When God Seems Silent

 “Why Does God Seem Distant or Silent in the midst of my Suffering?”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, March 16, 2014

Text: Lamentations 3 // Series: Why, God: Good Questions about Bad Things

He was stuck.  Sinking deeper and deeper into the mud with every movement.  He knew it wouldn’t be long before his old body couldn’t take this kind of depravation and injury anymore but at this point, what could he do?  He was starving to death, stuck fast at the bottom of a muddy pit.

Jeremiah thought back on how his life had come to this.  A previously well-respected prophet, he had been placed under arrest for the simple crime of relaying a message from the Lord that the city of Jerusalem was going to be defeated by the king of Babylon. The weak and feckless king Zedediah of Judah was all too easily influenced and so Pashur & some his cronies in the King’s court labelled Jeremiah a traitor for preaching this way and asked for permission to kill him.  He was undermining morale, they had said.  But it wasn’t enough for these men to have him locked up in the king’s dungeon: they wanted him to suffer before he died.  Jeremiah remembered being dragged from his prison cell and lowered by ropes into a deep and mostly empty cistern in the prison yard.  “An old well.  My life is going to end stuck in the mud at the bottom of an old well.”  He thought to himself.  The mud was like quicksand and he was sinking deeper with every movement he made, however slight.  An old poem came to his mind, used by petulant schoolgirls to taunt each other: “They lied to you and did you in, those so called friends you had; And now you’re stuck knee-deep in mud, and your “friends”, left you for dead!”    

You can read all about Jeremiah’s experiences in the book that bears his name in the Old Testament.  The part of his story where he gets thrown into a cistern is recorded in Jeremiah chapter 38.  Personally, I wonder what was going through Jeremiah’s head as he stuck at the bottom of that muddy pit.  If I was him and if I am honest, I would have had some pretty good questions that I would have been asking God.  “Why give me prophetic message that was dangerous for my health?  Why am I being persecuted for simply telling people the obvious truth?  Why don’t you get me out of this mess… I’m drowning here!”

Last week, we began a teaching series in the book of Lamentations called “Why, God: Good Questions about Bad Things”.  And we explored the question Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People?  We listened to the cries that that author of the book of Lamentations, likely Jeremiah, asked in chapter 1 – God, don’t you hear me?  Don’t you see what is going on in my life?  Why are these things happening to me?”  And these honest “from the gut” kinds of inquiries are often breezed over by contemporary western Christians in favour of my sunny and upbeat parts of the Bible.  But if we are honest with ourselves and with each other, you and I both know that life is not always rainbows and lollipops.  We know both intuitively and experientially that we live in a broken world and each one of us experiences different measures of suffering, loss, pain, and confusion.  Last weekend we heard from Jodi & Darryl as they described wrestling with the loss of their child in the first 10 days of Sam’s life.  We heard from Peter who wrestled with the notion of why God would give him a genetic condition that he cannot change which makes daily living a challenge and in other parts of the globe like East Africa, puts your very life at risk.  When we experience these and other kinds of hardships or when we watch those close to us or those on the news walking through deep waters, it is very natural to try to make sense of those experiences.  To try and understand the happenings of our lives and create meaning out of chaotic and difficult challenges. 

And so we often ask ‘why’ questions.  Why is this happening to me?  Why now?  But I think we also some ‘where’ questions: “where is God in the midst of all of this?”  Why does God seem silent, particularly in the midst of my suffering?  When I need Him the most, when I am in my darkest hour at the sinking down in the bottom of a muddy pit, God can seems the quietest or furthest away.  Why can God sometimes seem so far away? 

The question of God’s silence I think is a good one.  And if we are honest, there are more examples of it in the Bible that Christians are sometimes comfortable talking about.  Think of the deafening silence that echoed in his mind for days as Abraham walked up the mountain to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar.  Think of Job, who asks God for vindication and instead gets three “friends” who tell him what a horrible sinner he is.  There’s no record of God speaking to Joseph in prison in Egypt.  John the Baptist questions if Jesus is really the Promised One and in the end, John ends up dead with his head delivered on a platter.  Surely he and others cried out to God to spare his life?  Divine silence can be deafening. 

And it echoes prominently and personally through the book of Lamentations, which is a poetic reflection on the events of Jeremiah’s day.  The Babylonian army has destroyed the city of Jerusalem and killed or taken captive the entire nation.  And God has let it all happen.  And so in chapter 3, the author, likely Jeremiah, lays their experiences and their questions out there for us to wrestle with.  Follow along with me on your smart phone on YouVersion or you Bible as I read Lamentations 3:1-19 (the first and last verses will come up on the side screens).

