In this episode, CCEF faculty discuss the often painful experience of feeling that God is silent. They explore the emotional turmoil and spiritual distress that accompanies this silence, particularly during prolonged suffering, and how it can lead to feelings of abandonment and doubt. They talk about how Scripture provides a framework for understanding and processing this experience of silence, and they discuss the commonality of this struggle among Christians. Ultimately, we hope this episode encourages you to trust in God's faithfulness, even when his presence feels distant, and to find solace in the stories of others who have endured similar trials.

Mentioned in this episode: Download free audio from 8 conference sessions on the topic of guilt and shame here.

00:00 Introduction and Giveaway Announcement
01:00 Exploring the Silence of God
04:40 The Pain of Perceived Abandonment
07:01 Commonality of the Experience
11:08 Is God Uncaring?
17:01 Psalms as Prayer
19:47 God's Purpose in Silence
27:13 Faith Amid Silence
33:55 Conclusion and Prayer

Hello, and welcome to our CCEF podcast, Where Life and Scripture Meet. My name is Gunner Gunderson, and I'm serving as the Dean of Faculty here at CCEF. I'm here with my colleagues, Esther Liu and Darby Strickland. And before we get to our topic for today, I just wanted to mention that we are giving away eight free audio sessions this summer on the topic of guilt and shame. And you can access those free downloads by signing up for our weekly email.

The sessions will include topics like self-esteem and perfectionism, midlife crisis, shyness, and many more. And you can find the link for that download in our show notes or by going to our website at ccef.org. Our topic for today is something that's probably more commonly experienced than we often share, but it's the topic of when God is silent or when God seems silent, when God feels silent to us. And the way I'd like to start is just by exploring the experience of sensing that God is silent, or not sensing that he's with us or near. Can we just talk for a minute about that experience? How would you all describe what that experience is like?

I certainly see this come up often with people who are in particularly prolonged seasons of suffering and distress that seems unrelenting in seasons where prayers seem to go unanswered when, yeah, we're seeking God for wisdom, for clarity, for strength, for change in circumstances, etc. And it feels like God isn't interested in hearing our cries or responding to them in a way that makes sense to us. And they're in that place of vulnerability of asking the Lord and not knowing or not experiencing his activity and his love and his care. Then comes an experience of, “I feel like God is silent. I feel like he's far away.”

I think if we survey the Psalms, at least when I think about it, one of the psalmist's biggest fears is that the Lord has turned his face from him. Just feeling that the Lord isn't different to your suffering. It's really lonely, it's isolating. Often people think, “Is it something I've done?” Maybe we feel false guilt, maybe there's real guilt there to be dealt with, and it's just foundational shaking. You're already at a really low point, and you're seeking him, and you're feeling that your hurt hasn't moved him. And that's, yeah, that just compounds sorrow.

Just hearing it described is a pretty striking experience. One of the words that both of you mentioned was “seeking” or “pursuing” the Lord. And that's where we want the focus of our conversation to be today—not necessarily on situations where there is a hard-heartedness and a recalcitrance, or a spirit of prolonged lack of repentance or refusal to repent, or maybe a season where we're just refusing community and we’re completely isolating ourselves and turning away from these resources that God has provided. Not those kinds of situations where we have these things where we're turning away from the Lord, but rather seasons where we're actively seeking him, and we're pursuing him. We're seeking anything from wisdom—or, I love the phrase that you used, Esther, “a change in circumstances,” seeking for something to be alleviated or changed or different. And we sense maybe nothing coming in response. That's really what we want our focus to be as we have the conversation here. I think of Job 30:20 when he says, “I cry to you for help and you do not answer me. I stand and you only look at me. And that last phrase really captured my attention as I thought about this experience of silence. I stand there and you only look at me. And both the experience you mentioned Darby of this fear that the Lord would turn his face away from us. And then the way Job describes it metaphorically as, “You actually see me and…there's nothing.” And all of the questions that creates. Can we talk a little bit about why that sense or that experience of silence hurts? How it can impact us?

