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[silence] This is Glendale Presbyterian Church, People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman, entitled "On Hiding in the Deep, Deep Darkness of God."

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This is the fourth in the Lenten series called "The Kindnesses of Calvary." When the voice stops on this side, please turn the cassette over immediately for the remainder of the message. This tape is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any public or commercial use, in full or in part, requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Thielman.

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The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourself or others is heartily encouraged. If you would like a catalog listing titles of other sermons available, please write to People Moving Power at the address on this cassette. [music]

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Let us continue in our worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the Gospel according to Mark, the 15th chapter, beginning our reading with the 33rd verse. "And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

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And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?'" which means, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" "And some of the bystanders, hearing it said, 'Behold, he is calling Elijah.'" And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his Word.

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Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. This morning I would like to talk with you about hiding in the deep, deep darkness of God. It may seem somehow strange to you that I would speak of darkness and of God in the same sentence.

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After all, does Scripture not say, "God is light and in him is no darkness at all"? And isn't the ringing affirmation of Paul, "He has rescued us out of the darkness and into his infinite light"? Yes, there is no doubt about it. Scripture most often speaks of God in terms of light.

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But I submit to you that it is quite appropriate to think of God also in terms of darkness. The psalmist, you will remember, says that the darkness does not hide us from God. And he concludes that statement with this thought, "The darkness and the light are both alike to God." Or more particularly, do you remember that great scene in the 20th chapter of the book of Exodus,

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in which Moses has received from the hands of God the Ten Commandments? And following this goes into counsel with the Almighty. And the Scriptures read, "The people stood afar off, but Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was." The thick darkness where God was.

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It seems to me that we can speak of God in the darkness just as we can speak of him in the light. And I would ask you to see him in those terms this morning. I would ask you to see him coming to Calvary, surrounding the cross on which his own son was dying,

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with shadow, with darkness, with that which would screen the agony of his son from all those who stood about watching. We are at that moment in the crucifixion when the heaviest burden was upon Jesus. You know, occasionally when we meet people who are in the midst of great physical suffering,

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we will say to them, "I wish I could bear part of your pain for you." Now, I have no doubt that we are quite sincere when we say that. But let's face the fact that when we say that, we are running no risk. There is, you see, no way in which we can bear the physical pain of another.

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There is no way in which that can be transferred to us. We can make that statement then without any anxiety that anyone will be able to successfully take us up on it. But when Jesus said that he was willing to take upon himself the burden of a whole world's pain, he could do it.

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And not only could he do it, he did do it. And the moment on the cross which we encounter this morning is that moment when the intensity of the physical suffering was at its greatest, and the intensity of the spiritual suffering at its peak as well.

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And in that awful moment, precisely at that time, God chose to surround the scene with a deep, deep darkness. It was, I think, a great kindness by the Almighty to make sure that no one would be able to go home from Calvary that day and say,

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"I saw it all." There are arguments over how God accomplished this. Some say it was an eclipse of the sun. That is completely impossible.

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Passover was set by the phases of the moon, and Passover had only been at that time of the year, and the phase of the moon at the time of Passover was exactly the opposite of that which is required for an eclipse.

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It could not have been an eclipse. It is more likely that it was a sorocco. That is the name given to a strong, stormy wind which blows out of the southeast and comes upon Jerusalem very suddenly.

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It's a dark and an ominous thing, especially common in the springtime, and it makes no difference how many times you have seen it. It is still quite awesome to behold. This is probably what occurred at precisely this moment,

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but the how of it, you see, is not really important. What is important is this, that at the moment when his son was paying the greatest price, God made sure that the prying eyes of those who put him there would not be able to see it. He covered the scene with the shadow of his wings.

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I suppose that those who stood there that day and saw the darkness descend were filled with fear. It is a frightening thing to see all the light run out of the sky, to see the day, as it were, bleed out through that wound, ripped into the sky by the rising clouds,

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and to see all the veins of blue suddenly seeping nothing but darkness. But for God and his son, that spectacle was not one of fright. It was an expression of the loving kindness of a father for his only begotten. He hid Jesus in his deep, deep darkness.

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There are some, you know, who say that God was not present on Calvary, but that as his son entered into suffering, he separated himself from his son and thus, in fact, made the suffering worse. There's a little book called "Beavis, the Story of a Boy"

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in which there's a scene in which the lad is looking through an old Bible and he comes upon a scene depicting the cross, a particularly grisly portrayal of the crucifixion. And he looks at it for a long time and then he turns the page,

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and as he turns it, he says, "If God had been there, he would not have let it happen." Well, there are a lot of people who built a whole theology out of exactly that kind of thinking. I don't believe that's true. I prefer instead to think of that scene in terms of that magnificent painting

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which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. Here is Christ upon the cross and in the background, nothing but dark and swirling clouds, but if you look at those clouds, you can discern in them

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the very hurting countenance of God, and his arms are reaching forth to touch his Son. That's the way it was in that deep, deep darkness. A Father blessing with kindness his suffering Son.

