Are You Mistaking God’s Silence for His Absence?
There is something that can happen when we have prayed about the same thing for a long time.
At first, we wait.
We believe God has heard us. We trust that an answer will come. We continue praying with expectation.
But then days become weeks.
Weeks may become months.
Sometimes months become years.
Nothing changes.
No explanation comes.
No unmistakable direction appears.
We don’t sense God saying anything new.
And somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, we can begin making a very dangerous exchange.
God seems silent becomes God must be absent.
Those are not the same thing.
But when we are hurting, waiting, frightened, or confused, they can certainly feel like the same thing.
If God were here, wouldn’t He say something?
If God were here, wouldn’t He do something?
If God were here, wouldn’t I feel Him?
If God were here, wouldn’t this situation look different by now?
And perhaps the most painful question of all:
If God is here, why does He feel so far away?
Those questions aren’t evidence that we don’t have faith.
People throughout Scripture asked them too.
But there is something we need to examine carefully:
Have we begun using our ability to perceive God as the measurement of God’s actual presence?
Because if we have, every quiet season will eventually make us question whether He is still there.
There Is a Difference Between Presence and Perception
We need to separate two things that we often combine.
God’s presence.
And our perception of God’s presence.
They are not identical.
We can perceive something accurately.
But our inability to perceive something does not prove it isn’t there.
Think about how often this happens in ordinary life.
The sun doesn’t cease to exist because clouds prevent us from seeing it.
Someone can be working on our behalf without our knowing the conversation is happening.
Something can be developing long before there is visible evidence of it.
Our awareness is limited.
And spiritually, we can make the mistake of assuming:
If I cannot see God working, God isn’t working.
If I cannot hear God speaking, God isn’t speaking.
If I cannot feel God’s presence, God isn’t present.
But Scripture repeatedly gives us stories where God was present long before the people involved understood what He was doing.
Jacob Said, “Surely the LORD Is in This Place; and I Knew It Not”
There is a remarkable moment in Genesis 28.
Jacob is traveling alone.
He stops for the night, takes stones from the place for his pillows, lies down, and sleeps.
Then he dreams of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it.
God speaks to him and confirms His covenant promises.
When Jacob wakes, he says:
“Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.”— Genesis 28:16 KJV
I love the honesty of that sentence.
God was there.
Jacob simply didn’t know it.
His awareness did not create God’s presence.
And his lack of awareness did not cancel it.
God had been present before Jacob recognized Him.
That makes me wonder how many times we have said,
“God, where are You?”
while standing in a place where God is already present.
Maybe the problem isn’t always that God has withdrawn.
Sometimes we simply haven’t recognized Him yet.
We Have Learned to Associate God’s Presence With Certain Experiences
Many of us have ideas about what God’s presence is supposed to feel like.
Maybe it is peace.
Maybe it is tears during worship.
Maybe it is a strong sense that God is speaking.
Maybe Scripture suddenly seems to leap off the page.
Maybe we feel warmth, comfort, conviction, joy, or reassurance.
Those experiences can be beautiful.
But they are not the foundation of God’s presence.
Because what happens on the morning when you open your Bible and feel nothing?
What happens when you pray and there are no tears?
What happens when worship doesn’t move you emotionally?
What happens when you ask God for direction and receive no immediate clarity?
Has God left?
Or has the experience changed?
There is an important difference.
If our confidence in God’s nearness depends entirely upon what we feel, then our theology of God’s presence will change every time our emotions change.
And emotions change constantly.
God does not.
David Knew What It Felt Like to Think God Had Hidden Himself
David wasn’t unfamiliar with this struggle.
He wrote:
“Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?”— Psalm 10:1 KJV
Notice what David says.
Why are You standing far away?
That is how the situation felt to him.
God seemed distant precisely when David believed He should have seemed nearest.
And haven’t we experienced that?
There are seasons when we think:
God, this is exactly when I need to know You’re here.
But instead of feeling His nearness, we experience silence.
That can make the silence feel almost personal.
We begin wondering whether God has deliberately stepped away.
But Scripture allows David to express his perception without requiring us to conclude that his perception was the whole truth.
David felt abandoned at times.
David felt forgotten.
David felt that God had hidden His face.
And yet the larger testimony of David’s life was that God had never stopped being his God.
His perception changed.
God’s covenant faithfulness did not.
Jesus Slept Through a Storm
There is another story that exposes this assumption beautifully.
Jesus and His disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee when a violent storm arose.
The disciples were terrified.
Jesus was asleep.
Mark tells us:
“And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow…”— Mark 4:38 KJV
Think about that scene.
The wind is raging.
Water is entering the boat.
Experienced fishermen believe they may die.
And Jesus appears completely unresponsive.
