Seeking God's Hidden Face : When God Seems Absent

by Murphey, Cecil B.

• ISBN13: 9780830822928
• ISBN10: 0830822925
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Intervarsity Pr

Table of Contents

Introduction	9	(4)
When God Isn't There	13	(8)
On Hold	21	(6)
Why, God?	27	(6)
Something Lost	33	(8)
Bitter or Better	41	(12)
Bewildered by the Darkness	53	(8)
Complacency	61	(8)
Afflictive Providences	69	(10)
Secret Sins	79	(8)
Protesting Innocence	87	(8)
God's Sleep	95	(8)
``You Owe Me''	103	(8)
Finding God in Babylon	111	(8)
Needed Guilt	119	(10)
When God Stares	129	(8)
Old Wounds	137	(8)
Beyond Surrender	145	(10)
Unhealed Places	155	(8)
Understanding Silence	163	(8)
Shaped by Waiting	171	(16)
The Light Returns	187

Excerpts

Chapter One

WHEN GOD ISN'T

THERE

    Where are you, God?"

    "What's wrong with me? Have I sinned? Where have I failed?"

    Even though I knew I wasn't the first person to ask such questions, that didn't make the dilemma any easier. For many years I didn't realize how much the journey into darkness was a significant part of many lives. After I learned to speak with others about my experience, I discovered that this emptiness becomes a vital part in the growing process. It's not pleasant, and I hate going through such times. Worse, it's only in hindsight that we truly value the difficult times we've gone through.

    In the midst of our pain and confusion we can't function with our minds on the eventual outcome. We focus on the present. God simply doesn't respond to our deepest cries and longings. We wonder how we can keep on when we encounter only silence. It's not that we demand emotional jolts or miraculous answers, but we long for that sense of God's presence with us. "Just a whisper," I pleaded.

    In trying to explain this experience, it reminds me of walking outside on a starless night. We call it starless because the most we can see are dark, ugly clouds overhead. Yet we know that beyond the thick murkiness the stars shine as brightly as they do on any other night. Our eyes simply can't penetrate the darkness. For a time we're forced to live in lunar eclipse, a period of unrelenting gloom. The eclipse goes on so long that it seems like a way of life; it gets tougher and more discouraging to keep on walking through that dark, forlorn night. We know we need to go forward, but we feel as if we've lost our bearings and aren't sure which path leads forward. No matter which way we turn in our search for divine directions, we find only a silent emptiness.

    It helped me to think of this from an Old Testament perspective. I call it God's hidden face, a term that appears a number of times, especially in Psalms. For those disciples of old, and for me, there's nothing to see because God's face is deliberately hidden from us. It may be only a cloud of separation, but it feels like a wall of solid steel that shuts us off.

    Even when we sense it's divine strategy at work, that fact doesn't help much. We still want God's response to our prayers. We don't rely on emotion, but at least once in a while we want to "feel" God's presence or be infused with a sense of certainty that everything's all right in our relationship. Can't we have just a tiny nod of assurance that God is orchestrating the night music? Even if God's not taking an active role, can't we get a hint of guidance? a gentle nudge? a whisper? Instead, we encounter only silence, emptiness and more of the lunar eclipse. Beyond the dark clouds, of course, we know God's there. And yet ...

    And yet --that's a big part of the problem. God is there but not communicating with us. In those times our awareness and emotions don't square with our theological bearings. As far as we're concerned, God just isn't there for us, and we can't do anything to change the situation. Despite our agonizing, groanings and pleadings God doesn't answer, and we can't force an answer. So for all practical living purposes, God isn't there.

    Right off I want to point out that this is a highly subjective experience. It means that despite all our rational ability and our theological understanding, those dark nights envelop our lives. We didn't ask for them and certainly don't want them. We feel alienated, and it takes a long time to make sense out of the reality that tiny steps of faith taken in the darkness may be more pleasing to God than skipping ahead on the lighted pathway. No matter how committed we are to God--and maybe the more committed the more powerful the experience--we lose our bearings. It's like being in a state of sensory deprivation. All the outward tools we relied on, such as prayer, Bible reading, Sunday school classes and preaching, now seem boring and useless.

    I've walked through the dark valley of emptiness three times in my life--and each time it was worse. I'm not talking about doubting the existence of God, and I wasn't questioning my salvation. Spiritual realities had become deeply embedded within me, and I knew, even in the darkest moment, that I was a Christian.

    I remember all three clearly because of the intensity of my sense of isolation from God. I hurt inside, but no one noticed my wounds, or if they did, they had no idea what to do about them. Why was I the only one who had to go through such turmoil? I asked the first two times. Or maybe, I wondered the third time, others were better actors than me and able to hide their inner selves so that no one would know--and especially that no one would think of them as unspiritual.

    As I look at all three experiences, I can see patterns--which I didn't see during the period of God's hidden face. Even going through the third period of darkness, I made no connection with the previous walks. Certainly each was more intense than the previous, but I also think that over time we forget the pain and the bad days. After all, who wants to wallow in those sad memories?

    My first experience happened after I had been a Christian less than three years. As an adult convert I eagerly read countless books on spiritual growth. I felt as if I needed to catch up with the longtime believers around me. A friend named Barry Grahl got me started on the Navigator's Topical Memory System, and within a year I had memorized all the verses. I completed a self-study Bible correspondence course from Moody Bible Institute and read an endless number of books by most of the then-popular spiritual giants. By then I had even read the Bible through three times. I felt spiritually nourished by the Christian community and rejoiced that I had entered the kingdom of God.

