Seek and Hide

Is God hiding from you…or are you hiding from God? The common complaint is that God has left each of us to fight our own fight. It is as if we are claiming to be like lost children who frantically search everywhere, but cannot find our parents anywhere. We are the abandoned ones, betrayed by cruel and unloving parents who have exposed us to a harsh and dangerous world because they have left us to fend for ourselves. Our assumptions are shattered. Our parents are gone forever. And this is how we feel about God, too.

But how hard are we really looking? Or are we just repeating in our own time a pattern that was set in place from the very beginning. In the Eden story, found in the Book of Genesis, the man and the woman transgress and immediately feel shame and, as a result, go into hiding. God calls out to them, but they hide from Him at the very time when God is searching them out. In the time of the prophets, Isaiah identifies the intractable persistence of this problem of who is seeking and who is hiding: “We all, like lost sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way....” (Isaiah 53:6)

What causes us to hide from God? Is it us or is it Him? And what might cause us to hide in the first place? In the Genesis story the man and woman flee from the presence of a searching God because of shame and fear. If they had nothing to hide, they would not have taken cover. But they did have something very real to hide which was an act of utter unfaithfulness. After the man and the woman are cast out of Eden as punishment for their original crime, they seem to pass on to their own child Cain the same inclinations of faithlessness and rebellion. Cain murders his brother, and when he is caught, he cries out that his punishment is more than he can bear. He rejected God and became not a seeker but rather a “restless wanderer of the earth.” From then until now that is the condition of despair that many of us suffer from day in and day out. Perhaps it is time to find out what it means to be a seeker rather than a hider.