The Big Question
The Big Question
Genesis 3:9
But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”
The divine irony here is scintillating, friend, and it’s as if God turns what philosophers call ‘the problem of pain’ on its head. “God, where are you?” is the question we’ve all asked amidst our anguish—and even our Lord cried it out during His darkest hour at Calvary—but it’s a question the Father first asked of us in His. See, Adam and Eve may have felt the shame of their nakedness, and they may have hurried to patch up their prodigality in leafy penance, and they may have feared God’s footsteps in the distance and fled for cover, but, somehow, He felt the loss and the separation and the sting of sin as well. Though He knew exactly where they were, and though He planned for their redemption already, His heart was wounded, bleeding from their betrayal, and His question here of “Man, where areyou?” feels as gut-wrenchingly real as it is rhetorical.
How sobering to think that the two darkest days in world history—the day of the fall and the Day of Atonement—are both marked by God asking this same question. I pray our day today won’t follow suit.