For the last couple of days we’ve been exploring possible reasons why God remains silent, especially, it seems, during the times we need to hear from Him the most. When our world is crashing down around us, in our anguish we cry out,“O God, do not be silent! Do not be deaf. Do not be quiet, O God.” (Psalm 83:1 NLT). Then we listen, but we hear nothing, only deafening silence.
How can this be? How can our Heavenly Father, our God who says He loves us with an everlasting love, stay silent when we cry out to Him? If He loves us, how can He not answer our prayers, rescue us from our trials, or at least comfort us in the midst of them? Why does He not speak?
However, as we study God’s Word we discover it is precisely because God loves us He sometimes does not answer.
You see, God is not just our Heavenly Father. He is also our Teacher and a teacher sometimes has to give us tests. Matthew 11:29 says, “Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you.” The yoke we bear, the trials we face, are the tests He gives to help us grow and learn. However, as someone said at church recently, “A teacher is always quiet during a test.”
Can you imagine what would happen if a teacher, when giving a test, kept talking, telling his students all the answers? They’d never learn. They’d never study. They’d pass the class, but they’d never grow, and they’d leave that class unprepared to face the real world.
Each of us are being tested everyday. It is part of life and God, in His love, lets us have these trials for a reason. God’s not just concerned about your day-to-day problems. He’s looking at the big picture. God knows “when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow” and “when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.” (James 1:2-4 NLT).
Sometimes, like any good teacher, God stays quiet during the time of testing, but even in His silence, “God blesses those who patiently endure testing and temptation” because by staying quiet He is giving them room to grow into “the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” (James 1:12).
Someday soon God will speak. He will be silent no longer. On that day, when “your endurance is fully developed” and you are “perfect and complete”, you will hear Him say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant…enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matthew 25:21 KJV).
Till then keep listening for God’s voice, studying His word, “keep on doing what is right, and trust your lives to the God who created you, for he will never fail you.” (1 Peter 4:19).
God bless and have a great day!