In our human experience it may sometimes seem that God is the absent player in our drama. We have some trouble or difficulty, and we perhaps even ask for it to be removed, but it keeps on and we deduce that the Lord isn’t especially interested.

Then we project this mind-set onto the world’s stage, and wonder why God didn’t step in to rescue the boy scouts in Iowa, or the people that suffered from the typhoon in Burma and from the earthquake in China. Or for that matter, for many, why doesn’t God seem to be holding down our utility bills, rather than our income?

It is not easy to assure someone who has habituated himself to this mindset that the Lord indeed knows our situation, that He knows our discomforts and He cares for us.

Yet if we turn to the Scriptures, there we see God as the active player in the human drama. Now the roles are reversed, because God is the Prime Mover, the Creator of the universe, and moreover, God has demands He makes upon the human players.

In the Garden of Eden account, it is the human Adam who is effectively absent, having received a command from God, but seeing his companion being seduced into breaking it, and doing nothing about it at all until he himself joins in the transgression.

From God’s point of view, it was as if Adam were absent. And the Scriptural account continues all the way, with God being the active player, trying to engage humanity, and through Jesus the Christ eventually succeeding in doing so, though not without resistance from the generality of mankind at every conceivable turn.

God appeals in Exodus 19:3-6 to what the Israelites have seen. He directs Moses to say to them: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” It was on that basis of an active presence, and their acknowledgment of it, that God established His covenant relationship with them.

God promises, ‘You shall be My own possession among all peoples’; but such promises are always predicated upon the people’s effective presence to God. That is why the words “If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant” are inserted as the qualifier of the promise. If the people do not remain effectively present to God, a presence that is verifiable by their obedient attention to His will, then His promise becomes effectively invisible to them.

S. Matthew 9:35 - 10:23 shows Jesus in His typical role as the Prime Mover of His mission on earth, among the cities and villages of the land as He first went through them all Himself and then sent His disciples out as apostles of the Gospel, giving them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction.

That mission begins locally to what He calls the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and then it seems finally to be extended as a forecast of the apostolic mission after His Ascension, going throughout the whole earth and involving bearing witness before governors and kings and the Gentiles.

That becomes the continuing mission of the Church today in which we too have our part to play. The Gospel shows that it is part of the human drama that was initiated by the Son of God, and is to remain as being conducted in His love and in His Spirit.

So whenever we are tempted, and it is a temptation, to conclude that God is effectively absent in our human drama, whatever that may be at the time, it is well for us to take a little time off and read the powerful Scriptures that God has bequeathed to us and see in them through the power of the Holy Spirit the record of the One who is truly active and the Prime Mover, God Himself.

A modern church catechism says this: Christianity is the religion of the “Word” of God, a word which is “not a written and mute word, but the Word is incarnate and living”. If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, open our minds to understand the Scriptures.

As our minds are opened we will come to understand that the unspiritual complaints of our human experience are deeply flawed and wrong: that far from God being absent from us it is more likely we who are being absent from God: and that He, and not we at all, is the Prime Mover: and that following Him through Christ, His paths may indeed be seen and will prove to be our salvation.

For commentary, information and devotional material see www.churchofenglandcayman.com and www.anglicansatprayer.org