God gone silent
By Peter Leithart, First Things.
God’s advent is accompanied by great noise. He walks in Eden “in the Spirit of the day,” and descends to Sinai with a trumpet blast. To Ezekiel, his voice is the clamor of many waters. When he appears in Revelation, Jesus roars like a lion. As the Psalm puts it, “The voice of Yahweh is upon the waters; the God of glory thunders. The voice of Yahweh is powerful, the voice of Yahweh is majestic. The voice of Yahweh breaks the cedars; Yahweh breaks the cedars of Lebanon. . . . The voice of Yahweh shakes the wilderness . . . the voice of Yahweh makes the deer to calve and strips the forests bare.” God is boundless Life, and for that reason he is boundless Sound, the infinite polyphony of Father, Son, and Spirit.
Creation too begins in sound. Out of the darkness, the God who is eternal Word breathes out a “Let there be,” and there is a heavens and earth. Every last thing that exists is a residue of the Creator’s joyous creative shout. All creation echoes the Creator’s voice. Waves crash, streams burble, winds whistle and whisper and growl, lightning sizzles, planets harmonize in the music of the spheres. At the climax of creation, God forms a creature in his image and likeness, who not only can bellow and screech and bark and mew and sing, but can, like his Creator, shape breath into speech.
Then: Death invades this world of resounding praise. By one man’s sin, death enters the world, and silence through death, and so silence spreads to all men. The “wicked are silenced in darkness” (1 Sam. 2:9). Silence is the gravestone marking a once-great city, judged for its sin—no voice of joy or voice of gladness, no voice of the millstone, no voice of the bridegroom, no voice of the bride.
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