    Every day during that period I continued to read my Bible and tried to do all the things my spiritual mentors taught me. Despite that, my zeal diminished; I read and prayed less. Instead of going to every Bible study our church offered, I missed a few because they seemed so boring or I felt as if I had heard it too many times before.

    What good would it do to keep on praying? I wondered. Is it worth it? God wouldn't answer or give me any sign that my prayers had reached heaven. I intensified my efforts and read more and prayed longer. I had to fight the opposition of evil forces, as my spiritual leaders taught me.

    "What's going on?" I asked. I couldn't figure it out. I had been living the Christian life and following Jesus Christ. The books in my small library all concerned topics such as overcoming evil, growing in faith, persevering in spite of opposition, but none of them told me what to do when God turned off the lights.

    Before long I became weary and too discouraged to push myself to follow the spiritual disciplines. At first I marshaled my energy and did them anyway--only to realize that I'd read entire chapters and retained nothing. Some days I said to myself, I just can't read the Bible today . My prayers dipped to the low point. Everything spiritual demanded too much effort for too little payback. Guilt overwhelmed me and I'd cry, "God, what's wrong with me?"

    The first time I experienced God's hidden face, I couldn't talk about my void because I didn't think anyone would understand. So I faked it by continuing to walk through an isolated, empty spiritual world. All the while, God's face was hidden; I had no idea where to search or if God's face would ever shine on me again.

    "How could I be in a situation like this?" I cried. "God, I've been faithful to you, so where are you?"

    I ruefully laughed at myself, remembering that only a few weeks before my forced time of gloom I had spoken to a work friend, Jeanette Overton, about my faith in Jesus Christ. She was one of those people who had no interest in God. "I can handle anything that life throws at me," she said.

    To Jeanette, I stressed that I served the one who answers our prayers, who guides, and who's always there in our times of need . I especially remember stressing the ever-faithful, loving kindness of God.

    I'm glad Jeanette didn't come back and taunt me with "And where is God today?" Actually, for several weeks I avoided talking privately to her because I was afraid she might do just that.

    For seven months I felt as if I were in the middle of a deep forest with no light and no discernable path--not even a star in the sky to focus on.

    Maybe you've been there. If so, then you've already learned what I had to discover. We search, but we can't find God. We pray, and it's like dialing a telephone that rings endlessly because no one is home. We can tag our situation spiritual depression, the dark night of the soul, or any other name we want, but despite our relentless search, God still doesn't appear on the scene.

    To find comfort and help, we repeat to ourselves the biblical assurance that Jesus promises to be with us always, even to the end of the world (see Matthew 28:20). Or we turn to the time when the Israelites prepared to move into the Promised Land. Moses assures them, "The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you" (Deuteronomy 31:8, cf. v. 6). In the New Testament we find that same promise quoted in Hebrews 13:5.

    Then where is God?

    We don't know. We're still walking through a starless night. The silence intensifies everything. Eventually we accept a harsh fact of living the Christian experience: We can quote Scripture at God endlessly, but nothing is going to change as long as God's face remains hidden from us. Until God reappears, desolation intensifies.

    So where does that leave us when God isn't around or at least doesn't act on our behalf? We have to do something--at least, my nature is to thrust myself into activity of any kind--to get God out of retirement. But what should we do? Nothing works; everything we try seems futile.

    While we're going through our private darkness, we're inundated with messages from leading preachers, the gurus of self-help religion and pop psychologists who tell us we can keep getting better, enjoy the fullness of life and rise above our emotions. They insist we can overcome all the limitations in life. "If you can visualize it, you can actualize it," says a friend who's a top motivational speaker.

    At the best of times we find ourselves wanting to agree and to push forward. But what do we do when we can't help ourselves? when we can't find a way out of our dark night? when God isn't on speaking terms with us? That's when those motivational, high-energy messages seem like an opened can of Coke left out overnight--flat and tasteless.

    To make it worse, while we're frantically searching for some evidence of God at work in us, other friends share examples of victory in their lives. "Let me tell you what God did for me." "I had a wonderful answer to prayer." "I was reading the Bible today and God opened my eyes and gave me a marvelous insight."

    Why is God blessing and enriching their lives, and we're compelled to keep walking in darkness? Why does God choose to bless them and to push us aside?

    God's hidden face then becomes one of the hard realities to accept. God hasn't disappeared from the universe--only from our personal world. So it's just us--not everyone else--and that makes it even more depressing.

    "Where's the God-who-is-always-there-for-us?" we ask but can't answer. If only for an instant, we sense it may be that others are better Christians than we are, more open to God, more sensitive to the voice of the Spirit, and they're fully committed. Or we try to explain, and the admonitions from our well-intentioned friends sound almost as if they had stolen the words of Eliphaz and Bildad, who tried to convince Job that he was the cause of his own sad situation.

    I thought especially of Job's frustration in trying to explain to the closed-minded Eliphaz when he cried out about his search for God: "If only I knew where to find him; if only I could go to his dwelling! I would state my case before him" (Job 83:3-4). A few verses later Job says, "God has made my heart faint.... Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face" (w. 16-17).

    Poor Job felt utterly alone and misunderstood. I identified with his dilemma.

    In retrospect I can say that even though we don't know it, when we stumble around in the darkness, we're probably closer to finding God than we ever thought possible. God's absence is felt as a real absence only when we believe in the possibility of divine intervention.

* * *

    Understanding comes later, but first comes the long darkness.

Excerpted from SEEKING GOD'S HIDDEN FACE by Cecil Murphey. Copyright © 2001 by Cecil Murphey. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.