Getting to Know "The God Who Sees"
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: Feb 16-Feb 22
God will bless me for my faith and righteous desires.
Though I was a fervent woman of faith, this nightmare scene psychologically reflected the strange place I found myself after soul-suffering more than 80 cycles of infertility interspersed with miscarriages. My womb became a tomb, and I felt forsaken. The poetry of Lamentations 3 expressed my suffering, and I was tormented by the fear that this was somehow my own doing.
My years-long dark night of the soul was permeated with anxiety that God caused or allowed suffering because I deserved it. Per the evangelical theology of my upbringing, sin separates everyone from God and punitive wrath naturally follows as part of divine justice—part of God’s nature. Though I believed in the atonement of Jesus Christ, I was also taught that I could grieve God’s Spirit with my imperfect choices or lack of faith—causing the Spirit to depart. This implied that I could separate myself from God again (and again) and that I deserved suffering, whether caused or consented to by my just Creator. For me, this belief intensified inner fragmentation. I couldn’t reconcile my seemingly pure-heart desire to bear Life with the repeating death of hope or the literal death that my body carried and processed multiple times. My heart began to feel like catacombs.
Yet, as Weil articulated,
“It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. . . .
If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” . . . [and] we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God”
—Lenée Fuelling, “The Womb of Suffering”
God wants me to make and keep covenants with Him.
Notably, God’s response to Abram’s questioning is not to condemn or to withdraw the promise, but to consistently reassure and reiterate God’s promise to Abram. The account in Genesis tells us that Abram believed God (the Hebrew word denotes trust in a person or a relationship, rather than intellectual agreement), and that God counted this as “righteousness,” which we might understand as being in “right relationship” with God.
Again Abram is reminded of God’s promise to give him a land and an inheritance, and again—even in, and perhaps because of, this trusting relationship with God—Abram questions how he can know God’s promises will be fulfilled. God’s response once again is not to reprove or punish, but to recommit to Abram in a ritualized covenantal ceremony, speaking to Abram in a language he would understand.
Here, and in later chapters, we see a God who is relational—a God who can be talked to, questioned, negotiated with, and argued with. We see a God who wants to be in committed relationship with humanity, a God willingly and actively bound to another person in a covenant relationship. Notable to me is that in this relationship, God goes first; the only thing required of Abram at this point is willingness and trust. We might see here a reflection of a principle taught in the First Epistle of John—“We love [God] because [God] first loved us.”
—Cecelia Proffit, “The God Who Sees”
Abraham paid tithing.
Jesus Christ will lead me by the hand.
When he hears you cry out in panic on that icy road, he sees the ice. He guides your hands back into a path where you have traction. And he doesn’t need to understand your self-justifications to notice when other parts of your life are spinning out of control. If you let him, he’ll always nudge you back into some stabilizing friction.
He knows when you’re sick. Long before the day when you’ll complain to him about that pain in your abdomen, he’s already trying to prepare you for the moment when doctors will perform a scan, find the tumor, share the diagnosis. You speak English and the doctors’ words will sound strange and distant even to you. God won’t tell you in words that you’ll make it through this. But it’s not language that’s going to get you through the worst times anyway. It’s someone who loves you, reaching out to take your hand.
—James Goldberg, “A Secret”
I can be a peacemaker.
God hears me.
I had cause to reflect on the first person to be visited by an angel in the Old Testament, the enslaved1 woman of Abraham and Sarah, named Hagar. When Sarah is found barren, she gives her servant Hagar to Abraham, so that she may provide him with a son. When she discovers the plan has succeeded and that Hagar is pregnant, she “deals harshly” with Hagar, causing her to flee to the wilderness (Genesis 16:6, NRSV). An angel finds her in the wilderness by a fountain and assures her, “The Lord hath heard thy affliction” (Genesis 16:11, KJV). At this moment, she calls God by a different name, not the traditional one commonly found in the Old Testament. She calls him Elroi. Elroi in Hebrew means “the god who sees me.” The same God who saw Abraham and promised him that he would be the father of a great nation saw Hagar, Abraham’s slave woman, and made her the same promise.
—Grace Chipman, “I Have Called Thee by Name: Reflections from a Prison Educator”
Big Questions
One of the most difficult aspects for me to reckon with when reading the Old Testament is that, while these are literary stories communicating a larger message about God, many also portray human experiences in which God appears to command or condone things I believe are deeply immoral. How can we simultaneously find devotional value and literary power in a story while strongly condemning immorality and naming what’s wrong as unequivocally wrong? Should we even try?
Such is the case with the story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in Genesis 12–22. It is a story with aspects I find deeply moving and inspiring, while also feeling morally repulsed by the enslavement and abuse of Hagar, the use of Hagar’s body to give Abraham and Sarah a child, the endangerment of Ishmael, Hagar, and Sarah by Abraham, and the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac. Though I am aware that some of these actions were permitted by the culture of the time, I believe these things are wrong—even morally abhorrent. I believe God does not ask parents to kill their children (even as a test or lesson), God does not ask us to sacrifice or endanger another person even in the pursuit of a worthy goal, and abuse is never even tacitly endorsed by God.
At the same time, I find that when I zoom out and look at Genesis 12–22 as a whole story—including the hard, immoral, repugnant parts—it has the capacity to tell a compelling and moving narrative about a God who is deeply invested in deliverance and human dignity.
Let me explain what I mean.
—Cecelia Proffit, “The God Who Sees”
