The Bible describes this rebellion against God as follows: “They put the Lord to the proof by saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’” (Ex. 17:7) The issue then. . .God has to submit to experiment. He is “tested,” just as products are tested. He must submit to the conditions that we say are necessary if we are to reach certainty. If he doesn’t grant us now the protection he promised in Psalm 91 [1], then he is simply not God. He will have shown his own word, and himself, too, to be false.
We are dealing here with the vast question as to how we can and cannot know God, how we are related to God and how we can lose him. The arrogance that would make God and object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him. For it already implies that we deny God as God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior listening; by no longer acknowledging as real anything but what we can experimentally test and grasp. To think like that is to make oneself God. And to do that is to abase not only God, but the world and oneself too.