📖 The Book of Psalms — Unit 8: Psalm 28, When God Is Silent

1. The Pain of Silence

I do not care much for thunderstorms. The lightning around here can do real damage; one strike a while back knocked out three modems in our house. But the most irritating part comes when I am in the middle of a program and the screen suddenly goes blank, and a message pops up saying the signal cannot be received. There I sit with a fine dish, a television, and all the wires — and nothing but silence. We live with constant, pervasive background noise, and we have grown so accustomed to it that we feel uncomfortable without it. Silence can be painful, and never more so than when it is the silence of God.

Oh, how we would like to be like Moses, to whom God spoke from a burning bush; or like Elijah, who carried on a running conversation with the Lord; or like Christ, who often went off alone to be with His Father. Instead there are seasons when we cry out and heaven seems quiet. The trials we face are real — cancer is real, divorce is real, death is real, pain is real — and in the middle of them the silence of God can leave us upset, confused, and heartbroken, our faith suddenly up for grabs. Psalm 28 is the prayer of a man in exactly that place: "To You I will cry, O LORD my Rock: do not be silent to me." Why is God sometimes silent? Scripture offers at least three answers.

2. Silent Because We Must Experience Him

We experience the world through five senses — sight and hearing, touch, taste, and smell. A newborn must learn to use them; his eyes do not yet focus and he does not understand sound. But none of those senses reaches God, for God is Spirit. We can only use the language of the senses to describe Him to others — we say He "speaks" to us, that we keep our "eyes" on Him. To truly experience God, we must learn a different kind of attention. Think of young Samuel, given to the Lord and raised in the temple under Eli. One night he heard a voice and ran to Eli, who had not called him. It happened again, and a third time, until Eli understood and told the boy, "When you hear it again, say, 'Speak, LORD, for Your servant is listening.'" That posture — quiet, attentive, ready — is how the soul learns to hear God.

There is a true story of a man born blind who grew up, lived on his own, and played hockey. Then he fell in love, and his sweetheart learned of an operation that might give him sight. He had the surgery, but when the bandages came off he was terrified. His brain had never processed sight, and the flood of sensation overwhelmed him; he shut his eyes tight and asked, "Is this what sight is like?" It took months to learn to use what his eyes were now giving him. So it is with God. When we want to experience Him, we usually close our eyes and find a quiet place, turning off the other senses that distract us, so that the spiritual sense can learn to perceive Him.

3. The Grace Hidden in Silence

This is the secret hidden inside God's silence: it is often grace. It is one of His ways of getting our attention when we are distracted by a thousand other things. The very pain of the silence stirs a hunger that pushes us toward Him, into the arms of Jesus Christ — who, by the way, is the only person who ever lived who heard the total, deafening silence of God. Nailed to the cross, He cried, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" and that cry was answered by nothing but silence, so that ours never need be.

4. Silent Because We Haven't Tuned In

When I listen to the radio, I am tuned almost always to one station. My sons once wondered why I had never set the other channels; the truth is I keep it on the one I want to hear. We live in a world of distractions, with so many labor-saving devices that we are about to wear ourselves out keeping them all running. We do not know what to do with silence; if it gets too quiet we reach for the television or the radio. But to hear the voice of God we have to listen through the silence. And God does not usually shout. The Scripture says He speaks in a still, small voice — a voice easily drowned out by the cacophony of the world's seductive noise.

A man once lost his valuable watch in an ice house. His fellow workers searched diligently, combing every inch of the place, but could not find it. A little boy heard about the search and, during the lunch hour, slipped inside and quickly came out with the watch. The amazed men asked, "How did you find it?" He said, "I simply went in, closed the door, lay down quietly on the floor, and listened. After a while I could hear the tick, tick, tick of the watch." Some things can only be heard in stillness.

5. Tuned to His Frequency

Another reason we miss God's voice is that our ears are not tuned to His frequency. It is not that He is silent; it is that we have forgotten what His voice sounds like, and so we miss it.

6. Silent Because We Have Turned Away

There is a third reason for the silence, and it is the hardest: sometimes we have turned away. When Adam sinned in the garden, he hid himself, and God came calling, "Adam, where are you?" — not because God had lost him, but because Adam had hidden. Unconfessed sin, or a settled pattern of sin, plugs up our ears so that even when God is speaking we cannot hear Him.

In college I came down with a severe case of strep throat, so bad that the infection spread to my inner ears and I was actually going deaf. At one point the doctors removed astonishingly large plugs of wax from my ears — and suddenly I could hear again. Sin works like that. Left unchecked, it spreads like an infection and stops up the ears of faith. But God in His graciousness convicts us, and when we act on that conviction, turning to Him in repentance and confessing our sin, He graciously unstops our ears. Then we discover He had been speaking to us all along; we simply could not — or would not — hear Him.

7. Sowing, Reaping, and the Chastening of a Father

Two of God's laws help us understand His silence. The first is the law of sowing and reaping: "whatever a man sows, that he will also reap" (Galatians 6:7). This is a universal law. Even the thief on the cross, fully forgiven, still had to bear the consequences of his sinful life. Forgiveness restores the relationship; it does not always cancel the harvest. The second is the law of chastening, which applies only to God's children. When David sinned, the prophet Nathan told him he would not die, but that the child born to him would. David prayed and fasted seven days, and still God was silent and the child died (2 Samuel 12). Sometimes God's silence toward us is the loving discipline of a Father who is correcting a course we cannot yet see is wrong.

That is the prayer for a season of silence: not to demand that God speak on our terms, but to ask Him to show us what is wrong and how to make it right.

8. Turning Back to the God Who Speaks

The great Scottish teacher William Barclay observed that real turning, real repentance, always involves two movements: a turning from something and a turning toward something. We turn from the sin and noise and distraction that stopped our ears, and we turn toward the God who has been speaking all along. There were four hundred silent years between the last prophet and John the Baptist — and then God spoke His final and fullest Word, His Son. He is never as silent as He seems.

If you are in a season when heaven seems quiet, do not conclude that God has abandoned you. He may be teaching you to experience Him beyond the senses; He may be inviting you to be still and tune your heart to His frequency; He may be calling you, like Adam, back from a place you have wandered. In every case the answer is the same: draw near. Be still. Confess what needs confessing. And say with Samuel, "Speak, LORD, for Your servant is listening." The God who broke four hundred years of silence with the cry of a newborn in Bethlehem has not stopped speaking to those who will quiet themselves to hear.

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