When Did We Stop HEARING God?

So, if God regularly speaks and the problem actually is that our receiver doesn’t pick him up, when and how did this problem occur? Judeo-Christian tradition offers us some interesting answers. Most people don’t pick up on these because they get hung up on peripheral issues.
For instance when they read the first eleven chapters of Genesis (the first book of the Torah and of the Hebrew/Christian Bible), they get hung up on questions like, how big was Noah’s flood (did it ever actually occur), which animals and how many could fit on the ark? What language did they originally speak at Babel? When did this all occur? And so forth.
They miss the real thrust of chapters 3 through 11 of Genesis. These chapters are essentially a study in LOSS OF COMMUNICATION, a step by step analysis of how men lost the ability to communicate—with God, with nature and with each other.
Read as such, they become a fascinating study in downward mobility. In evaluating these chapters, one must remember a key psychological fact: what you cannot communicate with or understand becomes immediately frightening. Think of how you react when a parent, a boss or a mate says NOTHING, and you have no idea what they are thinking or what’s going on.
If they would just say something! But if we are left without a clue, most of us will assume the worst and become frustrated and, if only secretly, scared. Let’s watch this happen in Genesis. Start with chapter 3—Adam violates a direct order. He hears God coming toward him. He and Eve hide (v.8). He admits that he did so because he was afraid (v.10).
You don’t hide from—avoid—people you are in good rapport with. Communication has been lost. Adam has violated orders and is too busy blaming Eve to make the situation better. The receiver is broken at this point. The breakdown goes on.
Adam has been tending the “Garden of God” for what may have been a considerable period of time. We gather that this was a “no sweat” operation because in verse 17 he is told that he will hereafter get food from it “by the sweat of his brow,” “with toil”, and even the earth will seem “cursed” as he struggles to get his food.
I used to wonder how on earth Adam kept weeds and crabgrass out of his garden spaces without arduous work with rake and hoe. Or without poisonous chemicals. It struck me suddenly that the only possible way was with some kind of very basic communication. He could literally tell the weed to grow here—not there.
(We have discovered that plants will react positively to being spoken to. I remember a friend telling me how a large plant she had on an end table fell over for no apparent reason on a guest she did not like. It is not inconceivable that rudimentary communication was once possible.)
That communication was also lost. Now gardening and farming become hard labor. Man is tossed out of the Garden and no further reference is made to Adam ever again hearing the voice of God. A descendent named Enoch did, but that was considered highly unusual already then.
Next he loses the ability to communicate with beasts. In chapter 7, Noah is able to gather a great variety of animals together to load them on his boat. He is able to walk them aboard and keep order among them throughout the flood period. He is able to lead them off the boat.
Verse 2 of chapter 9 tells us that, after the flood, “from now on the animals with go in fear and dread of man.” (This morning a squirrel climbed up my slider frame after some bird suet. I tried gently to tell him to go back down—he didn’t understand me a bit and ran for hundreds of feet.) Even lions and tigers fear us—they just tend to kill what they fear. There’s no way to communicate.
In chapter 11, at Babel, the final nail is driven into the coffin of communication. One day as I was reading the passage, it suddenly struck me that the issue here isn’t that everybody went in speaking, let’s say, Sanscrit—and they all came out jabbering away in French, Italian or Swahili.
That’s not the point here. Not at all. As a kid I worked for weeks with a volatile Puerto Rican chap who spoke no English and I spoke no Spanish. Most English speakers were afraid to work with him; he could get violent. I went in patient (a bit nervous) and made extensive use of the four or five word we did share. We got along very well as long as I worked with him. The mere differences in external speech did not keep us from working together perfectly easily.
The issue of Babel isn’t DIFFERENT languages. Verse 7 says God “confused their languages.” That very thing happens between husbands and wives today—even when, ostensibly, they both speak English. Ever have your mate yell, “I’m NOT a mind reader!”?
That’s what went down at Babel. A confusion of speech—so that even though you heard the words you didn’t get the other person’s point. Nothing produces more anger or suspicion than the feeling that the other person is saying one thing while he or she insists they are saying something else. Or if you aren’t sure at all what they are saying.
I’m not immediately suspicious, doubtful or suspicious of someone who speaks Italian, Arabic or Chinese. But I can become paranoid over someone who speaks in English words but I don’t have any idea what he’s thinking or what he really means.
Without knowing what the other person is thinking, real communication is impossible. For thousands of years, men have lived in a world where the only people they felt they could trust were the family and villagers with whom they were raised—and even then, one could never be totally certain.
The receiver is broken. Genesis 3 through 11 tells us we have lost the ability to understand God, to make plants hear us, to understand the beasts and have them understand us, or to communicate in any deep way with our fellows.
We are isolated atoms for whom, essentially the only truth is the one spoken so despairingly by Descarte—“I know I think, therefore I know I exist”—but I cannot know the reality of anything else. The “Cogito Ergo Sum” is a cry of utter loneliness.
Descarte, to assuage his despair, turned to the notion of a God who affirmed his existence outside of the narrow reality Descarte could apprehend. We are all in his situation. But most of us are never able to hear the affirmation. The receiver is broken.
That is why God offers us a way to hear him—and hear his proof that we not only exist, but that there is a reality outside of ourselves that can be trusted. Tomorrow we’ll talk about how we can do that.