When God is Silent

“To you I call, O Lord my Rock; do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit. 2 Hear my cry for mercy as I call to you for help, as I lift up my hands toward your Most Holy Place.” (Psalm 28:1-2 NIV).

There is no sound more deafening then the silence of God. Been there done that, and if you are honest, so have you. We cry to God and plead with Him for some favor or some deliverance and all we are met with is silence. C.S. Lewis described this horrible silence this way: “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 in time of trouble?” Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed, (Bantam Books, New York, 1961, pp. 4-5).

Many times when we read our Bible, we do so through the proverbial rose colored glasses. What I mean is, we tend to put the major players on saintly pedestals, picture them moving and writing to us from Ivory Towers of ease. That is not so, and unless you realize this two things are bound to happen. First, you will miss great truths of comfort for your own heart. Second, Satan will convince you that spirituality is for a select super saints so you might as well now give up.

Look again at our passage. It doesn’t appear that David is crying for God’s help from a place of safety. Frankly, had this “man after God’s own heart” been in a safe place many of the Psalms would never have been written. But this is what I want you to notice: apparently even David had bouts of struggling with the silence of God!

If you are going through one of those silent times, take heart. God has not moved nor has He turned a deaf ear to His child. Lewis discovered this. Later, he writes, “You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears . . . And so perhaps with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like a drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps you own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.” (Grief pp. 53-54). By the way, as you work through this Psalm, you will discover that this is David’s experience as well. His pleas will turn to praise when God’s silence obviously breaks.

One final thought. I don’t know when this Psalm was written, what circumstances it may have arisen from. While the Psalm itself was probably written in a brief time, you can be sure that the experience from which this Psalm is written comes from a life-time of experience. Life experience is another thing we tend to forget when we study the Bible. Let’s speculate for illustration purposes. Let’s suppose this Psalm comes out of David’s cumulative experience with Saul. Let’s suppose for a minute that verses 1 & 2 were written the day he ran and verses 6-7 were added to the Psalm the day he got to stop running. Do you realize that we would be looking at a 13 year period? Incredible! But even in the “silent” years you can be sure of this, God was working (at least behind the scenes) and God did still care about what was happening with David. Why was God silent? He was preparing the shepherd boy to be the shepherd of Israel.

If God is silent to you right now. Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Charles Spurgeon said, “When you can’t trace His hand, trust His heart.”