When God Doesn't Answer...

I love hearing stories of answered prayers.  Its the combination of faith and God acting on behalf of His people that we find encouraging and faith building.  I once asked my friend Tony about a time when God answered a prayer and this is the story he told me.

Tony was a teenager and his grandfather was very sick.  It was late November and his grandfather was in the hospital dying.  Tony told me that Christmas was and is a very special time for his family.  Its when everyone came into town and celebrated together.  Tony loved this get-together and so did his grandfather.  So Tony prayed everyday that they could have just one more Christmas together with his grandfather and that his grandfather could enjoy his family just one more time.  He prayed for this like nothing he'd ever prayed before.  The day before Christmas his grandfather passed away.  Tony said that the answer to the prayer made no sense to him.  How could this be the best thing?  A good thing for anyone?  But Tony said that although he didn't understand, he still believed that God must have had a purpose for not answering his prayer.

We've all experienced something like this.  You want something so bad that you pray for it with your whole heart.  You see the good in it.  You pray for it so often that its always running through your mind.  But when it comes down to it, God doesn't answer.

And people tell you all the cliches:
"Sometimes His answer is just no"
"God operates on a different time schedule than we do"
"God sees the bigger picture"

There's truth in all these things, but in spite of the intellectual understanding, we still wonder  why God acts the way He does.  Why does He sometimes not respond the way that it seems like He should?

The psalmist struggled with these same thoughts.  There's a reason that believers through the centuries have used the psalms to learn how to pray.  The psalm writers often struggled with God's responses to their prayers.

Psalm 43:2 - Here's a guy whose being put down by some bad people.
I counted on you, God. Why did you walk out on me?  Why am I pacing the floor, wringing my hands over these outrageous people??

Psalm 60:1 - Here is one where God did not give a victory?
God! You walked off and left us kicked our defenses to bits and stalked off angry.
Come back, O please, come back!

Psalm 74:20-22 - Here's one who doesn't understand why God would let evil get so strong.
Remember Your promises, the city is in darkness, the countryside violent.
Don't leave the victims to rot in the street,
Make them a chorus to sing your praises.
On Your feet, O God. Stand up for Yourself!

And Psalm 77 - Here the writer is suffering and feels completely abandoned by God.
Will the Lord walk off and leave us for good?
Will He never smile on us again?
Is His love worn threadbare?
Has His salvation promise burned out?
Has God forgotten His manners?
Has He stalked off and left us?
"Just my luck," I said. "The God Most High goes out of business just the moment I need Him."

The psalmists are writing honestly about their experience of God.  They aren't writing their systematic theology about the nature of God. They are asking, "Where are You?"  Their situation has them wondering why God isn't helping.  They had every expectation that God would come to pick them up, but its not happening.  

And you can almost feel the suffering in their writing.  You can sense the begging, the attempts to manipulate God, the sarcasm.  These psalms of lament are not written to be pretty.  But  they are truthful expressions of faith.  Expressing the same faith that we have.

In Elie Wiesel's Night, he tells the story of him and his father living through the Nazi Holocaust. Wiesel was about 15 to 16 years old when the Nazi's came to his town and started separating out the Jews and carrying them away to concentration camps.  Wiesel and his father both spent time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, two of the most notorious and deadly places during the Holocaust.  When he first saw the bodies being burned at Auschwitz, he heard someone praying and he thought, "Why should I sanctify His name?  The Almighty has chosen to be silent.  What was there to thank Him for?"

After weeks of being barely fed, worked to death, watching executions, and suffering beatings, Wiesel heard a man say, "God is not with us.  I know.  No one has a right to say things like that.  But what can I do?  I suffer hell in my flesh and bones.  I have eyes and I see what's being done. How can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?"

Back to the Psalmists, these psalms of lament, of crying out for God to respond, end in different ways.  Sometimes they end with no resolution.  Sometimes they decide to just wait on God.  Sometimes they say, "God, please give me story of your greatness that I can tell other people."  Sometimes they end with the story of how God finally responded.

And sometimes they end like Psalm 77.  He has begged for God to help him and has started to wonder if God has just left him completely.  Then the psalm turns.  The psalmist decides to think about what God has done.

I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord.
I will remember Your wonders of old.
I will meditate on all Your work
And muse on Your mighty deeds.

With Your strong arm You redeemed Your people,
the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.

You led Your people like a flock
By the hand of Moses and Aaron.

What the psalmist does is this: he remembers that God has saved him before.  God has done great things before, and He can do it again. God has been faithful to Israel before and He will again.  God chose Israel and God saved them from Egypt.

Here's a couple of things I think we can take from the psalmists.  One is be honest with God.  Don't pretend or try to fake it with Him. Give God a chance to change you.
Two is remember what God has done before.  Remember all the times that He has responded to you in the past.  The times when He has been there for you.  And mostly, remember what He did for us on the cross.  At the cross, God proved Himself to us for all time.  We know that God was there for us when we needed Him most.  Jesus took care of our greatest need, even if we didn't know it.   Because of that moment when God was there 2000 years ago, we are confident that God is on our side even when we don't feel it.  When I look back over my life, God has always been faithful to me.  On any given day, we may not experience the presence of God.  But because God has been with us before, we know that He will again.