Wisdom for Life: A Listening Ear

Proverbs 19:20-23 

Listen to advice, Proverbs tells. An incredibly simple statement. In fact, it is so obvious that it seems completely unnecessary to say, especially in the limited space of the Holy Bible. But I suspect you know why, for even though we know we ought to listen, it is exceedingly hard to truly, fully, completely listen.

And so the wise person will devote every ounce of energy to being a good listener.

• The wise person cultivates their ability to listen.

• The wise person recognizes their deficiencies and seeks to fix them.

• The wise person knows they don’t know everything, especially about the things they think they know the most about.

Listening is so hard because it requires humility. It requires believing that the person you think is wrong or perhaps even a fool still has something to teach you.

And in some ways, listening to the Bible might even be harder. It was written thousands of years ago in a different language, that purports to be the word of God — an incredibly audacious, preposterous, outdated, superstitious point of view. And yet there is something about this book that has drawn people to it for 3,000 years, and they number in the billions. Those who have devoted the most to it have made more impact in history than any other group.

The wise person knows that the voice we are truly trying to hear in these pages — it’s not the apostle Paul or Luke or Matthew or Isaiah or Jeremiah — but what we are really trying to do is to hear the voice of God. And what’s more, this book not only purports to contain the voice of God, but it tells us that a listening ear can hear that voice anytime, any place, in any circumstance.

As Hebrews explains, God speaks in “many and various ways.” God speaks through angels, like with Mary. God speaks through bizarre writing on the wall, as with Daniel. God speaks through burning bushes, as to Moses, and God even speaks directly in an audible voice, like with Samuel. We envy those days in which God communicated so clearly, and we want to know if (or rather how) God still speaks today.In the Bible, God makes somewhat regular use of fantastic creatures to speak to us. In Revelation, these angels have six wings, can fly, and perpetually declare God’s truth. At Jesus’ resurrection, angels speak words of comfort to Mary. But does God still send these angels today?

It is clear that many Christians believe that God sends them special messengers to give them comfort, guidance, and direction. It may be a chance encounter with a stranger who offers a kind word, and since “angel” means messenger, perhaps we can conclude that yes, God does still speak to us through angels.

But if by “angels” we are referring to these six-winged beings that live with God, are not human, and come down to earth to convey divine truth, I am not so sure. It simply does not reflect how I have experienced God or the world in general. There are no stories I have heard that are compelling. I must admit that there is a measure of skepticism in my 21st-century mind.

But I am not the only one. In fact, it is the Bible that tells us to be careful — that we have to be careful not to too quickly believe somebody’s claim that an angel spoke to them.

In Colossians, Paul says, “Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind.” The apostle Paul, who saw a fantastic and incredible vision when Christ struck him blind on the road to Damascus — he’s the one who doubts angels have visited other people.

Does God speak to us in a voice we can hear?

Curiously enough, even in the Bible, which is literally God’s word to us — God speaking to us — there is an acute absence of God’s voice. There are moments in which God not only seemed silent but was silent. In the book of Samuel, we are told, “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”

So, when Samuel was lying down in the temple near the Ark and he heard a voice call his name, he assumed it was Eli. He went to Eli, only to discover he hadn’t called him. This happens two times more, and finally Eli catches on that God is calling him, so he tells Samuel, “‘Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’”So even though this story is about God speaking, we are first told that this is a rare occurrence. And it was so unexpected that neither Samuel nor Eli knew it was God. But that was in biblical times. What about today?

There’s an old joke: When you talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to you, we call it schizophrenia.

So, while we can accept that God spoke in days of old, we have a much harder time believing it today.We have a hard time believing today because we have seen so many instances throughout history and in our times of people claiming with utter certainty that God has spoken to them.

We want to be open to the idea that God still speaks directly and clearly to individuals. So how precisely do we cultivate a wise listening ear — one that is not so cynical that we disbelieve any potential message from God, but one that is not so foolish that it leaps at every claim?

We find it comes out of the whirlwind. From Job, we learn about the voice of God and how to listen.As you recall, Job has been afflicted by disease, by death of his loved ones, and then afflicted even further by his friends!

For several chapters, his friends try to teach Job what it is that God has to say — their shortsighted, pedantic, and trivial thoughts. His friends speak with utter confidence and conviction concerning God’s thoughts.

And then his friends turn those thoughts — and they turn those beliefs — on to Job in order to condemn him.

Have we all become like Job’s friends? Claiming to know what God wants, what God thinks, what God has to say, but never bothering to truly listen — while explaining to everyone who does not think like us why they are foolish and ignorant troglodytes.But Job is different from his friends. And it is his suffering that has done this.

Job, like you and me, desperately wants to know exactly what God thinks. Job wants the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, or the message from an angel — to know what to do, to know what to believe, to know why his life is so hard.And to truly get a feel for Job’s aching, yearning desire to hear God’s word, you have to sit down and read this book all in one sitting — because only then do you get a full sense of his existential crisis, and how impossibly hard it was for him to not be given an answer.Why, God? Why!!! Why all this suffering? Why all this injustice!!! Why, why, why!!

Then you appreciate not only his deep frustration but how incredibly devastating it must’ve been to have his friends make it even worse by blaming him!!!

So, this frustration builds and builds and builds over chapter after chapter — and that building is a metaphor for the course of our life, for the years and decades that we experience, yearning to know what it is that God has to say to us — yearning, aching, desperate, pleading, praying, exhausted, spent…

…and finally, ready. Ready to listen.

And then, the Bible tells us, “Out of the whirlwind God spoke!”

Essentially, God says, “I am God; you are not. There are things in this world that have nothing to do with you, that you will never understand.”

At that point, Job realizes that he had tried to speak for God rather than listen to what God had to say.

He realizes that the only way to hear is openness, humility, and an unrestrained desire to actually hear what God has to say without inserting the smallest bit of his own will and his own thoughts.And though Job doesn’t learn why — because he can’t, and neither can we — there is something profound that happens, and it changes everything.

Instead of Job continuing to focus on his suffering, his loss, his lack of understanding, and his questions, Job goes to God in prayer not for himself, but to ask that God would be merciful and forgiving to those that had blamed him, condemned him, and shamed him.

In his humility, his willingness to place himself utterly before God, his heart was turned by the voice of God. Amen.