Yeah, I think the example you gave from Job speaks to that beautifully because you're quoting from chapter 30, right? There's already been a long season of him crying out, and hearing nothing in return from the Lord. So, I just think that this experience isn't usually a matter of days or even weeks. It's often like a very prolonged period, and so it’s just the feeling of abandonment, right? And the longer that goes on, just feeling left or feeling judged. Like “I am out of favor with the Lord, and he does not delight in caring for me anymore.” I think those are probably the two experiences that I hear about most in my counseling room.

And I feel like just the dissonance of it…we have all these promises from God. We have all these Scriptural answers for God is faithful, God is present, God is near, God speaks. And so when our lived experience doesn't seem to align with what God promises in his Word, you do start to wonder what's going wrong here. “Is it me? Is it him? Is it something else?” And there are just all these unanswered questions and wrestlings of how to understand it. So even just the confusion and the gap between lived reality and all these things that we see in Scripture that don't make sense given what we're going through, and this experience can be really painful and confusing. And I think both of you kind of highlighted this, but as your guys were talking about indifference or reading Job, I thought of a counselee who was experiencing a season of feeling like God was silent. And the metaphor and illustration that she used was, “I feel like I'm falling off my bike, and God is my Father who's just standing there, watching me get hurt, but not coming to me.” And so even just that—the sense of loneliness, the sense of “I need help,” but help is nowhere to be found. And even help from someone that says he will help in Scripture. It just leads to a lot of deep sorrow and distress that makes so much sense in the world. It's really hard.

I think one of our temptations in seasons like this and other kinds of similar seasons is to believe that this experience is rare, and to believe that we're experiencing this in isolation, that we're the only ones, or we're the rare exception. I think it's one of Satan's greatest strategies is to convince us that we're the only ones having the experience that we're having, or sensing the things that we're sensing. Do you think that's true about this particular struggle? Is it really rare that believers have this experience, or is it more common? How would you speak to that if someone felt like, “It seems like I'm the only one.”

I think the cries are housed in Scripture for an important reason: because it is common. Some people I think are going to have longer seasons of it, or more intense suffering, but I think God puts the cries there. “How long will you turn your face from me? How long, Lord? Will you remain silent forever?” You know, they're peppered throughout the Psalms because he knows his people need them, which says to me—yeah, this is an experience of a Christian. But I think what’s hard is that, not only is what Esther's saying true—we see these things in Scripture, telling us who the Lord is—but often our community isn't in that same season. And so we are comparing ourselves to people around us who aren't experiencing that in the moment. So we're in a church on a Sunday morning and other people are speaking vibrantly about their faith, or they're testifying to his comfort, and when we're in a season where he feels silent, we're noticing those things even more, right? Because we are like the child who's feeling left out. We're just going to have a propensity to notice how our community seems to be feeling something and experiencing something different. So I think the experience in and of itself makes us prone to see the world differently and highlight our difference in the moment that we're living in but I think most Christians experience this type of season throughout their life.

Yeah, I really like that point, Darby, that you made of just the comparison component. I think the experience is more common than maybe some may realize. I think that's because sometimes it can be a sense of shame in feeling that way—of like, “I'm an inferior Christian for feeling that God is silent. Like these other people seem to have a vibrant face, and they have these really engaging quiet times, and just feel so many answered prayers. It can be tempting to be like, “Oh their Christian life, their faith, their, yeah, it just seems better and mine, and there's something wrong with mine.” And so it's easier to kind of hide that, sometimes pretend like, “Oh no, like I'm like that too,” or even to just keep that to ourselves that really we felt like God has been far away for a long time in our lives. And I think the other component of why it may seem rare for Christians to experience this is because I think there have been a lot of Christians who have shared their honest experiences of faith that haven't been this vibrant, “all is well” thing. And sometimes even some something like, “Yeah, I feel like God has been silent. I feel like he hasn't been answering my prayers. I feel like he's been indifferent to my suffering and it's really hard…” How often that can be met with answers and platitudes and, “No, you should have more faith. You just need to have more faith. You just need to pray more.” And that can kind of keep people in their shell of sharing that this is where I'm really at, and this is what I'm struggling with. And so, I imagine some of the rarity could be some of the hindrances of being able to share openly that this is the experience that I'm going through in any given season.

