THE SEEMING SILENCE AND DARKNESS OF GOD

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God...I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
 T.S. Elliot
The speaking God can be maddeningly silent at times.  Often times when I have been the most desirous to hear Him, the silence has been deafening!  There have been times where His voice seems so loud and clear to me and His presence so real. Those moments I can say like the hymn writer that "He walks with me and talks with me". But, other times I have seen, felt, or heard nothing and I have cried to God in my confused anguish and He just seems silent and seems absent.

All of God’s saints, if allowed to live long enough, are led into the lonely, disorienting, weary wilderness. It has been called the dark night of the soul. And while there, we deeply and mournfully lament. Job and David sang deep laments.

Job: “I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.” (Job 30:20)

King David: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.” (Psalm 22:1–2)

 

What we experience as God’s absence or distance or silence is phenomenological. It’s how we see and perceive it. It’s how at some point it looks and feels to us but it isn’t how it really is. If you never knew, you would look out at the horizon and determine that the world was flat, so likewise, we can deduce because of what we see, feel, or experience that God is not present or does not exist.  Just like we can experience the world as flat when in fact we are walking on a huge spinning ball, we can experience God as absent or distant when like Paul says, “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Yes, Job, King David, and I have felt God's absence, silence, or indifference; but in reality, God wasn’t absent or silent or indifferent at all toward Job,King David, or me, it’s just how it felt to them at the time. Yes, those feelings are deeply and painfully real. When we feel forsaken by God the fact is that we are not forsaken (Hebrews 13:5). We are simply called to trust what God promises more than our perceptions.

But why does God seem silent? Why the perceived silence? Why can it seem like God is just standing aloof there looking at us when we cry to him for help?

I don’t claim to understand all the mysteries of this experience. No doubt we underestimate the effects of remaining sin on us and our need for this discipline in order to share God’s holiness (Hebrews 12:10). But I believe there are clues for another purpose as well. I’ll phrase them as questions.

Why is it that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” but “familiarity breeds contempt”?

Why is water so much more refreshing when we’re really thirsty?

Why am I almost never satisfied with what I have, but always longing for more?

Why can the thought of being denied some dream create in us a desperation we previously didn’t have?

Why is the pursuit of earthly achievement often more enjoyable than the achievement itself?

Why do deprivation, adversity, scarcity, and suffering often produce the best character qualities in us while prosperity, ease, and abundance often produce the worst?

Do you see it? There is a pattern in the design of deprivation: Deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens desire. And the more heightened the desire, the greater its satisfaction will be. It is the mourning that will know the joy of comfort (Matthew 5:4). It is the hungry and thirsty that will be satisfied (Matthew 5:6). Longing makes us ask, emptiness makes us seek, silence makes us knock (Luke 11:9).

Deprivation is in the design of this age. We live mainly in the age of anticipation, not gratification. We live in the dim mirror age, not the face-to-face age (1 Corinthians 13:12). We deeply groan with all creation for the consummation of the ages. (Romans 8:22-23). The paradox is that what satisfies us most in this age is not what we receive, but what we are promised. The chase is better than the catch in this age because the Catch we’re designed to be satisfied with is in the age to come.

And so Fredrick William Faber wrote in his poem, “The Desire of God”:

Yes, pine for thy God, fainting soul! ever pine;


 Oh languish mid all that life brings thee of mirth;

Famished, thirsty, and restless — let such life be thine—


 For what sight is to heaven, desire is to earth.

 

So you desire God and ask for more of Him and what do you get? Stuck in a desert feeling deserted. You feel disoriented and desperate. You feel blind and lost. Dear reader, don’t despair. The silence, the absence is phenomenological. It’s how it feels, it’s not how it really is. You are not alone. God is with you (Psalm 23:4). And He is speaking all the time in the priceless gift of His objective Word so you don’t need to rely on the subjective impressions of your fluctuating emotions. I personally, in times of silence and darkness do not know what I would have done without the Word to anchor and sustain my wandering, clueless, lost soul.

If desire is to earth what sight is to heaven, then God answers our prayer with more desire. It’s the desert that awakens and sustains desire. It’s the desert that dries up our infatuation with worldliness. And it’s the desert that draws us to the well of the world to come. C.S. Lewis said that our greatest "havings" are our "longings"

“In the path of your judgments,O LORD, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul.My soul yearns for you in the night;my spirit within me earnestly seeks you.For when your judgments are in the earth,the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.” Isaiah 26:8-9"Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.”Luke 6:21
“Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”Psalm 90:14
"My soul longs and even yearns for the courts of the LORD; My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God."Psalm 84:2

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water…as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God… " (Psalm 63:1; 42:1)

Pastor Bill (Much of this was taken from Jon Bloom "When God Seems Silent")