The Delay and Silence of God

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but God doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry about most things. This has been a hard lesson for me to learn.

We live in a loud, fast-paced world, one of constantly breaking news. Crisis and urgency always seem to be the order of the day. Instant communication and quick responses are expected, if not demanded.

On the national level, there is little reporting by the media before there is a rush to analyze, comment, and then demand a response and plan of action from public officials.

On a personal level, I seem to irritate people frequently by not responding sufficiently quickly. “I sent you a text, didn’t you get it?” If I don’t respond back to an email within a day, I may get another one with a subject like this: “*** Second Attempt ***.”

In many companies voice mail has been discontinued because it’s “too slow.” Many younger people seldom answer their phones let alone initiate calls. Communication is more commonly accomplished through instant messages, texts, and tweets. This results in a clipped quality to conversations that limits thoughtful discussion.

Yes, we are in a big hurry, but back to my question: Have you noticed that God doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry? God could easily solve everything instantly with a mere snap of His fingers, but he doesn’t—and He has His reasons. Perhaps it is important for us to live some of our questions in order to appreciate their depth. Maybe the problems we want solved are themselves part of a deeper solution that God is working to make us humbler, wiser, and/or stronger.

God’s slow pace can be dismaying as well as puzzling. Why does God allow the wicked to inflict so much damage for so long? Why does He allow error and heresy to go unchecked? Why does He permit sinners to remain uncorrected and unpunished?

The Church, too, is often slow to respond or act. She will go on for decades, even centuries, pondering and reflecting while the world rushes forward into error, darkness, and confusion. We want the Church to turn on a dime, but that’s like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around.

Though at times imponderable, God’s delay is sinless. The Church’s delay, however, may be admixed with sin, sloth, and resistance. This does not mean that all the delay of the Church is sinful. Especially in today’s world of quick, often rash reaction, there is still the need for careful, thoughtful, prayerful deliberation. Our faith doesn’t reduce easily to sound bites. The gospel does not fit on a bumper sticker. The Church should not be reduced to an emergency response unit. The urgent should not eclipse the important.

All of this has been hard for me to learn; I am impatient by nature. I tap my foot incessantly in meetings, thinking, let’s get to work already! I am a bit like the field hand in Matthew’s Gospel (Mat 13:24ff) who wanted to tear out the weeds from amongst the wheat. The Lord cautioned against doing so because it might harm the wheat. He said that they should be allowed to grow together until the harvest; the day of judgment would come in due time.

Rash actions can cause harm, even if unintentionally. Overly quick or draconian measures to eliminate error and sin may hurt the saints and ration the Holy Spirit. Conflicts do have their place. They can serve to sharpen the distinction between the good and the wicked; darkness can permit the light to shine even more gloriously. But Father, but Father! What about the many souls who are lost and confused in the silence while the Church delays, reflecting and pondering? I have no simple answer except to point back to God. While the Church’s delay may or may not be given today’s expectations, God’s delays and lengthy silences shine before us and challenge our instinct to respond rashly and/or too quickly. God takes His time. The Jewish people were 400 years in slavery and 40 years in the desert. From then it was 1800 years to the Christ, who spent 30 of His 33 years in seclusion and silence.

Yes, for reasons of His own, God is in no rush. For my part, I must learn this hard lesson and be careful to enter into the silence of God through prayer. Having prayed in that silence I must emerge to teach and preach the faith He has revealed. I can do no more, but I can do no less.

Cardinal Robert Sarah’s words are a fitting conclusion to this difficult lesson for us moderns: Silence is of capital importance because it enables the Church to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, imitating his thirty silent years of Nazareth … and his intimate dialogue with the Father in the solitude and silence of the desert ….

Light makes no noise. If we want to approach this luminous source, we must assume an attitude of contemplation and silence …. The true nature of the Church is not found in what she does but in what she testifies. Christ asked us to be light. He ordered us not to conquer the world, but to show men the way, the truth and the life.