With any experience, we often talk about how we don't just experience something, we don't just sense something, but we also interpret it. And we have thoughts and evaluations about what's going on. And that can be related to ourselves, to the Lord, to the world around us—seeking to interpret our actual situation and what's going on, and why we're in this situation or why it's extended or it's lasting so long. Can we talk a little bit about interpretation of this experience? When God does feel silent, what are some things that we can tend to believe about him?

I feel like a common one is that “His access is…I don't think God cares about me. He must not care. If he did, he would do something about this thing that's really hard. And he's not.”

I think that's where the dissonance comes in because we know who the Lord is, we know what he's capable of doing for his children. So if our experience feels like he's choosing not to provide comfort, we have probably a pretty big indictment of “Why is he failing me?” And I think it can be filled in all the way to “He's cruel. He's uncaring.” Or to more bending it on ourselves. “He's displeased with me.” So I think we fill in the gap in a lot of different ways. I think it's just really important for each of us to be aware of, yeah, how does it change what we think about who the Lord is when we haven't heard from him?

I know someone who's very close to me who has gone through a lot in life and...they've said several different times at this point, “I often at this point in my life feel like God just doesn't like me. He just doesn't like me.” And this person is in God's word consistently and in biblical community, and has authentic friendships, and is mature about being open about their life, and has other people who are open about their lives with them, and they minister to them. And, in other words, they're not in a situation where they're cutting themselves off from all the various sources of ways that God might communicate with us, influence us, shape us by his Spirit, and particularly through his word. But that would be how they would say it. And when they say it, they're not saying, “This is my final belief; this is my ultimate belief about who God is,” but it is how they significantly, substantially feel. And that can certainly shape an interpretation of who God is as they go along their way.

I think an example of this is in Psalm 77:9. Before this verse in Psalm 77, there's these different kind of bemoanings, if you will, or groanings about “I’m reaching out to God. I'm stretching out my hand all night. My spirit refuses to be comforted.” This clear sense of, “I am going through it, I'm reaching out to God, and I'm just not getting resolution in response." And then Psalm 77:9 is this question, and baked into the question are all these speculative interpretations about God. Like maybe it's that this is what you're doing, or what you're not doing, or who you are,  or what's happened in light of my experience. And the question is, Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he, in anger, shut up his compassion?” And I hear so many different things baked into that. “Has God forgotten to be gracious? His promise to Israel to be filled with steadfast love and to keep his covenant?” And then also, “Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” I hear in that something like, “Have I done something wrong that's made the Lord angry? And therefore, he has almost shut off this feature of who he is, or shut off this attribute…to where that attribute is silent as it pertains to me.” And I'm not saying all those ways of talking are accurate about the Lord, but they are baked into these questions that the psalmist is acknowledging he actually has.

I like that you're rooting it in a Psalm, right? Trying to figure out your own heart and the Lord's heart for you when we're not sure. Not leaving it up to our own interpretations, right? Actually opening Scripture to help us interpret our thoughts. Psalm 13 kind of starts similarly, like, “How long, O Lord, like are you gonna forget me forever?” And then verse two just, it models that or speaks of that inner world chaos, like when your emotions are leading you astray. It's talking about, you know, “How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?” You know, that's that we're going to listen to ourselves in this season. It's just going to create so much more chaos. Yeah, when we're wrestling with our own emotions, we really can't think clearly. We're not good theologians when our lived experience is informing who we are and who the Lord is. And again, Scripture is just really clear that that's just something we're all prone to do. So I think finding a Psalm that echoes where your heart is starting is just super helpful because it can give us insights as to where we're starting. And then pretty soon we start to hear, “Oh, the Lord is actually talking to me. He's speaking into this. He might not feel close. My pain might not be gone. But he is shaping how I'm thinking.” And that, I think, just helps us make those incremental changes over time that lead us back in a way where his nearness is easier to be seen.