So they wake Him with a question:
“Master, carest thou not that we perish?”
There it is.
They did not merely question the storm.
They questioned His care.
Why?
Because Jesus wasn’t responding the way they thought someone who cared should respond.
The storm was raging.
Jesus was silent.
Therefore:
Don’t You care?
How often do we make the same conclusion?
God hasn’t changed the situation.
Does He care?
God hasn’t answered the prayer.
Does He care?
God hasn’t stopped the thing frightening me.
Does He care?
But here’s what makes the story so striking:
Jesus was physically in the boat.
They were questioning His care while sitting only a few feet away from Him.
His silence did not mean His absence.
His sleeping did not mean His indifference.
And the storm did not mean they had somehow sailed outside the reach of God.
Sometimes the Storm Makes Us Forget Who Is in the Boat
When something becomes frightening enough, it can consume our field of vision.
All we see is the storm.
All we hear is the wind.
All we feel is the boat moving underneath us.
And suddenly the circumstances become more convincing than the presence of God.
We begin interpreting God through the storm instead of interpreting the storm through what we know about God.
The disciples knew Jesus.
They had seen Him perform miracles.
They had heard Him teach.
They had watched His authority.
But fear narrowed their perspective.
And perhaps that happens to us too.
When life becomes painful enough, we can forget things we knew clearly before the storm began.
We forget God’s faithfulness.
We forget His character.
We forget what He has already brought us through.
We forget what Scripture says.
Not because we deliberately reject those truths.
Sometimes we are simply overwhelmed.
And God knows the difference.
“I Will Never Leave Thee”
One of the strongest assurances in Scripture appears in Hebrews:
“…for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.”— Hebrews 13:5 KJV
Notice what the promise is based upon.
Not:
You will always feel Me.
Not:
You will always understand what I’m doing.
Not:
You will always hear an immediate answer.
Not:
Your circumstances will always confirm My presence.
The promise rests on what God has said.
“I will never leave thee.”
That means there may be seasons when faith requires us to believe God’s statement about His presence more than our feelings about His presence.
That’s not denial.
It isn’t pretending we aren’t hurting.
It is refusing to let a temporary experience rewrite an eternal truth.
What About Jesus on the Cross?
There is perhaps no stronger expression of felt abandonment in Scripture than the cry of Jesus:
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”— Matthew 27:46 KJV
Jesus is quoting Psalm 22.
And Psalm 22 begins with anguish.
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me…?”— Psalm 22:1 KJV
But the psalm does not end there.
Later it says:
“For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.”— Psalm 22:24 KJV
Psalm 22 moves from the experience of abandonment toward confidence in God’s faithfulness.
That doesn’t make the suffering unreal.
Jesus’ suffering on the cross was unimaginably real, and the theology of what was happening there is much deeper than simply saying He felt abandoned.
But even here, Scripture teaches us something important:
The experience of darkness is not the end of the story.
There are moments when God’s purposes are operating at a depth we cannot possibly understand from where we are standing.
The disciples looking at the crucifixion saw catastrophe.
God was accomplishing redemption.
Same event.
Completely different field of vision.
Saturday Looked Like God Had Lost
Think about the day between the crucifixion and resurrection.
We talk a great deal about Friday.
And we celebrate Sunday.
But imagine Saturday.
Jesus is dead.
The tomb is sealed.
The disciples are scattered.
The person they believed was the Messiah has been executed.
There is no resurrection appearance yet.
No empty tomb yet.
No angel announcing:
“He is not here: for he is risen…”— Matthew 28:6 KJV
Just silence.
If you had asked the disciples on Saturday what God was doing, what would they have said?
They didn’t know.
From their perspective, the story appeared to be over.
But heaven had not lost control of the story.
God’s silence on Saturday did not mean God had stopped working.
Sunday was already coming even though the disciples could not see it.
And we have to be careful with that idea.
Not every difficult Saturday in our lives ends with the exact resurrection of the circumstance we wanted.
We cannot promise that every relationship will return, every illness will disappear, every loss will be restored in the way we imagine, or every unanswered question will receive an explanation here.
But the resurrection establishes something much larger:
There is never a moment when darkness gets to write the final conclusion about God.
Maybe We Have Been Looking for Evidence Instead of Presence
This is where I think the question becomes personal.
What evidence do we require before we believe God is near?
An answer?
A feeling?
A sign?
A changed circumstance?
A confirmation?
Someone saying exactly the thing we needed to hear?
What happens when none of those things come?
Can God still be present?
The answer Scripture gives us is yes.
Sometimes God makes His presence unmistakable.
Sometimes He seems hidden.
But His presence is not dependent upon our recognition.
Jacob didn’t recognize Him.
The disciples misunderstood Him.
