Ethan’s Dad: “Silence is golden.” Except when it’s not. You might think that when there are four children 8 years of age and under running around you, you have more than enough noise, and you long for quiet. But when you know there is a voice missing, jabbering from another two year-old that you should be hearing in the din, the chaos isn’t enough. Instead what you hear is a sound of silence that pierces your soul.

As Ethan’s mom hinted at in her last post, lately I also have been thinking about another kind of silence: the silence of God.

“It’s enough to drive a man crazy; it’ll break a man’s faith
It’s enough to make him wonder if he’s ever been sane
When he’s bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heaven’s only answer is the silence of God.”

-Andrew Peterson (The Silence of God)

There seems to be an impression among some Christians that God is only silent when we are distant from Him. That is to say, the only times we don’t hear from God are when we are enmeshed in deliberate sin or when we don’t like the answer we are getting about a request we have made to God. But this is, at best, only a half-truth.

To begin with, unless you are so distant from God that your conscience is dulled, the fact is that a Christian does hear from God quite loudly in the midst of deliberate sin. God lets us know in no uncertain terms that what we are doing is wrong. That’s why it is a deliberate sin. And if we don’t like what God is telling us when we ask for something, then He isn’t actually being silent, is He?

But I think in a way what these Christians are really saying is that God is never actually silent; we are just turning a deaf ear to Him. Now, this might sound like good theology to you, but as well-meaning as it may be, it is flat wrong. The silence of God is a very a real and agonizing experience for believers the world over.

“It’ll shake a man’s timbers when he loses his heart
When he has to remember what broke him apart
This yoke may be easy, but this burden is not
When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God.”

Moreover, the Bible does not shy away from this fact.

Job suffered with excruciating pain and loss for a stretch of time before God spoke to Him, and even when God broke the silence He did not fully explain to Job all of the reasons for his suffering. (See Job 38-41).  When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were sentenced to die in the fiery furnace, Scripture records that the three of them stated that “even if [God] does not [save us from the blazing furnace], we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” (Daniel 3:18). The clear implication is that the three men were not told by God beforehand what would happen to them when they were thrown into the fire. In the period of time between the Old and New Testaments, the people of Israel lived for over 400 years without any revelation from God about their salvation through a Messiah. John the Baptist passed time in prison under Herod without hearing anything from God as to whether his ministry had made any real difference. Finally John — in apparent desperation — sent some of his followers to Jesus to ask Him whether He really was the Messiah. (See Matthew 11:2). The Disciples spent the Saturday after Jesus’ death in despondency and silence (a period worth pondering in a future post).

Are we to write off all of these people’s recorded experiences as false impressions about God? If those examples are not enough, how about Jesus himself, who exclaimed from the cross: “My God my God, why have You forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

“Oh,” you say, “that was different because Jesus was taking on the sin of the world in that moment. God had to turn away. The same is not true for us.” But I think Jesus’ question was expressing the culmination of His entire experience during the crucifixion. It’s likely that God’s silence started the moment Jesus was led away from the Garden of Gethsemane by the Sanhedrin’s guards. Jesus came to earth and experienced what we experience. Did He bear more pain that we ever will or could during the crucifixion? Absolutely. But Jesus’ experience with the silence of God — perhaps more than anything else could — reflected His humanity.

“And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God.”

In asking this question — “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” — Jesus echoed the words of David as recorded in Psalm 22. So David too experienced this silence. And, in fact, the Psalms are full of reflections on the silence of God. For instance, David in Psalm 13 inquires:

“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

“Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
and my enemy will say, ‘I have overcome him,’
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.”

Psalm 42, the beginning of which is often (and I believe wrongly) quoted in a happy fashion, says:

“As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
‘Where is your God?'”

Psalm 77, which to me is one of the best passages in all of Scripture, pulls no punches:

“I cried out to God for help;
I cried out to God to hear me.
When I was in distress, I sought the Lord;
at night I stretched out untiring hands,
and I would not be comforted.