Darby, when think about what you're sharing about the Psalms and how they work, there's a sense in which a part of a psalm that resonates with our experience, perhaps of God's distance or our feelings of his distance. It locates us somewhere, but then it doesn't leave us in that place because a Psalm is an emerging prayer, where the prayer itself has a structure and a flow to it. It's going in a direction. Fundamentally, it's going to the Lord, taking us to the Lord in prayer, but it also has more than that moment, and more than that particular verse or that particular line. And Psalm 77 is such a great example of that. Just returning to that Psalm 77:9, “Has God in anger shut up his compassion?” It's right after that, that the Psalm itself turns; and the psalmist starts to reflect on different things that then causes me as the prayer of the Psalm to start reflecting on different things. And now there's a sense in which the voice changes and it's no longer the psalmist who is in a sense crying out to the Lord about the groaning and the unheardness of his voice, but is now starting to reflect on what God has done, and the consistent character God has demonstrated, and the hope that the psalmist starts to have cultivated in his heart: that the faithful God of the past will continue and is being faithful in the present, even if that faithfulness is not emotionally felt at this moment. And then that will continue on into the future, which I think is a really striking thing in Psalm 77. And one of my favorite verses is in Psalm 77:19. He says at the very end, reflecting on the Exodus, “Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters, yet your footprints were unseen.” And it's this picture of God leading his people through the water. But if you travel through a sea, it's this image of, well, your footprints won't be picked up. Or even after he leads them through the waters, return back on the heads of their enemies. There's a sense in which you can't even look back on that sea crossing and see exactly what happened because the sea came back over it. And there has to be this remembrance by faith of what God has done, and then this confidence. The other thing that verse highlights for me is the sense of mystery that there are just ways of the Lord that we can't perfectly and fully know. And that's where faith comes in, and rest and trust. Do you think that God uses seasons like this to increase any particular things in our lives or to give us any particular experiences that are important for us going forward?

And if so, what might some of those things be that you've seen, or that you've seen other people see that you've sought to help? What might God be doing in these kinds of situations where he seems so distant or he seems silent to us?

I think that's such an interesting question. And I want to pause on the word “might,” right? Because oftentimes we want there to be a purpose in our suffering. Like, “What am I supposed to be learning? What am I getting out of this?” And I know when I work with people who have been crushed by the world, when they feel like there's a lesson to be learned, I feel like it adds such a weight and a burden to suffering. I would say it's almost cruel. So I know you're not asking that in a cruel sense.

But I just want to say that like, so sometimes, so I would answer your question, sometimes, I think sometimes, right? But not all the time. And that I think goes back to that mystery. I think some people that I work with have been beautifully shaped by suffering. They've gone through seasons, years in fact, where God has felt silent and they come out the other side, just beautifully shaped with a deeper trust of the Lord. And because we know he's always at work, glorifying us, and shaping us into his Son, would I know that it's this one season of, you know, with this aspect of the Lord feeling absent? I don't know, but I just know he does use these things. But I just wouldn't want that these always have to be the purpose, like “What am I supposed to be getting out of this silence?” Because silence just feels like agony and pain. And yeah, if I'm alone in the midst of something really weighty, and I don't feel that the Lord is speaking to me, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be learning. So I just feel like that's such a burden. 

So yeah, I would speak to somebody in that season maybe five years from now, you know, go back and ask, “What do you think the Lord had done?” But in the midst of it, I sometimes find that to be an unhelpful thing to try to hang on to. Even I guess when we're thinking of these Psalms, they're beautiful and they're helpful, but most people I walk with can only live in the first two verses of them. They're not ready to move on through it, right? They just are in the beginning. So I think it's even just helpful that Psalms weren't written in a day, right? They're a summary of an experience. So yeah, I just want to be gentle in conveying that to people who are. So I think the temptation is, what do I need to do to get back in favor with the Lord? What do I need to do to hear him again? And we can't always conjure that. There is no formula. 

