Angry With God

The Life of Moses – Act 4, Scene 2:
“Angry With God”
Deuteronomy 34:1-8
Rev. Clark Lynn Callender, 9/5/10

Have you ever been angry with God?
The loved one that was taken far too early. The other who lingered and suffered far too long. The disease that came out of nowhere. The healing that never arrived. The marriage that fell apart. The child not saved. The suffering not eased. Prayers not answered. Promises seemingly not kept. Times when God’s ways in your life seem rotten, wrong, uncaring, uninvolved... lousy!
Have you ever been angry with God? Well, if you have ever felt this feeling, ever thought this thought, know that you are in good company for such marks the close of the great story of Moses...

This morning we conclude our study of the life of Moses, and as the story ends we find it closes (to quote the old saying) “not so much with a bang but with a whimper.” Quite literally a WHIMPER:
Having spent the last 40 years wandering in the wilderness as the first generation of Israelites dies off, Moses and the second generation finally arrive at the Promised Land once again. Here the people renew their covenant with God and prepare to enter the land; however, there’s one last little detail that needs attending to, namely: Moses – What is to become of him?
Answer: God is not going to allow Moses to enter the Promised Land! This is the closing “punch-line” to the story. Moses is to die at the very border of Canaan, never to set foot in it. So close, and yet so far.
Now, earlier on we’re told that Moses has requested that he be allowed to enter the land, in fact we’re told that he has even BEGGED to do so; but God has made it clear that this is not going to happen. And thus the story ends on something of a sour note. With deep poignancy Moses is left to only look out over the land he has worked so hard to get to. The message of victory and triumph of this great servant of God tempered instead, in the closing chapter, with this final nagging aftertaste of disappointment and frustration.
It seems a most unkind move of God’s part. Almost mean-spirited. Yet note: Here it is. This final unpleasant chapter not deleted, not glossed over. And I believe it’s here because it’s crucial in that it means to demonstrate to us the very real human struggle it finally is to really live all of this. That, yes, we have all the pretty words and the promises, but actually living faith in God does not come easily! As last week we heard Moses imploring everyone to “Love God”; so now, we discover, he was saying this at the very moment he himself was struggling most to do so!
The very real difficulty of actually living one’s faith amidst the all too tangible – and frequently quite lousy – realities of life!
What are we to make of this?
Well, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on this – on living our faith amidst the most difficult moments of life – most particularly, those moments when God seems lousy, WHEN WE ARE ANGRY WITH GOD...
(I)
Thought #1: DO NOT GO QUIETLY.
Right off the top, I believe it’s important for us to note that here is the great Moses struggling with issues we all often struggle with, and that, to begin with, should be reassuring to us - that such thoughts are normal and natural even for the greatest people of faith! There is nothing wrong with us when we have such crises of belief. The issue, of course, being what we do with them – this leading us into our first thought here:
As I was considering this closing scene in Moses’ life and how it seems he gets a rather “raw deal” from the Lord... One of the first things that caught my attention is just how Moses DOESN’T TAKE THIS LYING DOWN.
That is, Moses is not at all PASSIVE in what happens to him. He has an opinion, he has major problems with what’s going on, he’s angry – and he lets God know it! A good portion of the book of Deuteronomy being spent in Moses’ final griping! He goes at it with God!
This, of course, having been a pattern between these two throughout their relationship: Whenever Moses has had a problem with God he has not stepped back; he has stepped up. He’s repeatedly gone head-to-head with God – not in arrogance, imagining himself equal to God; but merely in GIVING HIS ALL. And the most amazing thing about this being that God has not been bothered by this but, quite the opposite, always seemed to welcome it, to enjoy it, to almost invite it – and finally to respect Moses most for it! As it says in the final paragraph of the story:

Moses consistently stepped up “face-to-face” with God – and God liked that! And this has two sides to it for us:
First, it’s a reminder that we need to SHARE EVERYTHING we think and feel FULLY with the Lord. You know, so often it seems we believe there are certain thoughts and feelings that we shouldn’t have – especially about God. They’re wrong, they’re bad, so we try to hide them – feel we must push them down within ourselves.
