Book Review- Disappointment With God (Philip Yancey)

So I have just finished reading a book that has taken months to finish. It has not taken months because it is boring. It took a long time because it is a difficult book to read and is abundant in difficult conceptual ideas that take time and effort to process. Most of Yancey’s works are intellectual, but I found this one to be his most challenging read thus far.

‘Disappointment with God’ attempts to answer the following three questions:
1. Is God fair?
2. Is God silent?
3. Is God hidden?

To this end, the book is a must-read. I have never had these questions so well answered, and his wise and calculated answers I will carry with me through life. Yancey does something very interesting and for a large part of the book, turns the tables and writes on what it might be like to be God, and even on God’s disappointment with man. This revealed to me God through history and certainly gave me a greater (even poetic) understanding of God, my father, the lover of my soul. Along the way, my desire to read the Old Testament prophets peaked and I started to appreciate new things in books like Isaiah and Lamentations. At one point in time, the book even became very intellectual in a scientific way and discussed the linearity of time and time and it’s relativity and what that means to us and to God.

In true Yancey fashion he explores all angles of an argument (even ‘disappointment without God’) often throwing himself in the deep water of the argument and writing his way back out onto solid ground.

Yancey, my hero.

the road home

in 2004 and 2005, i was involved with an organisation called j-life. we were based on a farm outside heidelberg called camp eden. it was during these two years that my faith in the Lord Jesus was cemented and when i made much personal progress and started taking concepts such leadership and devotion seriously. God worked wonders in my life.

whenever i come back to the campsite i am always excited to be in this place of memories and to a place when somehow God seems more available to me even though it’s probably me being more available to him.

the farm house is at the end of a 9km dirt road. whenever i drive the road it is different. there are always new tracks being formed and new holes in the ground that were never there before. sometimes when it has been raining, it is a very slushy drive. other times when it has been sunny, it can be a very bumpy ride. but every time is different.

it’s like my path to God is always different. Or it’s like God’s path to me is always different. There are always new ways to enjoy the company of my Father. There are always new discoveries that await me.

the road is not generic, but the road leads to God and i know where the road starts...

James 4:8... ‘come near to God and he will come near to you.’

offline

Even though technology so often works so well for us, we often find that sometimes it is able to work against us... and when it is working against us, we find that it can be rather effective at totally de-railing us. Sometimes I feel as though technology has built a highway over a dirt-road and that’s all smooth-driving until the introduction of tarmac means pot-holes, when before potholes were never a problem. So right now my internet is down- as you may have guessed from my very revealing title of this post. But an even greater tragedy than an offline connection is that fact that I don’t even need to be online. Technology has created a need that technology can’t satisfy. Now to catch the next train to somewhere I’m not planning on going...