Yeah, I hear you saying two very important things. One is to be careful of oversimplified reductionistic answers to the question, “What might God be doing? Well, here are the things that he does in scripture, in trials. Here are the things he says. And so those are the things he's doing and we accept those and we kind of chin up and keep going.” And those kinds of things…maybe even biblical categories, but an oversimplified, reductionistic way of speaking to people or expecting that of ourselves. And then the other was, I think what I heard you emphasizing was we want to be careful of assuming that we must and can identify some sort of lesson right now that God is teaching us or that he's instilling in us at this time. That it's an emerging story, and that there are things that God shows us over time, oftentimes, I would assume, into eternity that we don't know now. And we must continue to rest in him in the midst of the mystery. Is that at all reflecting, resonating with what you're sharing? Those couple of categories, the oversimplistic, and then like “We've got to be concrete and make sure that we know what it is right now that we're learning or supposed to be learning?”

Yes, and I think it's just because a sense of God wants to lift those burdens with us. He doesn't want to add to our burden, right? And so we want to be able to start with him with the cry of where our heart is today, not forcing ourselves to see where we should be, right? God is so kind that He meets us where we are. And I think sufferers, myself included, really struggle with when I'm messy, when I'm feeling distant from the Lord, we struggle to feel like we can bring that to him. And that's exactly what he asks his children to do. Start where you are. And right now you're feeling abandoned or rejected. So talk to me about that. Don't talk to me about…we don't need to talk about what I'm going to do with that. I just want to care for your heart in this moment. And I think we struggle as humans to feel loved in such a way that someone wants to love us where we are, not where we think they would want us to be.

Yeah, I certainly think of personal seasons where God felt particularly silent, and remembering that one of the common refrains for me in those seasons was like, “I can't see what you're doing.” And genuinely being perplexed and uncertain and having not a clue of like, “This way makes so much sense. If you did it this way, it would make so much sense. And yet you're not doing it that way. I can't see what you're doing. I can't see any good that is coming out of the silence, out of these unanswered prayers.” And I think that sentiment persisted for long periods of time and I feel like there is something about hindsight, but I think that's what you're saying Darby, of living in that story. I needed permission to live in the first two verses during that season, and I didn't need to rush myself or force myself into verse three of the Psalm when things pivot. God gave me permission to live in those two verses where things are hard, where things are confusing, where God seems far away, where he seems like he's forsaken me and I have no idea what he's doing.

And I do feel like there's something about hindsight. There's something about later on, that it's like “All these things that God was doing, there's no way I could have seen that in that season. And if I had tried to, or if I had forced myself to, I would have been crushed under that weight.” So there is something about story that I've really appreciated as well. The fact that it's a journey, the fact that we're not gonna have all the answers today, and we shouldn't. And what does it mean to trust in the Lord that he's writing a story that truly is good, even if I don't understand any of it today. And a call to faith in the unseen, I feel like is so much of the call sometimes when God feels silent.

It's making me think of that ending of Psalm 77 that I mentioned earlier, that the psalmist there looks back on this story where God was faithful and he reflects on it, but that's not his story in the moment. He's looking back on another story and seeing God's character expressed in God's covenant kept in that particular story, where God's guidance in a profound way was seen and experienced by his people in that event that was passed down from generation to generation in their memory. And then implicitly, he's believing by faith that that same God will be faithful in his story. But it's not that he sees all of the way that it's playing out right now in his story. He's simply believing that those same characteristics of God—because God is faithful to his people generation after generation—will also be applied to his story and are being applied to his story, even if he can't see it, even if he can't feel it, even if he can't hear it at this time. And that's a really interesting, I think, way to see how the stories of old, and who God is, apply to ours, but in a way that does require us to be patient. It doesn't give an instant sort of, “In my story, God must be doing this then.”

But fundamentally, that he's here, that he's faithful, that he's loving, that he is compassionate, and that he is at work. But I don't know all the specific lessons that I will have learned looking back, or ways that he will show himself in hindsight—whether that be a year, or a decade, or only when I see him in glory that he'll show me what he was doing. So there's a patience in it all.

