When God is Silent
When God Is Silent.
What do we do when sometimes our prayers seem to go unanswered? There are many men and women of God in biblical times that questioned the often and seemingly silence of God. But today, I would like to share two verses of scripture taken from Psalm 35:12 and 13b. We find David once again praying for rescue from his enemies who always seem to be pursuing him unfairly.
He is weary. He is questioning why God will not intervene for him. In these verses, David particularly questions God’s seeming silence: David writes: “They repay me evil for good, to the bereavement of my soul. I humbled my soul with fasting but my prayer kept returning to my bosom.”
David humbled himself. He fasted and prayed. Where was God? Why was God silent?
On Questioning God’s Silence
Have you ever questioned God’s silence in your own life?
I served as a pastoral counselor and hospital chaplain for ten years; the most asked question I received from those who were ill is: “Why doesn’t God answer my prayers?”
And so it is, in the midst of personal tragedy and physical and emotional suffering, men and women grope for relevant answers to the enigma of human hardship: Does God not hear us when we pray in our suffering? Is God immune and indifferent to our suffering? What do we do when God acts or does NOT act in His sovereignty in ways that do not strike us as adequate?
Why me, Lord?
Have you ever asked God: Why me, Lord? Why now? Why is God often silent in our suffering?
When all our earthly efforts fail to understand human hardship, we are left with the mystery of God’s silence.
Is God Indifferent?
There are those who attest that God is indifferent – He does not care as to what is happening to us, and in the world. How often do we come to the same conclusion as David when he was always fleeing from his enemies? Often, David believed God had abandoned him. It seemed the only logical explanation of what was happening to David in light of God’s strange silence. God’s silence and inactivity, David sometimes argued, must denote His indifference.
Similarly, because we cannot understand, we tend to doubt and to question the silence of God.
Where does our understanding begin?
One must believe that God is present in our anguish and that good will ultimately prevail.
Yet questions still remain: How is God present? How will good prevail? How do we know this? When the answers are not coming as we think they should? How is God present in tragedy?
These questions are as relevant today as they were when the ancient biblical authors struggled with them. Especially David.
When Personal Tragedy Strikes
I would like to share a sobering example of God’s presence in the midst of tragedy through the testimony of a former single missionary friend of mine.
Mary faced a dark and lonely valley on the mission field. She and one married missionary were kidnapped by terrorists in Central America and held for three weeks waiting for a large amount of ransom money from the USA.
The terrorists often changed areas of captivity, but they were both held in deep forests and forced to sleep on the hard forest floor with a flimsy blanket and very little food. The two Christian women slept close together with blankets wrapped around them. Fearing at night that a drunken terrorist would seek to rape them.
Mary’s worst fear became a nightmare reality.
A few days before their release, one of the terrorists slipped in beside Mary at night and raped her. He did not touch the married missionary. Why Mary?
When local police finally found the two women and shot the terrorists, Mary was flown to an English hospital for psychological therapy due to her intense trauma.
She asked the Christian therapist a sobering question: “Where was God?”
Wisely, the therapist responded, "He was right there with you, weeping along with you. Sharing in your suffering.”
My friend, through tears, shared with me that the therapist’s response – that God was with her, weeping with her – resonated deeply with her and in that moment, she began her emotional healing process.
Abuse of Freedom
God did not create a world in which there is evil, but He did create a world in which, through abuse of freedom, evil could occur. We can place the blame of evil where it belongs: upon the abuse of finite freedom of humankind and Satan. God neither wills evil or causes it.
The problem of God’s silence in suffering to most people is an enigma; to others it is cause for intense anger and indignation. How does one individual surpass personal tragedy with conquest while another becomes bitter in spirit?
What factors elicit such conflicting responses to the problem of suffering?
That great Methodist missionary, Dr. E. Stanley Jones tirelessly and earnestly sought to offer ways in which suffering humanity can find meaning and purpose in their afflictions and hardships. Through his own physical suffering (paralytic stroke), he discovered two essential elements in understanding the enigma of human hardship.
These are: obedience and self-surrender. When human answers fail to assuage, it is obedience to the will of God which turns negation of suffering into affirmation of significance. Dr. Jones asserted that the answer comes clearly to us when we see Christ in the midst of our suffering.
Just as my missionary friend, Mary, came to believe:
In the midst of the horror of her rape, God was with her. She clung to hope.
Hope in Suffering
Why is hope important for those who suffer? Because hope offers healing. Because hope is stronger than memory. Hope in the knowledge that God is with His people is stronger than the memory of the pain we may experience in the past or present. Hope helps us to believe that God is with us.
God understands our loneliness in our suffering and offers hope.
- Dr. Anna-Marie Lockard is an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene and has served for 46 years in pastoral and missionary service with her husband Chuck. She has been an adjunct professor for NBC for 17 years.