thoughtful leaders such as Dallas Willard, John Mark Comer, James K. Smith, and others.

On the one hand, it’s not easy or simple. How can it be? The way of Jesus is costly. It envelops our entire life.

But by relying on the strength and power of the Spirit of Jesus, we may behold God and run towards Him in a posture of surrender and passionate obedience.

Dear Reader, the game is over. He’s found you. Forever. Come on out. Cry out to Him: “here I am!” He’s waiting for you.

1. Eugene Peterson, reflecting on the story of Jonah, writes: “But why would anyone flee the presence of the Lord? The presence of the Lord is a wonderful place: an awareness of blessing, a personal affirmation. “Presence” in Hebrew is literally “face” (paneh), a metaphor with complex and intimate experience. In infancy, as our eyes gradually focus, the face becomes our first vista. By means of the parental face we know ourselves as ourselves and in its expressions learn our place in the world. In the face we acquire trust and affection (or, in some terrible cases, rejection and abuse.) Our formative years are spent looking up into the face, and we grow up toward what we are looking up to. Thus the metaphor pours out insights rooted in experience. The face is our source and our sun under which we realize ourselves as intimately conceived and beneficently illuminated. These experienced facts of face develop into the metaphor of God’s face. The feelings and responses that begin in the cradle develop in adulthood under the influence of the faith into acts of worship: deliberate ventures into God-adoration and commitment by which we escape the narcissistic isolation of gazing into our ego mirrors and having reality defined by the squint of our eyes, the set of our jaws. WHy would anyone flee the presence/face of God to look at that?” – Under the Predictable Plant, 11-12. ↩︎
2. In John Mark Comer’s book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, he aptly addresses this concern. At one point, he quotes Ronald Rolheiser who states:
   “Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.” -The Holy Longing: The Search for Christian Spirituality, 31-33. ↩︎
3. I do not in any way, shape, or form want to belittle Biblical studies and theological reflection. That is my ‘bread and butter’; I am always doing these things. But what I want to strongly recommend is that we don’t settle for a mental landscape of discipleship that requires so little of our hearts, our resources, and the entirety of our lives. ↩︎
4. I have all too often heard people refer to ‘truth and love’ as if they are separate entities. Truth is the cold, hard reality; just the facts. And love is the kind way you immediately and always give people the facts. But this is such a shortsighted view of truth; it settles on a version of truth that is oftentimes deeply based on partisanship and traditionalism. Comer excellently points to this when he quotes Willard: “We truly live at the mercy of our ideas.” Live No Lies, 27; Hearing God, 12.
   
   Comer goes on to write: “Because the ideas that we believe in our minds and then let into our bodies give shape to the trajectory of our souls. Put another way, they shape how we live and who we become. When we believe truth – that is, ideas that correspond to reality – we show up to reality in such a way that we flourish and thrive. We show up to our bodies, to our sexuality, to our interpersonal relationships, and, above all, to God himself in a way that is congruent with the Creator’s wisdom and good intentions for his creation. As a result, we tend to be happy. But when we believe lies – ideas that are not congruent with the reality o God’s wise and loving design – and then, tragically, open our bodies to those lies and let them into our muscle memories, we allow an ideological cancer to infect our souls. We live at odds with reality, and as a result we struggle to thrive. Because reality does not adjust itself to our illusions.”
   
   My point in all of this is to point out that whether we settle for distracted, apathetic life or lose ourselves in cognitive-exclusive discipleship- either way we have bought into a false idea of reality, one that elevates the mind and reason above all other parts of the person and life. Jesus’ call to apprenticeship is 2000 years old; it is so much older than the Enlightenment and Modernity’s exclusive claims of how to view the world and operate in it. As followers of Jesus, we are called to love Him with all of ourselves. I am continually reminded of how short-sighted our views of discipleship can be. And when we let false ideas of reality into our methods of discipleship, is it any wonder there is so little flourishing, satisfaction, or authenticity found in our communities?
   ↩︎