The Silences of God

The instinct of religion is to cry to God. The personal providence of God is the reason of prayer. The psalmist is in trouble, and as he prays his imagination suggests what it would be if God were silent to him.

I. Is God silent to our prayers? We pray expecting His answer. Prayer is not the mere utterance of surcharged hearts, like Lear’s raving to the winds. There is moral benefit in simple desire, and that desire grows by utterance. The Rock may not speak to us, but we can lean against it and find shelter under it. But the idea of God speaking to us is as essential for prayer as our speaking to Him. We ask for response, not merely that He would listen. In what sense may God be silent to a praying man? It is a possibility, and as such it is deprecated. Perhaps David was impatient because the answer did not at once come. Sometimes the answer may follow at once, as the thunder-clap the lightning. “I will, be thou clean,” was the instant answer to the leper’s cry. But the answer to the Syro-Phoenician, to the centurion, to the disciples in the storm, to the sisters of Lazarus, were purposely delayed. The long winter is not a capricious delay of spring; it prepares for a fuller, a more luxuriant life. Surely was not the Father, in this sense, silent to the well-beloved Son Himself when He prayed in His agony, thrice, “Father, if it be possible.” His cup might not pass, but “He was heard in that He feared.” Our hasty desires are often not wise. The thing demanded might send “leanness into our souls.”

II. there are other silences that perplex us. What is the meaning of many of God’s laws--the economy of violence, of death, of death as the condition of life? Why are the secrets of Nature so hidden? Why did not God tell at the first what powerful generations have just discovered? Wherefore do the wicked prosper? Why is God silent when His people are wronged with impunity and success? No doubt, much that we call God’s silence is speech that is unheard. It is not His silence, but only our deafness. Christianity has taught us how to regard suffering itself as a gospel.

III. concerning his kingdom we are perplexed. “Lord, are there few that be saved’?” He is silent to our curiosity even when prompted by benevolence.

IV. in spiritual things, again, we often think, in our obtuseness, that God is silent. We do not always hear God’s voice in our own souls. The Babel voices of passion drown it. He that will do the will of God shall know of the doctrine. Some men see and hear God everywhere; others never see or hear Him at all. To the spiritual soul God’s world is a whispering gallery--dead stones speak.

V. to such a soul the thought that God may be silent to him is intolerable. He would be as those who perish. Every delay was painful. The Divine Fatherhood has such meaning to us that we cannot bear “the hiding of God’s face.” This is the meaning of all the great yearnings after God with which the Psalms are full. To be thrown upon the mystery and sin and trouble of life, “all the burden and the mystery of this unintelligible world,” without God is, to a religious soul, intolerable. How terrible to think of men to whom God is always silent, who are spiritually so deaf that they cannot hear, and to whom, if they could hear, God has no words that He could speak but of rebuke. There are men who all their lives have been saying prayers but have never prayed, and to whom God has never spoken. What if the silence should never be broken? (H. Allen, D. D.)