Don't Lose Heart By Jason MeyerShembull

What to Do When You Feel God is Absent

The fact that God sometimes seems small is not the only problem we face. Sometimes God seems far away or far removed from our lives. We desperately search for God’s presence in our lives, but we can’t seem to find Him. He feels distant or even absent. 

A close friend of mine had to face the heart-wrenching realities of cancer. The chemotherapy, the hair loss, the nausea, the fatigue, the uncertainty of life, the medical bills, and the constant pain all took a toll on his fight for hope, but he said the single hardest struggle of all was walking through these things with an aching sense of God’s absence at times. The feeling that God was not there for him in his struggles was far worse than all the other burdens combined.

God gets right to the point in addressing that lie in the book of Isaiah. Many of us have struggled with exactly the same complaint that the Israelites expressed in chapter 49. They heard Isaiah declare that God was powerful and wise, but they doubted His presence. They felt abandoned, so they cried out in anguish, “The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me” (Isaiah 49:14).

God continued to assure the despairing people of Israel with this beautiful word picture: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (49:16). It was fairly common in the ancient world for a master’s name to be tattooed on his servant. 

But it is with this point that the power of the gospel blows away all our expectations. Never would one see the name of a servant tattooed on their master. That would put the master in the role of the servant, and who could imagine a master devoting his life to serve?

Christians imagine a master like this, because the High King of heaven became a servant to save His people. The enemy of your soul, Satan, feeds you half lies. He delights to put your sin in your face and render you defeated—don’t make an agreement with that lie. “God made [us] alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13–14).

Check the score. As a child of God, you bear your sins no more. God removed it from you “as far as the east is from the west” (Ps. 103:12). 

Do you see the greatness of God in the cross of Jesus Christ?