Reaching Out After God


Oh that I knew where I might find Him!--Job 23: 3.

This cry was uttered by Job when he was groaning under the stroke of adversity and affliction, bewildered by what was happening to him, puzzled over the brutality and injustice of life.

Everywhere today men and women are harassed by fears, perturbed and bewildered by what is happening to them and in the world, and from their hearts an instinctive cry is going up to God.

We hear concern expressed over the indifference of our generation toward religion. And yet, in spite of this seeming indifference, there is in the hearts of our generation a yearning after God. If you could hear the silent cry in their souls, you’d hear the old cry, Oh that I knew where I might find Him!

Many people who appear to be irreligious and wholly worldly-minded, think of God more often than we imagine. It is true of them as Gamaliel Bradford wrote of himself in the little poem: “I think about God, Yet I talk of small matters. Isn’t it odd How my idle tongue chatters? Of quarrelsome neighbors, Fine weather and rain, Indifferent labors, Indifferent pain, Some trivial style--Fashion shifts with a nod . . . And yet all the while I am thinking of God.”

Belief in God arises from the sense of dissatisfaction and guilt, the sense of need, the sense of communion and aspiration. We have all felt something of that. Perhaps it was in the sunset hour when day was dying in the west; or in the starlit night when the eyes of a thousand stars looked down on us; or as we listened to some great symphony of music which lifted us out of ourselves and made our spirits transcend the bounds of time and space; or in an hour of calamity when we stood stunned and speechless; or as we stood by the cradle of a newborn babe or the bedside of a dying saint, and the breath of another world fanned our cheek. Certainly, at one time or another, we have all felt the truth of Augustine’s words, “Thou has made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

The words of David express the reaching out of the human heart after God: “Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I call unto Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed” (Ps. 61:1-2).