God of Silence

Is God any less sovereign or intentional in times of silence than when we see His hand actively moving? Or in these moments of solemnity when it seems the heavens merely echo back our prayers is He deliberately waiting or moving unseen for our good and His glory (Romans 8:28)?

I think this attribute of God eludes us sometimes as we try to grasp His will in our finite minds. When we as humans lapse into silence, we rarely do so with exacting motives. Rather, as was the case with my former blog, we let our attention slip and then later remember something desirous of our time. If such were true of God, what a fearful life this would be!

Thanks be God through Christ our Savior that silence is as much or maybe more a precise instrument of His as when He speaks. In Psalm 22, David cries to the Lord, asking Him to break the silence and answer David's ceaseless appeals. Yet in his despair, David recounts God's past faithfulness and states:

For He has not despised or disdained
the suffering of the afflicted one;
He has not hidden His face from him
but has listened to his cry for help. (22:24)

In our weakness, we may doubt the Lord's care, His love, His plan, or His best, but we have this truth -- He has in the past and will in the future listen to our cries for help. Even when injustice seems to prevail and it seems that God has abandoned His people, He says in Isaiah 57:18-19:

"I have seen his ways, but I will heal him;
I will guide him and restore comfort to him,
creating praise on the lips of the mourners in Israel.
Peace, peace, to those far and near,"
says the LORD. "And I will heal them."

Yet our core issue is God's timing. "Why do you hesitate, O God?" or "Will the day ever come?" What we fail to see is that the slowness of God is for our good. Through it, He teaches us patience, reliance on Him, and faith that overcomes. Furthermore, the Lord's mercy is evidenced through His slowness to anger and outpouring of compassion (Exodus 34:6; Psalm 86:16, 103:8, 145:8). Without it, we would be condemned to a fate apart from Him (2 Peter 3:9).

Concluding, slowness and silence may not always be the same, but they are often more closely related than not. In our human strength, we may sustain momentary silence or slow audibility, but to follow the Lord wholeheartedly, thirsting for Him as for water, we must remember that our God is in control in both the music and the rests.