But this is totally wrong! As my father said to me in the only piece of advice he ever gave me about PRAYING; yet the one that has served me best – he said, simply: “Be yourself! If you’re angry with God, be angry with God. If you hate God, hate God. Be yourself, because that’s what God most wants: YOU. And only there can he reach the real you.”
God knows that, as in any relationship, it is only in open, honest sharing that things can be worked through and life found – as with Moses here. This text is first a reminder for us to BRING OUR ALL to God in prayer – the good, the bad, and the ugly – for only there can life be found. And then from this, it’s also a reminder to us to DEMAND OUR ALL. This is the other side of “NOT GOING QUIETLY”:
That is, throughout Moses’ life, it’s not just that he complained – anyone can complain (just hang around any church for awhile!): no, the point is that Moses WRESTLED – he wrestled with God. That is, he gave and he TOOK. As here, in the final chapters leading up to his death:
He’s tossing out different ideas, exploring different possibilities, he’s trying to understand, to grow, he’s using ALL HIS STRENGTH. And that’s the point: He lets the issues that confront him push him, ask a lot of him, totally involve him. And this is another thing that it seems God hopes for all of us: TOTAL INVOLVEMENT – our faith, our understanding, our abilities, pushed to the MAX! That we RISE TO OUR FULL HUMANITY as God created us!
You know, what so often happens when God seems to deal us a bad hand is we take one of two approaches: Either we just give up on, and turn from, God – like: “Well, if this is the way God is, then I will have nothing to do with God!” Or, conversely, in some misguided understanding of righteousness, we just blandly accept everything, spitting out pious platitudes: “If it is God’s will, then it is fine with me. It is not ours to question.”
Yet note, either way we’re completely PASSIVE: we don’t really dig into the issue; we just avoid it, step around it. We won’t get in there and get messy. We won’t allow it to push us and thus we miss the whole thing!
To put it another way: How often is the real problem in our lives, the real reason why we’re so angry with God simply that we expected life to just be HANDED TO US? We didn’t want a lot asked of us, we didn’t want to be really pushed, we didn’t want to really get involved; we just wanted it placed in our laps. We’ve just been “phoning it in” but now something great is being asked of us, a real challenge, a real demand, but we won’t have it?!
We yell at God for not helping our marriage; but we never really work at our marriage ourselves. We shake an angry first at God for not giving us healing; but we don’t want to have to explore the depths of real strength that are within us. We curse God for letting a loved one die; but we don’t want to find out what true faith is. More plainly put: We don’t want to know, and to have to really live, the true GREATNESS that is in us, the greatness God created and sees in us... and we take that out on God!
We’re seeking to have a God who enables us to avoid life; but we’re confronted instead with a God who calls us to fully engage it – that we might discover its greatest riches – and our greatest selves. Are we avoiding or engaging life – and what is it doing to us? Expanding on a reflection we’ve noted in the past, preacher John Ortberg writes:
“Imagine that you have a child, and for five minutes you're given a script of what will be that child’s life. You get an eraser. You can edit it. You can take out whatever you want.
“You read that your child will have a learning disability in grade school. Reading, which comes easily for some kids, will be laborious for yours.
“In high school, your kid will make a great circle of friends; then one of them will die of cancer.
“After high school this child will actually get into the college they wanted to attend. While there, there will be a car crash, and your child will lose a leg and go through a difficult depression.
“A few years later, your child will get a great job - then lose that job in an economic downturn.
“Your child will get married, but then go through the grief of separation.
“You get this script for your child’s life and have five minutes to edit it. What would you erase? Wouldn’t you want to take out all the stuff that would cause them pain?
“I am part of a generation of adults called ‘helicopter parents,’ because we’re constantly trying to swoop into our kid's lives to make sure no one is mistreating them or disappointing them. We want them to experience one unobstructed success after another.
“One Halloween a mom came to our door to trick or treat. Why didn’t she send in her kid? Well, the weather’s a little bad, she said; she was driving so he didn’t have to walk in the mist.
“But why not send him to the door? Well, he had fallen asleep in the car, she said, so she didn’t want him to have to wake up.
“I felt like saying, ‘Why don’t you eat all his candy and get his stomach ache for him, too — then he can be completely protected!’”
