How Do Disciples Respond When God Appears Silent?

 

How Do Disciples Respond When God Appears Silent?

 

How do you respond to God’s apparent silence?  The Psalter asks this penetrating question of faith.  The opening verses of Psalm 22 teaches us that hard questions are necessary in the journey of discipleship.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day and you do not answer, by night but I find no rest.”  Instead of being disrespectful and sacrilegious, these questions reflect a deeply intimate relationship between God and the Psalter.  In addition to David, other notable biblical characters including Hagar, Gideon, Job and Jeremiah ask similar tough questions.  God’s inactivity and absence contradicts everything they were taught about His character and power.  Giants in the history of Christendom like Charles Spurgeon, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. respectively pondered God’s inertia during industrialization, worldwide poverty in the prosperous twentieth century and intractable American Southern segregation.  Average disciples ask their personal versions of the Psalmist’s provocative questions.  Are there times when your life’s circumstances equate with incontrovertible evidence that Almighty God has forsaken you? If yes, how do you respond?

 

These startling questions are so aptly worded that they speak for any disciple experiencing a difficult time.  The Psalmist straightforwardly asks God, “Why have you forsaken me?’  Immediately, childhood Sunday School lessons resound within our ears.  “God does not leave nor does He forsake anyone who believes in Him.”  There are as many Old Testament verses that affirm this assertion as there are New Testament ones.  Consider Deuteronomy 31:8 and Joshua 1:8. Still, lingering unemployment compounded by sporadic health challenge and accompanying medical bills and intractable age discrimination combine to eclipse God’s presence.  Then, there is mounting bewilderment when a disciple prays fervently only to see his situation worsen.  How do you explain that irony?  How does a disciple pray faithfully and earnestly for God’s favorable intervention only to be on the receiving end of further silence and indifference?  Asking about being forsaken by God seems a reasonable response.  The Psalter also asks what explains God’s delay in saving him from drowning in the quicksand of emotion and being overwhelmed by the sudden and formidable rush of mighty waters.  What is the distance between the Psalter’s laments and shouts of anguish?  It is as if he sits and cries burning, angry, salty and countless tears and God does nothing.  After a while, those tears turn into bitterness and cynicism.  If God is indeed loving, gracious, kind and faithful, how can He be so indifferent to the Psalter’s pain and suffering?

 

Chances are billions of disciples relate daily to the Psalter’s feelings as they survive a global pandemic.  With the deaths of more than 260,000 Americans and comparable losses in other countries, grief and loss form a huge canopy over the Earth in the year 2020.  Death on the macro level inevitably becomes death on the micro level.  Each of these decedents belonged to families. Easily, bereavement permeates the lives of millions and tens of millions of citizens.  Those dark clouds block the sunlight of divine grace.  More personally, they intensify feelings of demoralization.  In lesser concerns, some disciples linger in the morass of aimlessness and agony.  These despairing feelings eventuate in feelings of mutual contempt.  God’s apparent absence and silence breeds such harsh feelings in a disciple as he suspects God has shown equal contempt for the disciple.  The Psalter indicts God with his eloquence.  “My God, I cry out by day and you do not answer, by night but I find no rest.”  Contemporarily, the Psalter views his life as a cruel joke by day and a never-ending nightmare during the hours of the evening.

Adamantly, I detest and resist the current impulses in Christian circles to squash questioning.  People who refuse to entertain hard questions of faith tend to characterize fellow believers who do as weak, insubordinate and faithless.  In some instances, fellow disciples yell at people who question God and biblical truths when their lives are incongruent with traditional spiritual promises.  Nevertheless, the Psalter’s questions were not accidentally included in the Bible.  There are times when disciples rightly resolve that God has forsaken them.  The corollary question remains, “How do disciples respond when God appears silent?”  As much as I disregard an unwillingness to wrestle with complexities, ironies, contradictions and mystery in believing in God, I disdain simplistic formulas and uninformed cliches.  Simple answers rarely satisfy complex questions.

 

To that end, I offer several experiential suggestions in response to the Psalter’s question.  First, gratitude always yields an affirming perspective.  Thankfulness focuses upon what a person earns and appreciates as opposed to concentrating upon what a person lacks.  Dwelling upon what is missing hardly emboldens anyone.  It forces disciples to compare themselves and their situations with other people.  As everyone is unique, personal differences are not comparable.  Consequently, acceptance of life’s realities is the first step towards resolving challenges.  Acceptance creates open-mindedness to God’s guidance and counsel from other disciples.  Third, clearing the mind and heart of resentments, failure to forgive and other toxic emotions is necessary to become a channel of God’s love and peace.  Harboring poisonous emotions and thoughts distorts a disciple’s perspective.  This regrettable state of mind prevents personal growth and spiritual progress.  Like cannibals who feed upon their own kind, negativity consumes the mind, heart and soul of its bearer.  Refusal to forgive victimizers particularly eats away at personal health, peace and well-being. 

 

Fourth, visualization of brighter, more rewarding and joyous days avoids paralysis and possible depression.  A disciple in crisis does not have to remain interminably in that predicament.  Envisioning the future with expectancy and hope are practical spiritual tools of progressing beyond today’s struggles.  Those spiritual disciplines are components of resilience which propels disciples toward mission, purpose and destiny.  Finally, hope as borne of affirmations spoken aloud, listening to music and hearing other people’s experiences of spirituality and faithful endurance is a powerfully stabilizing force when living through difficult and inexplicable days.  The belief that a disciple’s life can and will be better sustains him as he travels through “the valley of the shadow of death.”  Elsewhere, the Psalter boldly proclaims, “I am still confident of this, I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Summarily, he responds to God’s apparent absence and indifference with reaffirming God’s faithfulness which the Psalter wholeheartedly believes will emerge.