Keeping Silence

“When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” – Revelation 8:1

“The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” – Habakkuk 2:20

We made sparkle jars over the weekend by filling a glass jar with water, a bit of detergent, a few drops of food coloring, and lots of glitter and sequins. You just shake up the jar and watch the sparkles swirl around before slowing settling on the bottom, an activity the kids found endlessly fascinating.

Sometimes our souls, or our lives, are like those jars, full of swirling sediment which only time can settle. “Just as the physical law of gravity ensures that sediment swirling in a jar of muddy river water will eventually settle and the water will become clear,” writes Ruth Haley Barton, “so the spiritual law of gravity ensures that the chaos of the human soul will settle if it sits still long enough.” We don’t have to do anything but sit quietly in God’s presence, “anything but show up and trust the spiritual law of gravity that says, ‘Be still, and the knowing will come.’”

John describes two things, and only two things, which the seventh seal brings: silence, and time. These are rare commodities in our house right now. Silence is non-existent: there is always someone talking, sometimes everyone talking. There are simultaneous zoom calls, multiple voices shouting in play (for some reason their imaginative play always involves very enthusiastic sounds). And my time is not my own. There’s always the potential of being interrupted to meet needs or handle issues. 

We need now, more than ever, to keep silence. We live noisy lives. And we are used to meeting problems with activity, meeting busyness with more busyness. But there is a kind of truth that can only be declared, a kind of clarity that can only be experienced, through sitting quietly without doing or saying a thing. Our silence is a stopping to acknowledge that God sits in His holy temple. Our silence is an invitation to allow the Holy Spirit to work in and reveal to us what He may. “I believe that silence is the most challenging, the most needed and the least experienced spiritual discipline among evangelical Christians today,” writes Barton. May we not fail to keep our silence, on earth as it is in heaven.

Habakkuk

“Though the fig tree should not blossom,

   nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

   and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

   and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord;

   I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

God, the Lord, is my strength;

   he makes my feet like the deer’s;

   he makes me tread on my high places.”

- Habakkuk 3:17-19

Habakkuk reads like a journal. Unlike most of the other prophets, he does not address the people of Israel directly. Rather, he records his own thoughts and conversations with God, his personal struggle with whether God can be good amid tragedy and suffering. He lodges his complaints in prayers of lament: first, what are you going to do about the injustice, idolatry, and evil of your people? God replies, I will send Babylon to judge them. Habakkuk complains again: but the evil of Babylon is even worse! God replies, I will eventually destroy Babylon as well.

Then comes a theophany (3:3-15). Habakkuk beholds God, the way the Israelites did at Mt. Sinai after generations of slavery, the way Job did after long discourses on his suffering. There are echoes here of those earlier theophanies, echoes of creation (Habakkuk 3:6, Job 38:4) and exodus (Habakkuk 3:5, 8). The point is, these stories are not just isolated events. They echo, from ancient Job to Moses to pre-exilic Habakkuk, because they are retellings of the one same story, the story of Who God Is and How He Works. And that is a story that never changes, because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). He is a God who sees and gives purpose to suffering. Who does not forget us. Who comes with salvation and justice. He is far more powerful and sovereign than we grasp.

It is impossible to behold God and not leave changed. Habakkuk becomes someone who listens and who is willing to wait (3:16). He becomes someone who chooses transcendent joy in even the worst of circumstances. If you were to rewrite these verses, what would they look like? “Though the pandemic last forever, though we never gather in our church building again, though my kids never walk into school; though my work project fails; though the smoke stains the sky… I will take joy in the God of my salvation. He makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.” Where are your high places? When have there been theophanies in your life? What does it look like for you to choose to rejoice?

Rejoice

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.” – Philippians 4:4

If one word could sum up the book of Philippians, it would probably be “rejoice.” In this book, the words for joy and rejoicing appear sixteen times in only 104 verses. Yet Paul is writing from imprisonment, a forced shelter-in-place (with the possible outcome of death). 

The dictionary defines “rejoice” as “to feel or show great joy or delight.” It isn’t merely joy, but the feeling of joy and gladness, the rising of it up to the surface such that it can be perceived by others. What feeling have you most displayed during your shelter-in-place? What would the people living with you say rises most to the surface? Would it be frustration, grumbling, weariness, complaint—or joy?

What does Paul rejoice in? He rejoices in other people who share the gospel (1:5), grow in faith (1:25), have the mind of Christ (2:2) and reunite with each other (2:28). He rejoices in Jesus who is proclaimed (1:18), who provides deliverance (1:19), who gives meaning to everything in life (2:16). Most frequently, he rejoices in the Lord (3:1; 4:4, 10). Nothing that Paul rejoices in is fixed in his circumstances; it is rather—as he repeatedly emphasizes—fixed in the Lord. He commands us in a present-tense, ongoing imperative: find and show your joy in the Lord. Find and show your joy in how the Lord works in and through other people.

Paul speaks in this book about a God to whom he can constantly pray. Who is sure to complete the good work he begins in us. Who fills us with the fruit of righteousness. Who gave up everything he had for us, who made us his own, who is of surpassing worth to know, who supplies every need of ours, through whom we can do all things. Whom he cannot wait to leave life and be with. If I truly grasped these things, would not my joy in this God be evident to all? Would I not say, like Habakkuk:

“Though the fig tree should not blossom,

   nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

   and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

   and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord;

   I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

God, the Lord, is my strength;

   he makes my feet like the deer’s;

   he makes me tread on my high places.”

From Thirst To Rivers

“On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” – John 7:37-39

During the Festival of Booths (Deuteronomy 16:13, Numbers 29:12), there was a ceremony of water-pouring that, though never recorded in the Bible, is well-documented historically: at dawn on the first seven days of the festival, a priest would lead a procession down to the pool of Siloam, where a golden pitcher was filled with water. The procession returned to the temple as the morning sacrifice was being offered, and the water was poured out at the altar as the temple choir began to sing the Great Hallel (Psalms 113-118). The ceremony was not enacted on the eighth day. It is among a crowded throng of thirsty pilgrims, after enactment of God’s past provision and their continued need, that Jesus makes this proclamation, the same one he made to a solitary Gentile woman by a well (4:14).

Jesus gives us the living water of eternal life. But he doesn’t go on to say, “into” our hearts will flow living water. That would be the logical conclusion. The movement is in the opposite direction: “out of” our hearts flow rivers. No one knows for sure what Jesus is quoting here, but one possible reference is Ezekiel 47, where we see water flowing from the temple, first ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then waist-deep, then becoming a river that one cannot pass through. A river deep enough to swim in, that gives life wherever it goes, on whose banks are trees with leaves that do not wither and fruit for healing. We see similar imagery in Revelation 22, where the “river of the water of life, bright as crystal” flows from the throne of God through the city with the tree of life on its banks. 

And so, this is not just water-talk, but temple-talk. Jesus is God tabernacling on earth; the Spirit flows like the river, received after Jesus was “glorified.” “Throughout John’s gospel,” writes N.T. Wright, “there is a build-up towards the ‘glorification,’ the ‘lifting up,’ of Jesus—which turns out to be, with heavy paradox, the crucifixion of Jesus seen as the moment when his glory is fully and finally revealed, when the love of God which was always at work in him shines out most fully.” We are filled with the Spirit not for our own sake, but for the sake of spreading God’s glory and life into the wider world. This is a feast not only of celebration, but of vocation. After all, that was the ceremony: the filling in, the pouring out. We drink not to become lakes, but rivers, until “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).