The Surprising God

In Wounds that Heal, Bringing Our Hurts to the Cross ,  Stephen Seamands (Professor at Asbury Theological Seminary) writes that disappointment with God is common to believers who, having experienced trauma, were left wondering, "Where was God?" "Why did God let this terrible thing happen to me?"  Crucifixion   by Emil Nolde (1912) (source:  https://modernistarthistory.blogspot.com/2015/01/22.html ) In helping us understand and deal with these difficult, challenging questions, and the resultant feelings of disappointment with God, Seamands reminds us that  Jesus himself felt disappointment, even abandoned by God. After being suspended [on the cross] for six hours, he finally voiced his disappointment.... He cried out "with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? ' (Mark 15:34). In Aramaic... Jesus was reciting a familiar verse, Psalm 22:1: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" In his bitter cry of dereliction, he made those words his...

And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters . (Genesis 1:2, NASB) How are we to understand this verse? Many commentators note that it has much in common with the creation epics (myths) of the Ancient Near East (ANE). However, Torrance scholar Dr. John McKenna, in his essay "Reading Genesis 1:2," argues that this interpretive approach is inadequate. What follows is quoted from his essay (with minor edits) with permission from John's heirs. Chaos by Aivazovsky (public domain via Wikimedia Commons) The willingness to divorce our understanding of chaos, emptiness, darkness, and the deep of the faces of the waters, with which the Spirit of God is said to ' be brooding' in [Gen. 1:2], belongs to a pre-suppositional framework of thought developed in an epistemological split between Dogmatic and Biblical Theologians in our times, when modern exegesis b...