When God is Silent

 

Suffering 21

 

Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?

Psalm 10.1

           Trouble is bad. What makes trouble worse is when God is silent in our trouble. We are burdened because He has burdened us. We are laden because He had laden us. We are grieved because He has grieved us. We are wounded because He has wounded us. Yet when we pour our heart out before Him, when we place our sorrow before Him and ask Him why, He is silent.

          When it comes to suffering, I could make the argument that the silence of God is harder than the actual suffering itself. The agony of our Saviour during His passion is seen most not in the screamed I thirst, but in the hollow, whispered heartbreak of My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

          If even Jesus struggled with this, if even Jesus – who knew the Scriptures inside and out, who understood the plan of redemption and His own place in it, who had not one speck of sin in His own life – struggled with the silence of God then I should not be surprised to find myself there too.

          Today, I want to offer four thoughts about the silence of God.

          First, I must examine myself to see if the silence of God is caused by my sin.

If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me. (Psalm 66.18) I will hide my face from them… For they are a very froward generation. (Deuteronomy 32.20) Sift your thoughts, decisions, and priorities. Sift the stewardship of your money, your time, and your opportunities. Sift your heart for pride, greed, selfishness, covetousness, and bitterness. As the priests in Israel’s Temple sifted the flour for the meat offerings twelve times, do you sift your heart, beloved. And in your sifting ask God to show you yourself. Search me, O God, and know my heart: Try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, And lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139.23-24)

          Second, know that when God is silent He still comforts. The Holy Spirit still indwells us, and He still fulfills His ministry of comfort. The Word of God is still available to me; the pages of Psalms can still soak up my tears. Now, God may not respond to my desperate plea to understand why, but God still comforts me.

          The truth is in the short term comfort is more needful than explanations. Many years ago, I tried to help my young daughter learn to ride a bike. While it was moving in a straight line she had relatively little trouble, but rounding the first corner she crashed and skinned her knee. As I rushed up I said, “Emma, the problem is centrifugal force. Your center of gravity shifted as your straight line became an arc and…” No. I did none of that. I just held her, wiped away her tears, and helped her mother bandage her knee.

          While I was finishing Bible college, I carefully planned the next few years. I had a girlfriend for whom I cared much. I would propose to her at Christmas of our senior year, and we would marry the following summer. Having finished school, we would get a little apartment and allow our marriage to mature for a year or two. Following that, I would get hired on as an assistant pastor at some large church and we would be on our way.

          When she broke up with me the summer before our senior year it sent me into a four year tail spin. I finished college in a daze. I clung like a drowning man to my busroute. I quit jobs I should have kept and kept jobs I should have quit. I moved in and out of apartments and started and never finished semesters. My prospects of that good staff job went up in smoke. Who hires an unmarried youth pastor? God made no sense. I had oh-so-carefully sought to follow Him; He had led me directly to a cliff and dropped me off. And He was silent.

          …yet in that silence He still comforted me. I remember one particular Valentine’s Day, a horrible time of year in my situation. I was working the afternoon shift at a steel factory. During my 8 PM break I walked outside into the bitter wind and biting snow of a Chicago February and wept. My peers were gathered at the Valentine’s Banquet, enjoying their fiancés and their futures, while I headed into painful oblivion. I remember yelling at God that night as I walked around the block and cried. He answered me nothing. I got no explanation. But He comforted me to the depth of my questioning spirit that night. And it was enough.

          Third, other than when I sin, His silence is proof He is at work.

          This sounds illogical, but it is not. If God – Who is omnipresent, Who encourages me to pray, Who has told me He will never leave me nor forsake me – if that God is silent I have come to realize by way of experience it is for a reason. His silence proves to me He is accomplishing some great purpose; His silence is proof He is at work.

          A moment ago, I referenced the difficult handful of years I lived at the end of college. Curiously enough, I had experienced a similarly bad relationship breakup in high school. Most of my poetry was penned enduring that in high school. As my post-college plans crumbled around me, I reached back to the grief of my high school years. By now, I had come to see and understand why God allowed me to hurt in high school. Clutching that to my heart, I encouraged myself that if God was at work through my sorrow then He must similarly be at work through my sorrow now. And I threw myself in desperate trust at His feet.

