When God Is Silent

Between the last prophet of the Old Testament and the first words of the New there are roughly four hundred years of silence. God was not absent during them. He was arranging almost everything the New Testament would need — the roads, the common language, the scattered synagogues, the hunger.

That is worth holding when your own prayers seem to reach a ceiling. Silence in scripture is very often preparation, and preparation is by nature unannounced.

First, rule out the obvious. Scripture names some reasons God does not answer: unconfessed sin, unforgiveness, treating a spouse badly, asking to spend it on our own pleasures. Check those honestly, and if the list is clear, stop searching for a fault. Some silence has no fault in it at all.

Then change what you are listening for. Elijah expected wind, earthquake and fire. What came was a still small voice — and he only heard it because he had stopped waiting for spectacle. Much of what we call silence is God speaking at a volume we have decided not to count.

Keep the practices anyway. The instinct in silence is to stop — stop praying, stop reading, stop gathering. That is precisely backwards. The practices are not what produce the voice; they are what keep you in the room when it comes.

And write it down. Habakkuk was told to record the vision and wait. The record matters because silence erases memory. People in a long wait routinely forget what God has already done, and a written record is the only defence against that.

The silence will end. It has never once been permanent, in scripture or in anyone's life. And what is built in you during it is usually the thing that makes you able to carry what comes after.