Silence. Silence that literally shouts at you. I have said before that I spent several years on lookout towers when I was young. On Jumbo mountain, where I was stationed for one summer in the middle of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the silence at times would become deafening. There are some who will not understand that, but I find, in my life, I need times of silence. I need silence, except when I communicate with God. The silence of God is troubling to many today. They want conversation and interaction, but God is not on social media nor is He on Instagram. God takes no selfies and then sends them to us.
Do you have time to take your Bible out and look at Psalm 77? The writer {Aspah} is struggling with this very issue. In my NASB Bible. He uses the personal pronoun “I” 18 times. There is a struggle going on inside him and he wants to talk to God about it. Listen to him; “thou hast held my eyelids open, I am so troubled I cannot speak, I have considered the days and years of long ago, my spirit ponders.”
There are times we need to talk to God and receive a positive answer immediately. If we do not receive an answer quickly, we turn to other sources quickly. We do not like the silence of God, and in this day of impatience we quickly forget about God and turn to other sources.
Perhaps in this day of social media, we have forgotten how to talk to God. While studying the life of Abraham some time ago, I found this issue of silence. In all of the Patriarch’s life, I could find but six times when Abraham and God met. It seems to me that Abraham listened to God’s instructions and kept following that instruction until he heard from God again. I just finished re-reading the book of Job. Have you read that book and listened to the silence of God on Jobs behalf? Satan knew what was going on, but God was silent with Job. I can speak from experience; it troubles me when I feel silence from God. It troubles me when a friend and I may be having differences and there is silence. Listen to the words of Saint Paul on this issue of troubles in his life; “We are afflicted but not cast down. We are perplexed but not in despair, we are persecuted but not forsaken, we are struck down but not destroyed”.
Back to Psalm 77, the writer asks himself and God, six very probing questions:
“Will the Lord walk off and leave me”?
“Will he never smile again”?
“Is His love worn threadbare”?
“Has his salvation promise worn out”?
“Has God forgotten His manners”?
“Has He angrily stalked off and left us”? {NASB}
“Then I said, it is my luck that the high God goes out of business just when I need Him”. Some may think I am making this up, but this exactly the way the writer puts it as quoted from “The Message”. These are big questions and they make us look at the core of our lives. They make us examine the main thing, to see if it is still the main thing.
I just finished re-reading Simon Wiesenthal’s book on his times in the death camps of the Nazis as they sought to rid the empire of all Jews. The common saying of the Jews who were in those camps was that “God has left us”. Don’t we all feel that way at times? When my life is going through a crisis and I feel the silence of God, I ask those same six questions that the writer of Psalm 77 asks.
But notice that in verse 11, the Psalmist goes through a change. He has been subjective [looking inward] through all of the first 10 verses. Now, in verse 11, he changes his theme from being subjective to objective [looking beyond himself]. He gets outside of his own life and its troubles and he begins to quote what God has said and who He is. He says,
“You are the God who works wonders”.
“You are the God who makes known thy strength”.
“By thy power thou hast redeemed thy people”.
The author is now seeing beyond the problems he is facing, and he is getting back to reminding himself who God is and what He has done in the past.
Are you going through a difficult time in your life? Are there times when you feel you are all alone and God is silent? That you are all alone in this world, and you are overcome with problems? I write from experiences, for I have gone through periods of my life when God was silent. For a long period of time, I carried 3×5 cards in my shirt pocket. On them were written the promises of God from God’s word. Yes, I felt alone, but if I could not hear God, I could take a card out and read what God has said.
It is so easy to allow the issues of life to overwhelm us. A great challenge of mine is to keep the main thing, the main thing. Do not allow life to overwhelm you and take away your fellowship with God.
I leave you with three suggestions:
Stay objective.
By this I mean, keep track of where you are in life and what life is demanding of you. Do not allow life to diminish who you are in Christ.
Stay focused.
Life must have a goal, an objective as to where we want life to take us.
Persevere in what you believe in.
Do not throw away your faith because of trouble.
Read the last four verses of this Psalm. The writer uses 15 different examples of who God is, despite the trouble he is going through. We must not lose sight of God in the conflicts that life brings us.