          God grows us, beloved, by giving us progressively harder tests. When you are experiencing such a test, remember what you went through last time, how though it seemed God had abandoned you He actually had not. He was silent, then, but He was there and He was at work. Which tells you He is at work now.

          I am forty-nine years of age as of this writing. There have been four specific seasons in my life where God made no sense, where I hurt deeply and He gave me no explanation, where I had sought to follow Him and it had resulted in pain. In all four of those while God was silent He was at work.

          I will need to remind myself of this when the fifth time comes.

          Not only is this borne out by my experience, I find it borne out by other’s experience as well. Many a saint of the Lord has experienced the silence of God.

 While C. S. Lewis’ wife lay dying he wrote, “Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

          Adoniram Judson gave up everything to travel to Burma as a missionary. When war broke out between England and Burma in 1824, the American Judson was imprisoned as an English spy. He was tortured for an entire year, and was so shaken by the experience he contemplated suicide. Then he received word his wife had died, followed soon after by the death of his young daughter. Released, he tried to process it via hard work, but eventually he gave up his mission. He built a hut in the Burmese jungle, dug an open grave, and sat by that grave hour after hour in the grips of a fierce depression. In a letter to his dead wife’s parents he wrote, “Have either of you learned the art of real communion with God, and can you teach me the first principles? God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him, but I find him not.”

          Joseph, in prison, hurled questions at heavens that seemed made of brass. The children of Israel spent decades prior to Moses’ arrival beseeching God to undertake for them; He seemed silent for many years. The sweet psalmist of Israel wrote brokenly, Wherefore hidest thou thy face, And forgettest our affliction and our oppression? (Psalm 44.24) Lord, why castest thou off my soul? Why hidest thou thy face from me? (Psalm 88.14) A sorrowing Job asked, Wherefore hidest thou thy face, And holdest me for thine enemy? (Job 13.24) In what is perhaps the most haunting stretch of biblical phrases, a borderline bitter Job implored his friends to explain the silence of God:

Job 23.1–9

1 Then Job answered and said,

2 Even to day is my complaint bitter: My stroke is heavier than my groaning.

3 Oh that I knew where I might find him! That I might come even to his seat!

4 I would order my cause before him, And fill my mouth with arguments.

5 I would know the words which he would answer me, And understand what he would say unto me.

6 Will he plead against me with his great power? No; but he would put strength in me.

7 There the righteous might dispute with him; So should I be delivered for ever from my judge.

8 Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; And backward, but I cannot perceive him:

9 On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him:

          It is good to know in such times that we are not alone. Saints through all the ages have experienced the same working of God via His silence.

          Lastly, pour a biblical lament into the silence.

          This is something that evangelicals, for all their problems, are better at than we fundamentalists are. Bring up lament in an independent Baptist church and people think you have gone off the deep end. But it is eminently biblical. The term simply means an expression of sorrow or mourning, and they are found all over the Bible. Job laments. Abraham laments. Jacob laments. Joseph laments. Moses laments. Naomi laments. Samuel laments. David laments. Jeremiah laments. (Lamentations anyone?) Jesus laments. John laments. Paul laments.

          Find one of these Bible prayers and meditate upon it. Let it soak deep into the battered surface of your heart. Then, like the priceless water of Bethlehem David poured out before the Lord, pour your lament out before Him.

          In my mind, I have such places captured in the amber of memory, rooms and roads and trails and shorelines all over America, where I have poured out my soul to Him.

          He is silent but He is there, wherever your there is.

          We have spoken much in this series of the work God does in and through and during our suffering. Do you know when God does that? In the silence. Job finishes the haunting passage I referenced just above with some of the best words to ever flow from a mortal pen.

Job 23.8–10

8 Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; And backward, but I cannot perceive him:

9 On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him:

10 But he knoweth the way that I take: When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.

          In the silence, God is refining you into gold.