“If you could wave a wand, if you could erase every failure, setback, suffering, and pain - are you sure it would be a good idea? Would it cause your child to grow up to be a better, stronger, more generous person? Is it possible that in some way people actually need adversity, setbacks, maybe even something like trauma to reach the fullest level of development and growth?”
The first thought to consider when life seems lousy, when you’re most angry with God: DO NOT GO QUIETLY – give all to God, demand all of yourself. From this, then...
(II)
Thought #2: REMEMBER THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME.
In the New Testament book of Hebrews, the author gives the following interpretation of the death of Moses and others like him, great people of faith who also died having never received the promise they had spent their life working toward – he writes:

This, I believe, is a second crucial message we are meant to take from Moses’ death: That even though Moses never enters the Promised Land, that doesn’t necessarily make it a WRONG ending. That, in effect, this is exactly the whole point: That he died precisely as he lived, and that his is a model of the life of faith for anyone in this world, namely: That is this life we can only JOURNEY – we’re sojourners, travelers, pilgrims – never really reaching home. We live here but THIS IS NOT OUR HOME – there’s more, there’s a real home beyond. There is, and can be, no ending, no settling here.
Yet this is a mistake that we all make and the cause of so much pain and frustration and failure for us: We don’t journey toward our true home. We settle here and seek to make this the end. We view this as everything. We live too much solely for this life, for this moment, for this time only. We want everything wrapped up here with a neat bow. We see things, we decide, we judge, we act only for the here and now, for this world. But there’s so much more than this! This is not our home, this is not our final resting place! And we get ourselves in major trouble whenever we forget this!
We search for happy endings, but even the best of circumstances they are never entirely to be found – because this is not the end, this is not our final home. We long for closure to our places of pain, but it never seems to entirely come – because this is not the end, this is not our home. We consume our lives in a frenzied search to find something in this life that will fill and perfectly satisfy us, but it always fall short – because this is not the end, this is not our home!
You know, there are parts of the text of the Moses story that seem to indicate that the reason for God’s refusal to permit Moses to enter the Promised Land is failure on Moses’ part – mistakes he has made for which he is being punished. However, there are also long parts of the text that seem to question this point of view, even implying that if true, it’s totally UNFAIR – and that that’s the real point: That this life is NOT TOTALLY FAIR. Why? Because this life is not the end of the story! What’s the old saying? “Expecting life to be fair is like expecting a lion not to eat you because you are a vegetarian.” This life is never totally fair because this life is not the end of the story!
Basically, the second point here is that, in times of frustration and struggle, TAKE AN ETERNAL PERSPECTIVE. Realize that this is not your home – it doesn’t end neatly here, it’s not fair - and look for the home to come where it does get wrapped up. Realize that the story that seems to have ended painfully is not over – those loved ones you’ve lose you will see again. And live for that! Live beyond this life! Live for the issues and matters that are eternal!
You know, there’s an old fable that is told about a sailor shipwrecked on one of the South Sea islands. He was seized by the natives, hoisted on their shoulders, carried to their village, and set upon a crude throne. Little by little, he learned that it was their custom once each year to make some man a king. He liked this idea until he began to wonder what happened to all the former kings.
Soon he discovered that every year when his kingship was ended, the king was banished to an island, where he starved to death. The sailor did not like that, but he was smart and he was king, king for a year.
So, as King, he put his carpenters to work making boats, his farmers to work transplanting fruit trees to the island, growing crops, masons building houses. So when his kingship was over, he was banished, not to a barren land, but to an island rich in abundance – where he lived happily ever after.
So, likewise, we’re all kings here, kings for a little while at least, able to choose what we shall do with the stuff of this life – knowing that this is not the end of the story. The wise person being the one who puts their effort into where they’re going not where they are.
Thought #2 when life seems lousy and you’re angry with God: Think eternity – Remember that THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME. And finally...
(III)
Thought #3: LOOK AT THINGS FROM GOD’S PERSPECTIVE.
In the end, of course, we’ve been focusing on our annoyance with God here (at the close of the Moses story); but what if we were to turn things around and consider the situation from GOD’S PERSPECTIVE...