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And as God came to Christ in the deep darkness of his suffering, so God comes to all of us in the deep darkness of our suffering. We all know suffering. There are times in each and every one of our lives

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when everything seems to be tumbling in. There are times when, to use Paul Tournier's phrase, we, for a little while at least, forget God's address. The comforting thing in that circumstance is to know that God never forgets ours.

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I have a minister friend who was calling on someone terminally ill, and they were not bearing their pain well, and they knew it, and they cried out to the pastor, "Oh, I wish that my faith was strong enough to give me greater confidence

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and greater courage and greater patience now." And my minister friend said what I think was a very wise thing. He said, "You have labored all of your life to carry the faith, have you not?" The patient said, "Yes, that is true."

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Then he said, "Isn't it about time that you let the faith carry you?" And that's not just a clever phrase, a very cynical shifting of emphasis, not at all. That's the affirmation of what is a solemn truth, that at the moment of hurt, when our faith in God may be shaken,

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God's faith in us stands sure. And in the moment of darkness, when we feel most alone, he is drawing most close. I can think of countless illustrations of this out of my own ministry.

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I've had before my mind's eye most of this week a woman named Kathy Cook. She was an older lady in the congregation which I served in the East before coming to Glendale. And she was one of those who taught a lot of things to a young pastor,

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a good illustration of what I believe to be an absolute fact that congregations teach their pastors much more than the pastors are ever able to teach their people. She was dying and I was sitting with her husband Wilfred

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and he was especially confused and lost. He was so dependent upon her in life. The prospect of going on without her was just more than his mind could begin to take hold of.

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It was like a great tide, you see, was carrying her away, and we fought the tide for a while, but there was no way it could be fought any longer, and she was gradually being taken, and there was nothing that could be done.

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And then suddenly, in the midst of this experience, rising almost like a person coming up from being submerged in water, she came toward consciousness and she began to speak and we heard her voice as if it was a long distance away.

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And even in the midst of that terrible circumstance, there was a kind of radiance about her. The first thing that she said was, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow, thou art with me,"

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affirming, you see, that God was there in the darkness with her. And then she said, "Wilfred," that was her husband's name, she did not look toward him. Maybe she was not even conscious of the fact that he was there,

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but she addressed him still, "Wilfred." Absent from the body, is present with the Lord. And then immediately beyond that, she said, and I don't know to whom she addressed these words,

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although I've addressed them to thousands of people in her name since, and I don't even know if the words are hers or if she heard them somewhere else and was just repeating them now, but she said, "I would rather walk with my father in darkness

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than with anyone else in the light." She was experiencing, you see, exactly what Jesus knew. In the time of the deep suffering, still meaningfulness because not alone. The suffering would pass, but the fellowship of God that was there,

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that would continue, that could never be taken away, and I submit to you, it's a very beautiful thing to hide in the deep darkness of suffering with a God like that. But the plain fact of the matter is that not all Christians seem to be able to claim the presence of God in suffering.

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You have known individuals, I am sure, who in the midst of hardship have a faith that is ringing and triumphant, and other people seem to be overtaken by their fears and anxieties. Why is it that some people seem to feel and to hear and to know God in darkness

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while other people do not? Well, there are probably many answers to that question, but I think the one which is basic is this. The individual who best knows God in the darkness of suffering

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is the one who has most frequently known God in the darkness of devotion. I use the word "darkness" to describe devotion because darkness seems to me to be a time which more encourages devotion. I find my prayers at least seemingly more meaningful to me

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when they are at the dawn of the day or at the dusk or in the evening. It is difficult for me to pray at high noon. I prefer the sanctuary of the church which is somehow dim and shadowed and perhaps only colored by that light which filters through stained glass.

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In this dimness I have a sense of the mysterium tremendum. And that's what I mean when I speak of the darkness of devotion. Those who have spent time in prayer and the study of the Scriptures, who have become familiar with the voice of God,

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who have become familiar with the touch of God, who are able to discern even the slightest movement of the Spirit of God in their lives, these are the ones who, when they get into the darkness of suffering, know his presence and can rejoice in it and be empowered and enabled by it.

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Dr. John Miller is a medical missionary in Central Africa. He was at Lake Munkamba with his family, and one night he left his house to go to the bathroom. They have no indoor plumbing at Lake Munkamba,

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and he went to the little shed set aside for bathroom purposes out behind their house. And he was seated there in the pitch blackness of an African night, and there's nothing darker anywhere. And as he sat there thinking of nothing in particular,

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he heard a very soft scratching sound as if something were being drawn across the rough wood of the shed. And as he heard it, he became very still, first thinking about the sound.