I love how raw and how real the book of Lamentations is. The writer says “God, it feels dark.  I cry out to you, I shout, but it feels like you don’t hear my prayers.  I’m in a dark place here, God.”  You heard last weekend how part of our heart in this series is to let you into the stories of some of the people sitting around you.  To allow you to hear their questions and their experiences in these dark places.  So I want to invite Al Thiessen to join me and he is going to share some of his story with you this morning.  Al and his wife Herta have been long-time covenant members here at Jericho.  In the past few years, Al has weathered a heart attack and Herta has fought and beaten cancer.  But those are stories for another time.  

Q1) Al, people talk about dark nights of the soul experiences from a spiritual perspective but sometimes there can be other factors at play as well.  Al, would you take us through a bit of your journey?

Q2) This morning we are talking about how God sometimes feels distant or silent in the midst of these times.  What was your experience with that?

Q3) What would you say to someone who thinks your experience or the experience of someone they know resembles yours.  Where and how did you begin to see things change and what perhaps hasn't changed?           

Let’s thank Al for sharing with us this morning.  With Jodi & Darryl and with Al’s story, you hear people who have had some time to wrestle with the WHY questions and to come to some conclusions.  But one of the dangers in Christian community is that we don’t share our story until it is neatly and tidily wrapped up with a little pink bow on the top.  At the conclusion of our time last weekend, your heard April Ferguson get up and ask us to remember that there are people around you and I who are in the middle of that journey still and who still feel like God is distant and silent.  And this calls something out of us as individuals and as a community that can be a real challenge: living without a clear answer to some of the questions of WHY.  I’m going to invite Shawn Olson to come up and join me here.  Shawn has been hanging around Jericho for a while and April introduced you to part of his story last weekend but I wanted you to hear it in his own words. 

Q1 - "I know the answer to this could fill 5 hours, but take us through the physical / medial aspect of your life story, Shawn" 

Q2 - "Now switch the lens... take us through the spiritual aspect of your journey. Where are you at right now?". 

Q3 - "Last question. What do you want / need from a group of people like this?  What do you for sure NOT want?"    

I think that Shawn and Al’s stories highlight important aspects of what to do and what not to do when God seems silent or distant, either in your own life or as you journey with those around you.  There are 5 helpful things that come up in Lamentations 3 that can keep us

When God Seems Distant or Silent…

1. Keep HOPING

“Yet still I dare to hope.”  (Lamentations 3:21)

This hope is not a wishful kind of thinking like the musical Annie.  (The sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun).  The author charges us to place our hope not in circumstances or strategies but in the faithful love of the Lord.  C.S. Lewis reminds us “Though our feelings will come and go, God’s love for us does not.” 

The Christian story gives us a resource to keep a robust hope alive, even in the midst of physical pain and hardship, which can often be some of the most challenging to bear because we everything about our lives and our experience the world is mediated though our physical bodies.  We can only dare to hope in the midst of silence because of the certainty we have that one day, God is making all things new.  He may seem distant and silent in the present and so, in the words of Romans 8,  

“And we believers also groan, even though we have    the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future     glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for         the day when God will give us our full rights as His     adopted children, including the new bodies He has          promised us.” (Romans 8:23)

We dare to hope in the midst of depression and kidney failure and cancer and sickness and death only because one day, our physical bodies will be released from sin and suffering.  We do not grieve as those who have no hope and therefore, we do not live as those who have no hope.  Which sounds great, but what do you do in the meantime?  When God still feels distant and silent!   

2. Keep TALKING

I love how the author of Lamentations puts this in 3:24-25

“I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my inheritance;     therefore, I will hope in him!’ The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.”  (Lamentations 3:24-25)

It’s like he knows that he is prone to forgetting in the darkness what he knew to be true in the light.  So what do you do when you find yourself at the bottom of a dark and muddy pit?  You keep talking.  Firstly, maybe to keep your own sanity!  A bit of healthy self-talk.  But notice here that what you tell yourself matters.  It’s not just a bland campy kind of inner monologue: ‘things will get better.  I’m going to be alright’.  Notice what the writer reminds themselves of – their relationship with God.  I say to myself “I need to search for God. He is faithful.  He can be trusted.”  This is one of the reasons I keep a Life journal, where I write down that things that God teaches me about himself when I read the Bible.  Because I know I’m going to forget these things 2 minutes after I close the book!  And if I can forget them that quickly, I need a mechanism to remember them when I am in the middle of suffering and hardship.  So I go back and read those journal entries. As I do so, I am talking to myself but also    

-      Talk to yourself; to God; process with trusted friends

Sometimes the thing you most want to do when you are going through a challenging time is to pull away and hibernate.  To isolate yourself and cut off contact with people.  But when people don’t know what is going on, they can’t be expected to know how to help.  Don’t clamp up.  Find people who can take it – this won’t be everyone you know – but keep talking with God, keep talking to yourself and to trusted friends. 