I know well that God’s silence constantly runs into man’s impatience … [but] nowadays man fosters a kind of compulsive relationship with time. One day we will understand everything. Until then it is necessary to seek without making noise.

Who can understand God? … As with all questions connected with God, there is a stage when the search can go no farther. The only thing to do is to raise our eyes, to stretch out our hands toward God, and to pray in silence while awaiting the dawn … [Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Power of Silence, pp. 219-221].

When Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal he was in no hurry. He let them go first, go all day, till at last it was the proper time to give the evening sacrifice to the Lord. Then Elijah restored the altar and presented the sacrifice.

The Lord does things in the fullness of time.

Paul wrote, speaking hypothetically, asking what if the Lord endures vessels of wrath so that he might bring in vessels of glory.

Now while Paul doesn’t say that literally is the case, it does represent a sort of expediency that may be in the works, for predestination is preceded by foreknowledge and, simply, in the normal course of events there are people who will respond to the Gospel and those who stubbornly just will not ... and it has often been the case that the former may rely on the latter having lived.

Just to be clear, it does say that all things work together for the good of those that love the Lord; but, the reverse is not stated, we aren’t told that all things work for the harm of those who reject Him. Instead we are told that He gives blessings to all men.

C.S.Lewis wrote that pain is God’s megaphone to the world. In Revelation we see people having finally become so hard of hearing, so spiritually insensitive, that the Lord seems to be turning the proverbial volume on that megaphone up to “10” in hopes some will hear. In the midst of that his two witnesses stand before the whole world and are ultimately slain ... and the the world throws a party.

I think that it will be in those three days that the last people who would ever turn to the Lord in this age, ever again, will and at that point what Paul wrote of will no longer apply. There will be no one who can benefit if He delays any longer .. so then the Lord returns.

While it isn’t exactly branching off of your post, I have noted that there is something of a meme about that since the Lord knows everything that’s going to happen, and even they charge that He is behind it (I marvel that people so easily confuse fatalism with His permitting things ... doubly so since many don’t seem to pick up on the fatalism inherent in Islam — to the point that Muslim scholars were once behind an ideology that rejected cause and effect — even as they want to try to hammer Christians with it), they brashly ask why even pray.

Now, all the useful and interesting theological things one might say aside, I’ve found myself more usually picking up on the level of sass that folks like Elijah employed (especially when confronting the prophets of Baal) by saying things like: Alright, I get it, you would never talk to your own dad unless you thought you could get something for it.

Which doesn’t share the Gospel but it does at least say something about prayer. Prayer isn’t just asking for stuff, even asking for the right sorts of stuff that the Lord knows we need, but it’s our part of a dialogue where we express gratitude, give praise, posit questions or even express dismay ... and of course ask for help etc.

To someone who thinks Christians are fatalist and merely God’s sock puppets I can see how they miss out on the value of the last one ... but per my sass, how do they miss the possibility of the first four?

Now, I’m here to say that there have been times in my life when I pray: “Father rescue me from myself -yet- again!” acknowledging where my help comes from AND where the trouble comes from (me, that’s me doing that) and prayer gets answered right then ... and I will also say that there’ve been a few times when I’m not the problem but it’s external and coming at me and the same has happened.

So the fatalist idea that prayer does nothing that these anonymous internet meme’ers want to push is totally bupkis, as I think Scripture itself should make clear.

But getting back to your post, even for a petition asked in faith, “no” is a perfectly acceptable answer to receive. As is “not now” / “wait”.

Not that those would be news to you.

As for the likely not accepted kind of prayers you mention, yeah, I’d imagine the probably way too common “Lord, please let me win the lottery”, never mind all the likely deal making, along with praying right before finals ... well, they are “prayers” I suppose....

(Confession: I’ve maybe bought a dozen lottery tickets down through the years, since the 90s, it just feels like lotteries are a bit like worry ... praying to the wrong little “g” god. The last time I bought one I was actually more interested in how long I could go without even the hint of trying to cut a deal with the almighty somewhere in my heart. Made it about an hour.)

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