My Dad sent me an email with a Mike Yaconelli quote. I liked it, so here it is (source unknown):
“The nature of God is playful, that is why he hides. God is not only present when we can see him, he is present when we can’t, and joy comes from recognizing God in places we never thought he would be. God hides in difficulty, he hides in suffering, he hides in poverty, he hides in failure, and he hides in the stories of our lives. Whatever our circumstance whatever the status of our lives, God is present–invisible, hiding, waiting for us to discover him, waiting for us to learn from him in the shadows as well as the light.”
Mike died last October 29 in a vehicle accident. Quotes like the above were commonplace and a source of constant challenge to me during the years when The Wittenburg Door was published by Youth Specialities.
I’ve always been a fan of the Wittenburg Door and Yaconelli. But the phrase “the nature of God is playful” strikes me as fairly shallow and narrow-minded. Tell someone who is hungry or suffering that God’s nature is “playful” – just doesn’t hold water to me, and reminds me of the “pop” Christian spirituality that often fills the bookshelves of most Christian bookstores – “if it feels good it must be God”. God is “deep calling to deep” within the joys and sufferings of this life.
Todd Rundgren is one of my favorite musicians. This notion reminds me of the viewpoint of one of his songs:
“God’s love is in disguise, and all we want is sweet lies.”
It’s not a viewpoint I necessarily agree with, but it is one that is more prevalent in our churches than it should be.
I’m not so sure about the nature of God being “playful.” I feel a lot more comfortable with the holy nature of God and with his merciful and gracious, but just, dealings toward men.
Maybe it is just the shallowness (as Chuck says), but I think it is also disrespectful to make God’s actions as meaningless and undirected as our own earthly games. I cannot think of any games that would be the least bit enjoyable for an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God. It also plays havoc with the idea presented in Romans 8:28–30 that God has planned from the beginning how he will glorify himself through the sanctification of believers.
But God does hide. The Psalms speak of this in many places. In my cursory look He hides in judgement of the unrighteous, trials of the godly, forgiveness to the godly and mercy to the wicked.
And in another sense, as David presents in Psalm 139, God is everywhere. An omnipresent God cannot be hidden, and we cannot hide from an omniscient God.
I was looking around for the source for your “The nature of God is playful…” quote. It appears that the website is out of commssion right now, but the google cache still works. Sermon notes for July 28, 2002, apparently from a Pastor Pete of Wilmot Centre Missionary Church, which is located in Petersburg, Ontario, Canada.