So, keep hoping, keep talking but also,

Keep LISTENING

“So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the     Lord… Let them sit alone in silence beneath the Lord’s demands. Let them lie face down in the dust,    for there may be hope at last.”  (Lamentations 3:24-25)

In the midst of pain God can seem distant and silent but sometimes, if you still your heart and your raging mind and spirit long enough, and get quiet enough, you begin to hear that

God is still speaking, He just may not be doing it in a way that you expect or with the answer you want.

When God doesn’t give me the answer that I want – healing, freedom of pain or anxiety or cancer or grief – then it can be convenient to chalk it up to God being silent.  But sometimes, if we are honest, God has already given us an answer to our questions but we are unwilling to be quiet enough to accept it.  It’s like kids when they ask for something and one parent says NO, they go to the other parent and they say “daddy isn’t listening to me.” The truth is that daddy listened and gave an answer.  It just wasn’t the answer they wanted so they pretend daddy didn’t say anything.  In the middle of difficult times, God can speak to us in very different ways than we are used to in good times so it can be hard for us to learn a new way of hearing.  But He is still speaking. Are you listening?     

If you think that that one is hard, these last two are even more tricky, in my thinking.  Keep hoping, keep talking, keep listening, and

3. Keep PERSEVERING

“Wait for hope to appear.  Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face. The “worst” is never the worst.  Why? Because the Master won’t ever walk out and fail to return..”  (Lamentations 3:29-31  The Message)

We live in a culture of instant results.  It permeates every part of our experiences – if we don’t get our glasses done in 1 hour, it’s unthinkable.  If our blood work takes more than 4 days, we are incensed.  If I have to wait for more than 3 cars in the Starbucks drive thru line up, my day is a disaster!  And the danger is that this can bleed so quickly into our spiritual lives.  If we don’t hear life-altering lightning bolts from God the very first time we life journal, we write the process off as stupid and unhelpful.  If we cry out to God in our pain and He seems not to answer us immediately, we think we have an answer from Him: silence.  God has heard us but He just hasn’t given us the answer we are looking for in the time-frame we pictured it.  We want OUT and we want out NOW.  But we are reminded time and time again in the Scriptures that something happens to our faith and to our lives when we slow-roast in the oven as opposed to expect quick results in the microwave. 

“I have refined you, but not as silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.” (Isaiah 48:10)

I hate that verse.  I wish it wasn’t in the Bible.  That God would want to use or have a purpose for my suffering or for suffering as a category is unsettling and not helpful.  But it is true.  “why does God not rescue you and I right away from our sufferings?  Well, part of it may be that something happens in our lives in that process that cannot happen in any other way.  In the New Testament, Paul sees his life through that lens and he actually actively invites others into that process.  Again, as a community: 

“Ensure suffering along with me.” – Paul (in 2 Timothy 2:3)

Are you in the midst of hardship?  Keep hoping, keep talking, keep listening, keep persevering, and finally:

4. Keep LEARNING

Lamentations 3 says “let us test and examine our ways”.  Isaiah 30:20 has more vivid word picture: “Though the Lord gave you adversity for food and suffering for drink, he will still be with you to teach you.” 

I have shared before how my temptation is to jump the other steps and when something bad happens rush here and say “OK, God… what are you trying to teach me?  I want to learn it quickly so I can move on or get past this as soon as possible!”  But what I am finding in my own life is that what I really need to learn happens right there in the middle of the storm or at the bottom of that muddy pit or when you are wrestling with depression or chronic illness…. That God is still with me.    

“So if you are suffering in a manner that pleases God,          keep on doing what is right, and trust your lives to          the God who created you, for He will never fail you.”   (I Peter 4:19)

“The faithful love of the Lord never ends.  His mercies never cease.  Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh every morning.”  For me, this is the biggest take away from the whole book of Lamentations:

God may seem distant or silent but He is never absent 

You and I may not get all of the answers we feel that we may need or want this side of eternity.  But we do have a God who has promised never to leave us. Never to forsake us.  In the midst of the storm, you and I have a choice to make: we can believe that lie that God is distant OR we can cling to the invitation to keep hoping, keep talking, keep listening, keep persevering, and keep learning and keep trusting.  We are going to move into a time of prayer response.  We have people who are willing to pray with and for you – Keith and Melissa Reed, Dale Moore and I, Ruth Ellen and _________ will be available at the sides here the band will lead us in 2 songs of response and then if you want to head out and pick up your kids you are welcome to do so, but don’t rush away.  My sense is that God is speaking powerfully to some of you today and so let me pray with and for you as the team comes and leads us in worship response in song.