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Then suddenly he knew what the sound was. For in the darkness, he felt moving along his leg and up into his lap, a snake. He was at first overtaken with fear as this snake began to move across him.

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But he then did what he'd done so many times before. He addressed God in prayer. He'd studied the posture of prayer. He'd studied the attitudes of prayer.

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He had learned to focus on the Almighty. He had stored within himself sufficient fellowship experiences with God and an intensity of devotion. He had spent so many times, so many hours in the darkness of meditation upon God

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and the things of God that he could now, in the darkness of this moment of intense anxiety and in the midst of an African night, he could right then tune himself into God. And he sat there in perfect stillness, thinking about God.

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He was aware of the presence of the serpent, but only on the edge of his consciousness. He felt that snake move and finally leave. And he continued in his prayer until finally he brought himself again to the moment where they were. And he leaped through the door of the shed out into the night,

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got members of his family, and they came with flashlights. And they killed in that shed an eight-foot black mamba. And the mamba is the most vicious and one of the three deadliest snakes on the face of the earth. Remember walking past a glass case in which one had been kept for eight months

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at a hospital in Africa, and every time you would walk by, after eight months that snake would still strike the glass, after eight months. The summer I was there, 27 people had been bitten by mambas and out of 27, 27 had died. This man, in the midst of that circumstance, a mamba in his lap, could so focus on God that he was composed.

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This not only has to do with prayer, it has to do also with the reading of Scripture. Scripture's primary purpose is to reveal to us God, and also to be stored within us to use in times of need. Scripture is not principally designed as a tool for witnessing to others.

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You study the life of Jesus and you will discover that Jesus very rarely quoted the Bible to other people. The only ones to whom he quoted it were the devil and Pharisees, and they were very closely related. Now just so, the Bible should be to us what it was to him, that which we store ourselves full of for the times of our great need.

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I remember, like it was yesterday, the second time I came to Glendale to meet with the pulpit committee of this church. I made the mistake of saying to one of the members of the committee who was to take me back to the Los Angeles International Airport,

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"Could you show me a few sites along the way?" Well, I don't think there's a site in Southern California with which he is unfamiliar, and he decided to show me every one of them before we got to the airport. And as a result, we literally hit that airport at a full run,

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carrying the bags, no time to check them in, ran all those long hallways, and I'm sure we were getting on an airplane which was as far away from the front door as any airplane could be, and literally I threw those bags through the door of that plane as they were closing it and stepped onto that aircraft.

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I was so out of breath, my heart was pounding, I stumbled to my seat and sat down and I could not get myself together. I was wringing wet with sweat. I was in a complete turmoil. I'm one of these people who can get on an airplane and fall asleep just like that.

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And this was one of those red-eye specials, overnight flights back to the East Coast. But I couldn't go to sleep. I was just in a complete toss inside. So I began to rehearse in my mind promises of Scripture with which I had been filling myself for years. And then, because things mean more to me when I not only think them but also say them,

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I began to say them out loud, which must have led some of the people around me to think strange thoughts. But nonetheless, there I was, and I began to say these verses, and as I did, I fell asleep. And I slept like a baby all the way across the country, and when we landed in Pittsburgh the next morning, I got up and, strange to say,

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not only was I completely rested and ready for a full day of ministry there, but all of the questions and the anxieties which had been arising in my mind over my visits here to Glendale had somehow been solved. They were eliminated. They were taken away.

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And I was completely at ease. Now, I would submit to you that this process of prayer and meditation upon Scripture is what enables us to know God in the time of hardship. Discovering him in the darkness of devotion makes him all the more available

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in the times of the darkness of suffering. We have many books on our book table and many tapes in our tape ministry which are designed to help you with just that kind of thing. I hope you'll look at them as you build within yourself that kind of communion,

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a communion which will not only strengthen you in times of suffering, but even in the time of most intense anxiety, the time of death. You see, when God came upon Calvary in darkness, his son was dying. Now, each of us owes God a death. Make no mistake about that.

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The clock of time is wound but once, and no man has the power to know just when that clock will stop, at late or early hour, but that clock will stop. Each and every one of us owes God a death. But the Christian has much less anxiety about death than the non-Christian

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for the Christian, you see, has experienced God in the darkness. Now, that's not just a matter of opinion on my part. That's a statistical fact. The School of Psychology at Fuller Seminary has recently completed a series of studies in which they used a film which was produced by them which depicts a man's actual dying.

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This is no actor. There's nothing phony about this film at all. This was a man with terminal cancer and photographs were taken of him and interviews were conducted with him across all of the process of his dying. Hours and hours and hours of film, then reduced to a brief presentation.

