UnansweredSample

God on Mute

What do we do when God seems silent? 

In Scripture God called people by name. God never says, “Hey, you!” God is personal and present. Nonetheless, God can sometimes be silent. Two people who experienced both the personal presence and the silence of God were Abram and Sarah. Actually, they experienced the silence of God not once, but twice. 

Try to imagine that. God had promised Abram that through his descendants all the families of the earth would be blessed (see Gen. 12:3), and yet he and his barren wife waited, sometimes not very patiently, to see God’s promise become reality. Nothing had worked. The first period of God’s silence was 10 years (see Gen. 12–16); the second period of silence, 13 more years (see Gen. 17–18). Abram and Sarah spent nearly 25 years of their lives grappling with God’s silence.

If you had been Abram, what would have been going through your mind?

While it might not be the issue of infertility, we can all point to a time in our lives when we have wondered whether God has forgotten us. Imagine that you were in Abram or Sarai’s place. For many years God had been silent about how and when His covenant with you would be fulfilled. Then God appeared to you and showed you the stars of the sky and gave you a promise about the immeasurable number of offspring you would have. 

Abram struggled with the absence of God’s presence. He worried. He looked elsewhere for answers. Yet, when God finally spoke, illustrating His promise with a beautiful analogy of the stars in the heavens, Abram “believed in the LORD” (15:6, NASB). If you know Abram’s story, you know that God continued to be faithful to them. God gave Abram a son named Isaac and a family line that led to the birth of Christ. Though God may seem silent, He is always at work. 

Part of having faith is recognizing that God is always at work—even though He may appear to be silent. We can express our faith and open ourselves to the work He wants to do in our character as we wait.