And as we kind of think of this topic, I've obviously thought of a lot of people that I've encountered, along with my own life, where I've experienced God's silence. I’m obviously counseling a lot of people who are coming in, feeling that way and feeling discouraged by it, and feeling dismayed by it. And I think there is something to now that I've been doing this for a number of years that I can look back and I can look at those people, and I can say with sincerity that those people are my heroes in the faith. That they weren't deficient in their faith and that's why they felt like God was silent. They're people that I admire because of that patience, because of that endurance, because of that long-suffering, because they had every reason to turn away from God in the sense of, he's not answering, he's silent, he seems like he doesn't care. He's not doing anything about this thing that I so desperately want to be different and he could. And there's all these things of, in some sense, it's like you have every reason to kind of go off and give up on God in a sense. And yet seeing a faith that persists in the midst of it, seeing people turn to him again and again, imperfectly, inconsistently, ups and downs, of course.

But now when I look back on those people who have experienced God's silence, they're some of the most faithful Christians that I know. They're some of the most devoted people that I know to Christ, and their faith in the midst of God's silence is beautiful. And so, yeah, as you're speaking of patience and endurance and all that that requires to live in that season of God's silence, it does take a lot. And there's a fortitude that is so beautiful that can't be put into words. And so, yeah, I almost just want to give a shout out to all the people that I've gotten to witness their faith in it. And it was messy, but it was so beautiful and so glorious.

Makes me think of Hebrews 11 and that beautiful rendition, if you will, walkthrough, of people who didn't see the promises. They didn't sense, if you will, what God was doing. But they believed him, and they put one foot in front of the other. And even at the end of that chapter, we're told that God did not, in their time, bring everything to completion, did not bring everything to resolution, didn't bring it all to fulfillment. And yet there is this remarkable faith as they walked with him through things that are unimaginable when I actually go back through that chapter. And I agree—those folks that have struggled so well, there is such a nobility in it. And you see clearly in scripture how the Lord takes such pleasure in those who wait on him to use the language of the Psalms and who hope in him and for him. I remember a seminary professor who said, “The mark of the saint is not how well we're doing, but what we do when we're not doing well.”

And that's helped me a lot of times, that it's not my own self assessment, even of how well I'm doing, but where am I turning when I'm not doing well?

I think that takes you right back to Psalm 77, right? When that wasn't his lived experience, he went back and looked at what the Lord had done. He's remembering past faithfulness. I think for some people in the season of silence, whether it's going back in their own lives and remembering a time that felt very different and the Lord was present and helpful, whether it's turning into scripture, saying, recounting on the Lord's faithfulness, whether it's even just looking at, yeah, someone else's story in your community and seeing his faithfulness. Sometimes it's just really helpful to recall his goodness and his faithfulness. When we don't feel it manifested in our lives, God gives us many other places to look for it and to borrow other people's faith when ours feels weaker.

My hope is that this conversation could be one way of offering some perspectives that could function as that borrowed faith, knowing that we all go through seasons where we need other voices to share their stories, to share Scripture, to share testimony, or just to listen, and to sit, and to weep, and to understand, and to be there. Our hope is that not only this episode, but this podcast, could serve in that way of a joint conversation showing that God continues to work among his people, and that God continues to shower his compassion through one another.

And so thank you again for joining us on Where Life and Scripture Meet. We hope you've been blessed. I'd love to finish with a prayer for those of you who may, at this moment, be feeling like God is silent and for whom this conversation has not really offered any particular resolution that you were hoping for when you clicked on it, or when it came up in your feed. So let me pray for you. 

Heavenly Father, we hold our souls up to you and acknowledge that by your grace, through faith, you are our God and we are your people. And I plead Lord for those who are experiencing a sense of silence or distance, those who continue to seek you, who continue to knock on the door, who continue to simply cry out to you and don't sense anything in response. I do pray that you would reveal yourself to them, that you would bring comfort to them, that you would give them the strength to put one foot in front of another. I pray that you would maintain the softness of their hearts. I pray that you would communicate to them a sense of your pleasure, a sense of your promises being true. I pray that you would give them comfort: that the story of all of your children does end well, that all your promises will be fulfilled, that no matter how long it takes, Lord, we will see those promises fulfilled in due time when we see Christ. Would you help them simply today and not to worry about tomorrow, but to trust your grace for right now. In Jesus's name, amen.