Do you think God liked the ending any more than Moses did? Do you think God enjoyed “sticking it to” his most faithful servant and friend?
In the ancient Jewish writings there’s a tradition that states that when Moses was told that he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land, he begged God that if he couldn’t enter it as a human, that he might be allowed to fly over it as a bird, or that he might be permitted to graze on it as a cow. And the legend says that as God told him no, that this would not be possible, that Moses looked over at God and saw tears pouring from God’s eyes. It broke God’s heart just as much as it broke Moses’.
Have you ever thought of what this moment did to God?
We’re generally so focused on ourselves that we can’t see anything. But if try to also see things from God’s perspective we gain the BIGGER PICTURE, namely: That God is here with Moses through all of this. In the end, God doesn’t just send Moses a text message: “Sorry, no Promised Land! LOL.” No, God is there to give the difficult news. God is there hurting as well. At some point Moses’ life has to end and it’s going to hurt. God is there in the good times and in the bad. In the end, God doesn’t offer Moses Canaan; what God offers is God’s self. The one constant of the whole story – of our whole story: God’s PRESENCE.
Is it enough?
How often, in the end, is this NOT what we’re seeking and thus why we know so much pain and frustration? That, in the end, when it comes to our faith in God, we’re seeking only “stuff” from God, getting the things we want; NOT GOD’S OWN SELF – and thus we suffer. The wise person being the one who, instead, seeks only God.
The final point when God seems lousy: Don’t get lost in your demands and desires; just seek God – God’s PRESENCE - share the experience - and all will be yours! Author Randy Hoyt writes:
“Doctors and nurses were doing everything possible for my wife, the mother of my seven children, yet I could see the hopelessness in their faces. Through an emergency C-section during the fifth month of her pregnancy, it was discovered the detached placenta had grown through the uterus and attached itself to her bladder. Bleeding was so profuse during surgery that Kris was given 30 units of blood. As the night wore on, her battle for life became desperate.
“I cried out, ‘God, what do you want? I know you can heal her; why don’t you?’ In the middle of my darkest night, God began to speak. I wanted a miracle. He wanted to discuss his nature.
“’Do you believe I am a loving God?’ the Spirit asked.
“Sitting beside my wife’s bed, amid the chaos of ICU, I needed to answer that question. I could have said, ‘No, you cannot be a loving God. Look around here. My wife is dying. My newborn daughter may die. I have to go home and tell six children that their mother will not come home again ever.’
“But that night God gave me the grace to see him as he is. ‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘You are a loving God. No matter what happens here tonight I know that is your nature.’
“Kris’s condition worsened.
“Kris was determined to give our child all she had to help her in her struggle to live. In the end, it cost Kris her life. Grace lived just 16 days.
“’What about our plans, God?’ I asked. ‘Who will teach the kids, guide them, and love them like their mother?’
“God laid it on the heart of a man to head up an effort which became known as ‘Help Bring Hope to the Hoyt Kids.’ In six months, hundreds of people worked, sent money, donated supplies and poured love into our family. Churches provided food daily; on weekends, as many as 50 people were fed. I received more than 500 letters, e-mails and cards from people who said they were praying for us.
“I am writing this in the house God has given us. The medical bills are gone. The house is paid for. I am working as well as schooling my children.
“One night I lay awake, tormented with the memory of Kris fighting for her life. I tried to remember her with the light of life in her eyes, but all I could see was death. I could feel myself falling into depression when suddenly before me was a vision of Kris, so perfectly alive in Christ, shining and healthy. No pain, just pure joy on her face. ‘See her as she is now,’ the Holy Spirit seemed to say. ‘She is alive.’
Someday we will all be together with Jesus and our daughter Grace. I asked God for the life of my wife; I received instead a lesson on the nature of God. Armed with that knowledge, I have no fear for today or the future. God will always be enough for any situation.”

A famous preacher once said: “Faith in God is like the love of family – it’s easy when everything’s going smoothly; but you only really find out if it’s there when everything goes wrong.”
Have you ever been angry with God?
When life goes wrong and God seems lousy – don’t let the struggle break you; but rather, remake you: Do not go quietly. Remember this is not your home. And look at things from God’s perspective.