I read Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew about 20 years ago and loved it. Keith read both that and Disappointment with God and was so happy with the latter that the church soon after had a class based upon it. So I came into this book expecting wonderful things. Unfortunately, this one doesn't match up, at least for me.
When you study the history of the Israelites as they leave Egypt, led by Moses, it takes only a little thought to realize why they had so much trouble. For 400 years or more they had no direct contact with God. In Egypt they saw a culture with tangible gods (idols, often of calves) every day. That is what they grew up with and so, expected from their own God. No one had taught them otherwise, except perhaps a few whose families kept the old stories of the patriarchs alive, like Amram and Jochebed who successfully taught their own children. But by and large, when Aaron fashioned the golden calf and told them that this was the god who brought them out of Egypt, that was far easier for them to understand than a God who only showed Himself in frightening thunder and lightning, and cloudy or fiery pillars. They had to be taught that God was not a tangible being, and that was the reason for the second commandment, "You shall have no graven images before me."
And so today, we Christians will often fall into the same trap. "I can't see God in my life, so He must not be there." Nonsense. One just has to learn how to see Him, just like those ancient people had to, and sometimes we fail as miserably as they did. So I expected this to be a book that helped with doubt primarily, and spiritual vision as an answer to it. That is not what I got. This book seemed like a group of people sitting around nursing their mocha lattes while discussing personal experiences and interesting questions, with no real practical help given at all. It barely hung together, and that like a patchwork quilt without even a color scheme. It was repetitive and somewhat boring. Frankly, Os Guinness's God in the Dark was much more helpful to me. After 100 pages in Yancey's book, I gave up and put it back on the shelf.
If you still want to give it a try, Reaching for the Invisible God is available all over the internet.
Dene Ward
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