When God is Silent

Looking up Hebrew since Jesus is quoting from Psalm 22, I don't think David was inspired to write God is silent. There's another verb for God being silent, cf. Psalm 28:1 chashah; Ps. 35:22, 50:3, 109:1 charesh. Instead Psalm 22:1 "Why have you forsaken me?" David uses azab in qal: why have you left me, forsaken me, left me behind. If Jesus wanted to say "Why are you silent?" he could have easily quoted Hab. 1:13 (again that charesh verb) which says, "Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up the man more righteous than he?" (ESV)

The Apostles Creed says: "he descended into Hell, the third day, he arose again from the dead..." (possibly amalgamating Eph. 4:9 and 1Pet 3:18-19). But better is to point out "Hell is the absence of God" so Jesus suffered Hell on the cross.

If the author is trying to suggest something akin to the Dark Night of the Soul and the silence of God, other texts such as Elijah's depression and Songs of Solomon as St. John of the Cross uses the latter.

A link to this article has been posted on the website GoodNewsow.com.

Jesus didn't merely feel abandoned; he was abandoned. Moreover, he was forsaken by God so that we could be reconciled to God. As Isaiah wrote, "The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him." So if a believer is not at peace with God, it is certainly not because God is not at peace with him or her.

I often think that the inward feelings of God being absent are merely the work of the Holy Spirit convicting us of how distant we are from God. Oh, if we knew how sinful we truly were, wouldn't we be overwhelmed with a sense of our distance from him? Thankfully, God knows how much (of a true knowledge of the depths of our corruption) we can bear.

Yes, God may feel distant to the believer; but this feeling is only a reminder of how little we have relied on God in the past, and a motivation to rely on him more in the future.