DAILY DEVOTIONAL – September 17, 2019
“What God Doesn’t Say”
Prayer: Jesus, You are the Word of God made flesh. You came to speak the very words of God to us; His words that give life and salvation. Lord we admit that there are times in our distress that we feel the words You have given us are not enough. God in Your mercy and by Your Spirit help us to always remember that You speak to us always and in many ways. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear Your faithfulness to us. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
Scripture: Psalm 22:1-5
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.
3 Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
4 In you our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried and were rescued;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame.
Devotional – “What God Doesn’t Say”
The sure hope and certainty of salvation that we know and trust as believers comes from the fact that God has indeed spoken and continues to speak through His Word. God’s promises that we find preserved by the Holy Spirit in the Word of God have proven 100% true. In addition to the Word God has given us that we can read and hold in our hands, God comes even closer still and speaks to our hearts through His Holy Spirit that He has given to us in the waters of our baptism. Just as Peter proclaimed in his first sermon in Acts 2, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
But what about those times in life where we pray and pray, we persist in faith that God has promised to hear our prayers and even answer our prayers, but yet the only reply we seem to get is silence? We know God is with us, but He couldn’t seem farther away.
I’m pretty confident in saying that every believer, myself included, has experienced the joy and have been greatly comforted by the words that God has spoken and given to us. I’m equally confident that we all have also been left paralyzed by what God hasn’t said.
This is exactly the outcry of David in our text for today from Psalm 22 when he says:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.
If you have never heard the song entitled “The Silence of God” by Andrew Peterson, make sure you do so. Outside of the words of Scripture, I’m not sure the experience of God’s silence could be any better articulated in the lyrics of the song or felt in its melodies. The lyrics begin by saying:
It’s enough to drive a man crazy; it’ll break a man’s faith
It’s enough to make him wonder if he’s ever been sane
When he’s bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heaven’s only answer is the silence of God
The unbelieving world would have us believe that God is silent, because God doesn’t have a voice to speak with – because God is absent. He is not there. And truth be told, in the midst of the arid desert of heaven’s silence it can certainly seem that way. However, it only seems that way. God has promised to and is always speaking to us. When it seems that God is silent, I assure you my friends, He is not.
If you are at all familiar with the story and book of Job, you will know that Job knew a thing or two about the silence of God. The whole book deals with living in and through those times when we feel we need to hear God clearly and directly but are only deafened by the noise of our hurting and pain. The shocking end to the book of Job is that although God spoke a lot in the end, Job never really received an answer to the question he so badly wanted to be answered. Yet, just because Job didn’t hear God’s answer, doesn’t mean one wasn’t given. Part of God’s answer came through Elihu who spoke to Job and said in 33:14, “God does speak – again and again He speaks – but we don’t always perceive it.”
God is always speaking. Through the Word He has put in our hands, through the millions of sermons preached each week, through creation itself, and yes, even through the silence of what God hasn’t said. What we perceive as silence from God, is just that. What we perceive to be silence. It’s all about perception. Or maybe to better help illustrate the point here, I should say it’s all about reception…
Have you ever been on a road trip, driving across the country? The sun is shining, your wheels or rolling free, windows down and some good tunes playing through the speakers. Then it happens. It starts with intermittent static and crackling. Then that fuzzy white noise increases steadily, ruining that song your listening to, until it’s completely lost and replaced with a cacophony of sporadic voices as the radio scrambles to find some reliable signal. As miserable as this situation is, it didn’t happen because the radio station you were listening to stopped playing music or went of air. It happened because the reception failed. Whether it be a big mountain, bad weather, or just being out of range, that song is still playing but our reception has failed.
What’s true of radio reception is also true of our spiritual perception. God never goes “off air”. He is always speaking to us and always answering prayer, but sometimes, our perception is compromised. Whether that be by our own sinfulness and doubt or the result of our own thoughts being scrambled and drowned out by the static of our circumstances, we all, like David and Job, have those times when we perceive God to be silent. But He is still very much with us and very much speaking to us.
Though we may perceive God’s silence as the absence of an answer, or as God’s absence altogether, the truth is we know that even silence is an answer. I am sure you have heard these sayings before:
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but yet, “familiarity breeds contempt.” God never leaves us or forsakes us and is indeed always with us and speaking to us, but sometimes God will answer us and speak to us through silence in order to draw us closer to Himself; closer still so that we may receive more of what God wants to give us out of His goodness and mercy. I very much like what Jon Blook said about this in an article he wrote about this same topic. Jon makes the astute observation that, “Deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens desire. And the more heightened the desire, the greater its satisfaction will be. It is the mourning that will know the joy of comfort (Matthew 5:4). It is the hungry and thirsty that will be satisfied (Matthew 5:6). Longing makes us ask, emptiness makes us seek, silence makes us knock.”
You see my friends, we only perceive God’s silence to be the absence of an answer, when in fact silence can often times be God’s most gracious and loving reply given to draw us ever closer to His mercy and joy.
Jesus walked to Calvary’s hill and sacrificed Himself on the cross. Nailed to a tree the Son of God Himself was abandoned and forsaken by God in that moment so that through faith in Christ’s death and resurrection you and I would never have to be. Because of what Christ has done for us, God has never and will never abandon us or forsake us, especially in those times when we perceive His silence to be anything other than an answer to prayer.
I’ll encourage you again to listen to Andrew Peterson’s song “The Silence of God.” I’ll close our time together by sharing with you the last words of the song.
And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God
God bless you my friends, have a wonderful and relaxing weekend, and remember that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