David sometimes couldn’t feel Him.
Joseph couldn’t see what He was doing.
Mary and Martha couldn’t understand His delay.
And yet God was still present in every story.
Silence May Reveal What We Believe Presence Should Look Like
Maybe part of the difficulty is that we have created a picture of what God’s presence must look like.
If God is with me, the door should open.
If God is with me, this should work.
If God is with me, I’ll know what to do.
If God is with me, I won’t feel this confused.
If God is with me, I won’t have to wait this long.
But where did God promise those things?
Isaiah gave us the picture we looked at in the previous teaching:
“Who is among you that feareth the LORD… that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.”— Isaiah 50:10 KJV
A person can fear God.
Obey God.
Trust God.
And still temporarily walk through a place where they cannot see.
The absence of light is not necessarily the absence of God.
Sometimes faith is recognizing God.
Sometimes faith is trusting Him when we cannot.
God Does Not Need to Continually Prove That He Is Present
That sentence may challenge us.
Because we often ask God for reassurance.
And He graciously gives it many times.
There is nothing wrong with asking:
“Father, remind me that You’re here.”
But relationship eventually grows beyond requiring constant evidence.
Think about human relationships.
If someone we deeply love had to prove every day that they existed, cared about us, and had not abandoned us simply because we couldn’t presently see them, there would be very little trust in that relationship.
Yet sometimes we approach God that way.
Show me something so I know You’re here.
Then tomorrow:
Show me again.
And again.
And again.
But perhaps maturity sometimes looks like saying:
“God, I don’t feel You today. But I know what You have said.”
That isn’t cold faith.
That is rooted faith.
What If God Feels Far Away Right Now?
Then tell Him.
You don’t have to manufacture spiritual language.
David didn’t.
Say:
“God, You feel far away.”
“I don’t understand why You’re quiet.”
“I don’t know what You’re doing.”
“I’m struggling to recognize You here.”
God is not threatened by honest prayer.
But after you tell Him what you feel, remind yourself of what you know.
He has not asked you to pretend.
He has asked you to trust.
And those are very different things.
Trust says:
What I feel is real, but what I feel is not the only thing that is true.
I feel alone.
But God has said He will not forsake me.
I feel forgotten.
But Scripture says He is faithful.
I cannot see what He is doing.
But my inability to see is not proof that He is doing nothing.
I cannot hear an answer.
But silence is not proof of absence.
Perhaps the Question Is Not “Where Is God?”
Maybe sometimes the better question is:
“What am I using as evidence that God is here?”
If the answer is only:
I feel Him.
I hear Him.
My prayers are being answered.
My circumstances are improving.
Then our confidence will always rise and fall with our experiences.
But if the answer becomes:
“God is here because God has said He will not leave me,”
something begins to settle.
Not necessarily the circumstances.
Something settles inside us.
We no longer have to interpret every quiet season as abandonment.
We no longer have to chase signs to convince ourselves He hasn’t disappeared.
We can wait.
We can grieve.
We can ask questions.
We can wrestle.
We can admit we don’t understand.
And still remain.
“Surely the LORD Is in This Place”
I keep coming back to Jacob’s words:
“Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.”
Maybe someday we will say that about seasons we are presently struggling to understand.
God was there.
I just couldn’t recognize Him yet.
God was working.
I just couldn’t see it yet.
God had not abandoned me.
I simply didn’t know how to recognize His presence in that kind of season.
And perhaps there are places in our lives where we will never fully understand what God was doing until eternity.
But we don’t have to understand everything to know this:
Silence and absence are not the same thing.
So when God seems quiet, don’t immediately conclude He has left.
When you cannot see Him, don’t assume He isn’t there.
When you cannot feel Him, don’t rewrite what He has already said.
And when the storm becomes loud enough that God’s silence frightens you, remember the disciples.
Jesus was still in the boat.
Perhaps the question isn’t whether God has disappeared.
Perhaps we are simply learning to trust His presence without requiring Him to continually prove it.
And that brings us to the final question in this series:
What if God is doing something right now that you simply cannot yet recognize?
Because sometimes God isn’t absent.
Sometimes the story just isn’t finished.
Much Love
~Gayla~
Continue Your Journey
If this reflection spoke to you and you’d like to explore further, I invite you into The Secret Place, a place created for deeper time in God’s Word, prayer, reflection, and spiritual growth. There you’ll find Bible studies, devotions, the Prayer Library, The Garden Room, and more.
Enter The Secret Place →
Continue Through My Books
If you enjoy these biblical reflections and would like to continue studying with me, I invite you to explore my books. Each one was written to help you go deeper into Scripture, examine your walk with God, and continue growing in your relationship with Him.
Explore My Books →
Comments