But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and the sound of locking and double locking from inside. After that, silence. You might as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There is no light in the windows. Maybe it’s an empty house. Has it ever been inhabited? That seemed to be the case in the past. And that appearance was as strong as that. What could this mean? Why is He such a present commander in our times of prosperity and such an absent help in times of trouble? (An observed mourning6)
CS Lewis wrote these words as he struggled to cope with the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis here expresses the experience of many people who have struggled to deal with true evil in their lives and turned to God only to find it seemingly absent. This experiment has sometimes been called the problem of divine concealment.
So, what causes this “absence” of God, as so many people, myself included, periodically experience? And how can we count on his absence to find him?
Wanting absence
We can approach the question of God’s hidden character from two angles: first, from the “experienced absence of God” and second, from the reality that God is not immediately apparent to our senses. Let’s take them one at a time.
For many, the absence of God is felt so deeply because they actively live as if God is absent from their daily lives. As strange as it may seem, this type of experienced absence of God occurs in the lives of both Christians and non-Christians. Stephen Charnock describes this dynamic with the term practical atheism (The existence and attributes of God, 1:137-255). Many people, even self-proclaimed Christians, live their lives as if God does not exist.
Indeed, one of the causes of the deep impression of the absence of God can be the presence of unconfessed and unrepentant sins. Charnock suggests that to sin is to secretly desire the non-existence of God. It should come as no surprise, then, that we experience a deep sense of the absence of God if we live in unconfessed sin. For this form of divine concealment, the proper remedy is confession of sin and return to God.
Modern existentialism has transformed this version of the experienced absence of God into a “philosophy”. In his job God’s problem, John Courtney Murray describes how the modern existentialist asserts the absence of God: “He says that God must be absent. He affirms his fundamental desire that God be absent. The reason is obvious. . . . If God is present, man is created by God and is made man. . . (with) a destiny that he did not choose himself” (117).
The modern existentialist affirms the absence of God, not because he has sought him and failed to find him, but because, if God is present, then man is responsible to him. “Therefore, God must be declared dead, disappeared, absent. The declaration is an act of will, a will fundamental to the absence of God” (God’s problem, 117). Here we find not the existential fear of not finding God, but man actively desiring the absence of God, so that he can live his life without divine constraints.
Abandoned and alone
Another way we might fall into an experienced absence of God is not related to personal sin, but to the feeling of having been abandoned in bad circumstances. Once again, this absence is common to believers and unbelievers alike. We can become aware of God’s hidden character when evil suddenly appears and, turning to God, we are shocked by its apparent absence.
This feeling is what Lewis describes in An observed mourning, and what Elijah seems to have experienced when he fled from Jezebel to a cave in the wilderness (1 Kings 19). Joseph Minich perfectly captures this appearance of absence:
That we don’t see Him when we pray, that He often seems distant, that sometimes our prayers bounce off the ceiling, and especially for people who are suffering, that sometimes we can beg Him to just “show Himself” to us, and that it is not – all this leads us to think or at least be tempted to think that perhaps its non-existence is the “most natural deduction”. (Lasting divine absence3)
Invisible not absent
We see the second way of approaching God’s hiddenness when the atheist sardonically points out that God could very easily resolve the question of His existence simply by “manifesting Himself.” Like Elijah when he confronted the prophets of Baal, the atheist mocks the believer: “Cry out loud, for he is a god. Either he is thinking, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or he is sleeping and needs to be awakened” (1 Kings 18:27). So where is he?
Faced with such doubt and ridicule, many believers begin to question whether God exists, while others withdraw from the discussion altogether, ashamed that there does not seem to be more compelling evidence of God’s presence. Doubts increase when we consider that God appears to have demonstrated his presence in the distant past through mind-blowing miracles, but we are apparently late to the show.
“We too easily overlook the presence of God, precisely because it is so obvious. »
So how should we understand the distinct feeling that God is missing? Fernand Van Steenberghen notes that we must first recognize that if there is a God (like the God of Christianity), then we should not expect him to be “visible” (Hidden God, 348). Van Steenberghen suggests instead: “The living God is necessarily a hidden god. He is, by nature, the Inaccessible, the Invisible, the Impalpable, because He is Spirit (it in fact escapes all sensible experience) and it is Infinitythat is to say transcending the whole order of finite beings, of which we are an integral part” (Hidden God348, author’s translation).
In other words, we must remember that the God of Christianity is, by nature, imperceptible to the senses and far exceeds the very weak capacities of the human intellect. Thus, if the presence of God is undeniable, it is also imperceptible except through the effects he causes.
Always, already there
Furthermore, notes Van Steenberghen, God is hidden, even in his providential governance of the created cosmos, because his ways are a mystery to our finite minds (Hidden God, 348-49). Indeed, one could say that God does not “intervene” in the created cosmos because he is always already present in it as the original and sustaining cause (The reality of God and the problem of evil, 74-77). We too easily neglect the presence of God precisely because It’s so obvious.
If God is always already present, then He does not “intervene” (act from outside) in the way that the owner of an aquarium might intervene, on occasion, to clean up a mess. Christianity teaches that in every natural event – whether leaves falling from trees in the fall, snow falling in winter, flowers blooming in spring, or grass turning brown under the heat of summer – God is always already present and active.
We do not “see” God because the divine nature is invisible, but we see God’s work, in every waking moment, in creation. As John Calvin said in his Institutes, “I only wanted to emphasize that this way of seeking God is common to strangers as well as to those of his household, if they trace the contours which draw above and below a living likeness of Him” (1.5. 6). . For Calvin, God is so manifest in creation as its cause that man can barely open his eyes, or even dream, without perceiving the causal efficacy of God in everything that presents itself to his senses.
Ultimately, recognizing God’s presence is less a matter of perception or intellect and more a matter of will. The sardonic question of the existence of God can be answered by willingly and openly considering the many wonders of this world which, when we reflect on them, demonstrate that there is a God and that He is always present everywhere.
Search silently
After examining the causes of God’s hidden character, how can we understand the experienced absence of God? If, as we have seen, God is always already present, then why feel so absent when I “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4)? Isn’t God supposed to be my very present help in time of need (Psalm 46:1)? He is! Fortunately, God’s presence does not depend on my ability to feel His presence. Whether I am aware of God’s presence or not, God is always already there.
There are many remedies for the experienced absence of God, one of which was mentioned above: repentance and confession of sins. However, if, like Job, I have repented and confessed, and God still seems to be hiding from me, what can I do? A musician put it this way:
What I feel continues to haunt me;
It’s stronger than before.
When darkness fights light,
I will contact you;
I’m going to scream your name.
No matter how far I stray,
I promise I will reach you. (Spoken: “Nothing without you”)
Christ’s promise to those who cry to Him is that “he who seeks finds” (Matthew 7:8). So when we are tormented by the perceived absence of God, rather than sinking into despair, we cry out to God, we wait for Him in prayer, we look up to Him in worship, we run toward Him. he church – the body of Christ – to sustain us, we seek him in his word, and we remember his presence by partaking of the Lord’s Supper.
Sometimes, perhaps too often, God allows us to feel his absence because we have forgotten him. He allows us to feel his absence and his silence, not as a refusal to respond, but as the compassionate gaze of the resurrected Christ who waits for us to remember that we need him.