“I remembered you, God, and I groaned;
I meditated, and my spirit grew faint.
You kept my eyes from closing;
I was too troubled to speak.
I thought about the former days,
the years of long ago;
I remembered my songs in the night.
My heart meditated and my spirit asked:

“‘Will the Lord reject forever?
Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion?'”

And then there is Psalm 88, which is perhaps the most depressing expression of God’s silence in all of Scripture. It contains lines such as:

“You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily on me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.

“….

“I call to you, Lord, every day;
I spread out my hands to you.
Do you show your wonders to the dead?
Do their spirits rise up and praise you?
“Is your love declared in the grave,
your faithfulness in Destruction?
Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

“But I cry to you for help, Lord;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, Lord, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?”

Why would God include these expressions of anguish in Scripture if the experiences were not real, and, perhaps more importantly, appropriate? God does not shy away from His silence, so why should we? The expressions of silence are there often enough that we are almost forced to face the prospect that the silence is purposeful. So why would God sometimes choose to be silent in our most painful moments, the very moments when you would think we need Him the most?

When we ask the question “why did this happen?” what we really mean is: Why weren’t You there, God? Why didn’t You stop it? Isn’t that, in part, what is behind Jesus’ haunting question: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”

Yet, so often when we ask that question, what follows is silence. In our case, we screamed the question, over and over: Why did Ethan die? Why did you not tell us earlier that he wasn’t breathing? Why didn’t you stop this? Why couldn’t the paramedics save him? Why didn’t you bring Ethan back, like you did the son of the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17-7-24), the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 7:11-17), Jairus’s daughter (Luke 8:40-42, 49-56), and Lazarus (John 11:1-44). We received no answer, no comfort, no reassurance. Just cold, dark, silence.

It has taken me a while to realize, as I indicated above, that perhaps this silence was intentional. In fact, I think the “Why” questions might be important not so much because of answers you hope to receive, but instead precisely because they are accompanied by silence. It does not seem so at the time, but if God is not going to supernaturally intervene, then silence is really the only appropriate response in a horrific moment like that because there is no answer that will satisfy other than “I will give you your son back.” Yet God has already chosen, for whatever reason, not to provide the satisfying answer. And He is no fool. God knows that when that is the case, the response from His child will be anger, disappointment, confusion, and despair. The truth is, in that God-forsaken moment — and for a while afterward — if His answer was not “I will save Ethan,” I did not want to hear from God and He knew it.

I think that the silence occurs because the answer to “Why?” will not satisfy if it does not include an immediate fix to the brokenness. And when you sit in the silence what you start to realize is that God is not who you thought He was. This may sound like a negative thing, but that is only the case if you think you have God figured out. And if you think that, then your God is too small because He fits into your finite mind. He stretches far beyond that.

“‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,’
declares the Lord.
“‘As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.'” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

The unvarnished truth is that God is a lot more concerned with how we answer the “Who” questions of life than He is with answering our “Why” questions. For one inquiring mind, Jesus answered the question: “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29-37). The answer is: everyone. On another occasion, Jesus asked His Disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” And Jesus approved Peter’s answer: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” (Matthew 16:15-17).

And in the silence of God, this last question is the most important question of all: when your world comes crashing down around you, when the unthinkable tragedy is your reality, when you weep until you have no strength to weep anymore (1 Samuel 30:4), who do you say Jesus is? If He is just some friend or spiritual mentor or great teacher, He is useless in that moment. But if He is who Peter said He was, then He makes all the difference in the world.

Because that person, that Savior, cares for you beyond all measure and He proved it by dying for you. He didn’t just tell us He loves us, He demonstrated it in the most agonizing way conceivable to our finite minds, by dying on an instrument of torture. And beyond that, if He is who Peter said He was, then Jesus isn’t even just some martyr who died a horrible death in our place. He is alive, meaning He overcame death, and He is capable of extending, and eager to offer, that same gift to us — and to our little ones whose lives were so tragically cut short.

This is what real faith is about: it is about foregoing the “Why” based on the “Who.” If we can accept that, then we can keep on living — if not in complete peace — then at least in genuine hope. “And this hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who God has given to us.” (Romans 5:5).