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And when you see this film, this man, quite literally, dies before your very eyes. And they showed that picture. And then they assessed by various means of study, both electrical and in terms of other responses, the way people responded to that film. They expected to find that the Christian could confront it much more effectively than the non-Christian.

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And they did find that. But what amazed even them was that there was such a wide difference between the confidence of the believer and the fear and the anxiety of the unbeliever. Far wider than they had ever imagined it would be. The Christian, you see, does not deny the reality of death. He affirms it.

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He understands it to be the terrible thing that it is. Death is the fruit of sin. And there's nothing beautiful about death. There's nothing beautiful about death. But the Christian knows that in the process of dying, he is with God. And the Christian understands himself to be in the deep, deep darkness of his dying

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with the God who comes, oft times, in deep, deep darkness. I'm a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. And I came across a story concerning him just a few days ago, which I've since authenticated, which I'd never heard before. It was in the last year of the Civil War. He was visiting in a military hospital in Washington, D.C.

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And he came to the bed of a soldier lad who was dying. And he went up to the boy and he said, "Is there anything I can do for you?" Now, the boy was somewhat confused in his thinking and did not know that this was the President of the United States. And so he responded by saying, "Yes, there is. I'd like to write a letter to my mother, but I can't write.

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Would you write it for me? I'll tell you what to say." Members of Lincoln's staff crowded in. They were going to take the task, but Lincoln waved them back. And he took a pencil and a paper. And that great hand, which was used to the haft of the axe, and now was upon the wheel of the ship of state,

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that great hand, took a stub of a pencil and on a piece of paper took down every word the boy told him to write. And when he was done, the boy said, "Now, would you sign it so that my mother will know who was kind enough to take this letter for me? And then I'll sign it too." So Lincoln wrote his name, and then he gave it to the boy to sign, and it was when the boy looked at his signature on the paper

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that he realized who had written the letter, and he was immediately embarrassed. "Oh, sir, I wouldn't." And Lincoln said, "I am with you. I will do whatever you want me to do. Is there anything else?" And the boy, made more confident by this act of this great, great man, said, "Yes, sir. Would you stay with me till I cross over?" And Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, probably the greatest president that we have ever known,

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and perhaps the greatest man our nation has ever produced, took a chair and sat down, taking the frail white hand of the boy in his great browned hand, and he held it hour after hour after hour. And when the boy was gone, he folded the lad's hands and then went quietly away. Now, it's not difficult for us to imagine a man like Abraham Lincoln doing that.

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Is it then hard for us, as Christians who know the love of God, to imagine how our God comes upon us and strengthens us in the time of our dying? When Jesus said there on the cross, in the midst of the darkness, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" That was not a cry of separation from his Father. That was the first verse of a psalm, a psalm so well known to the Jews of that day that all he had to do was mention the first verse

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and every one of its verses would come singing into their minds. And that psalm is an affirmation of confidence and strength in the time of suffering. Jesus was saying, "My God," and leading on to that tremendous ringing assertion of belief in the love of his God, with which that psalm concludes. That's what he was saying as he died in the midst of the shadows cast by the great broad shoulders of the God who at that very moment was putting under him his everlasting arms.

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That's all I want to say. That's all I know to say about the deep, deep darkness of God. Except perhaps to remind you that there was a Scots clergyman named Henry Francis Light who ministered for 24 years at a little church in Devonshire on the coast to a tough congregation of seafaring people. They were rough and difficult to minister to, but for 24 years he did it.

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In 1844 he had a heart attack and every year after that it was necessary for him to be apart from his people for at least three months to keep up enough strength for the other nine months of ministry. Well, during those three months absences dissensions and discords began to rise in the congregation. The choir for whom he had done so much and in which he'd had such special interest, that was the source of the trouble and it soon spread through the church. He felt that he had to resign.

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On his last Sunday, having led his people in the act of Holy Communion, he went down to the bay and sitting on a rock he looked out over the harbor, which was like molten gold for the sun was going down over Dartmoor and the fishing vessels were all anchored for him to see. He took from his pocket a piece of paper and he wrote some lines. He went back to his study and before tea time at five o'clock he finished the lines. Since that time these lines which speak of darkness and of God's presence in the darkness, well they've gone around the world many, many times bringing comfort and strength and peace to those who in the darkness of their circumstance know what it's like to experience the kindness of God.

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I'd like you now to bow your head with me and to make the lines written by this pastor so long ago our prayer as God's people this morning. Abide with me. Fast falls the even tide. The darkness deepens. Lord with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, oh abide with me. I need thy presence every passing hour. What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power? Who like thyself my guide and stay can be? Through cloud and sunshine, oh abide with me. Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes. Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.

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Heaven's morning breaks and earth's vain shadows flee. In life, in death, oh Lord, abide with me. Hear our prayer, oh God of the deep, deep darkness, for we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.