“Oh that I knew where I might find him!”

(Job 23)

When God hides, what can people do? A patient in the hospital after days and nights of suffering with no let up says: “I try to pray, but God’s presence seems so far from me.” A student in college writes seeking help for his classmate: “My friend says he had Christ once, but now he has lost Him. Try as hard as he may, he cannot find Him. What can I do to help my friend find Christ?” A family meets head-on a series of disasters: illness, financial difficulties, death; and with the tragic circumstances, there comes the spiritual despair of being forsaken of God, cast off by Him who had blessed all their days. “Why are we enduring these things?” they ask. “Why does God hide Himself from us?”

This is the agonizing question which has depressed so many hearts — “Why does God hide Himself from me?” Jesus, suffering on the cross sighed: “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?” And Job, hedged in by suffering and loss, wondering what God meant by all the calamities rained down upon his battered head; cries out: “O that I knew where I might find Him! I go forward, but He is not there; backward, but I cannot perceive Him; on the left hand where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him; He hideth Himself on the right hand and I cannot see Him.” When God hides, what to do?

First of all, we ought to do this — remember that there is both an objective side and a subjective side of this business of God’s hiding. Tis not only God and His ways with us which need examination when we feel that God hides Himself from us, but also ourselves and our ways with Him.

Now on God’s side — the objective part of the problem of why God hides — this we must face: There are certain aspects of the divine nature which remain always the same, making it difficult for human beings to find God. For one thing, there is God’s spiritual invisible nature. “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable.” “He is a spirit and has not a body like man.” “They who would worship Him — or find Him — must worship Him and seek Him in spirit and in truth.” How else could our Father God be near and accessible to all His children at one and the same time and fulfill the Psalmist’s glad acknowledgement: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in Hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me?” The very spiritual nature of God, which makes Him everywhere and always accessible to His children on earth at one and the same time, presents certain difficulties, which every person encounters in finding God.

Then there is the immeasurable qualitative difference between God and man — between the infinite and the finite — between the eternal and the temporal, which will always present certain real difficulties to people who seek to know, understand, and commune with Almighty God. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” saith the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” How can mere man with his little hand grasp the whole universe? How can the midget mind of man encompass the length and breadth and height and depth of God’s power, righteousness, and love?

So, for God’s own inscrutable reasons in this world, He remains as Blaise Pascal says: “A God who hides Himself,” and there is little or nothing we can do about it.

But, when we turn this problem around and come at it from the subjective side; when we focus attention on ourselves rather than on God as we face this problem of what do to when God seems to hide Himself from us; when life is bereft of meaning and we feel terribly low and God-forsaken — there are number of things we can do.  We can check upon ourselves to see if we are looking in the right locale, for one thing.

Did you hear about the clergyman whose church members spent their Sundays on the golf course? When he chided them and suggested they come to church instead, they all replied: “We can worship God on the golf course in His great out-of-doors better than in a stuffy church.” So the minister took them at their word. He gave up his Sunday routine of services and joined a congenial foursome. Next Sunday in his pulpit he reported cynically: “Don’t you believe a word of it, when they say they worship just as well on the green as in the sanctuary. I went with them and the only time I ever heard mention of God’s name was when one fellow missed a 12 inch putt.” Yes, we can do plenty about our habit of consistently refusing those experiences which will bring God near. No wonder we complain that God hides!

But more than that, we can check up on how we are conducting our search for God. If you were going to hunt for quail, you wouldn’t take a coon dog. You don’t measure the speed of the wind with a yardstick. The only right search that people can make for God is with their hearts. Yes, you search for God with your heart and so often it seems that God is hiding from us because we are searching for Him with everything else but our hearts or with a heart unprepared. The promise is: “If with all your hearts ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me, thus saith your God.” There are unvarying demands.

First we must seek with an open heart. We must press the quest with a heart desiring God more than all else or we shall not find Him. It is possible for us to be desiring God because we are under the pressure of some peculiar obligation or difficulty and our desire simply means: “If God would deliver me, I think I would serve Him, but all the probabilities are, that as soon as I enjoy the blessing, I should forget the vow.” For such a search there is no satisfactory find. We must search for God as those who know there is no other help for us. If we think God is one among many — that there be many solaces and many sources of strength in human life and God is but one of them, even the chief of them, He will not show the grace of His heart or the luster of His face to us. We must come to Him as those who say: “We have tried every other source of strength and consolation, and behold, they are broken cisterns that can hold no water. We have consulted other physicians, we have spent all we have on them and are become worse rather than better; now we come to thee, God of salvation, God of mercy, that we may find healing and recovery.”

“No man can know God, until his heart has been emptied of every desire but a desire after Christ, and of every conviction but a conviction that God alone can meet faith in himself by the life that is eternal. People find God in a variety of ways. Some find Him in great pain and affliction; and others never would have found Him but for fire and loss and death and desolation! Others have been drawn to Him by the kind ministry of loving parents or brothers or sisters. There is infinite variety in the details, but there is no variety in the principle. We must desire God with a true heart, with an unmixed love, and then He will come to us and be our God.” (Joseph Parker)

For our search of God is just the other side of God’s search for us. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” says the Savior. “If any man hear my voice and open unto me, I will come in to him and sup with him and he with me.” “If with all your hearts, ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me, thus saith your God.”

But we must also seek God with a grateful heart, or we shall not find. “The best defense against the devil,” someone has said, “is a grateful heart.” When we lose a thankful spirit, there comes into our hearts those demons of resentment, self-pity, hypercritical attitude toward others, dissatisfaction with our lot, and all forms of selfishness. God comes close to bless with joy and peace the grateful heart, but God seeks in vain to reveal Himself and bestow His multitude of mercies on an ungrateful heart.

“I’m past eighty now,” a dear friend said to me. “I’ve had a good life. Any time, I’m ready to go. My childhood was wonderful, We had a mother who taught us to be honest, and that’s no small thing, you know. And for fifty years I lived with a wonderfully fine man. I never had too much, but we never wanted for anything. God has been so good to me. Whatever comes, however it goes, I’m ready.” So she spoke with a twinkle in her eye, jokingly even, as she lay sick in bed. The secret? A grateful heart, born of a vibrant faith — or is it faith made strong and real by gratitude? Either way, tis clear that God hides from the grumbling, ungrateful heart and draws near to the heart throbbing with thundering thankfulness to Him.

But it must also be with a faithful heart — a faith-filled heart — that we seek our God or we shall not find. When things were terribly out of joint for the prophet Habakkuk, when a corrupt kingdom was conquering the world and God’s own righteous Israel was being devoured by a people cruel and wicked, when everything in the contemporary scene pointed to the fact that God had abandoned His own, gone back on His promises and the eternal principles of His very nature — in such a gloomy time of despair when God hides — the prophet Habakkuk points the way for the man or woman of faith to take. What does Habakkuk do? Listen: “I will get me up in my watchtower and listen to what He may say to me.”

Resolutely, Habakkuk determines not to drift but to keep holding on a bit longer. He does not understand his personal dilemma or his nation’s predicament. God seems to have forsaken His own. But he determines even in a calamitous time to live by his faith. “The just shall live by faith,” he cries. “Even in adversity, the Lord still is God. Perhaps He is saying something to me through this biting pain, this aching loss. Maybe I have been so busy with other things that I could not hear, so attentive to other voices that I would not listen till the blow fell and this awful silence settled on my soul. This I will do, I will listen to see what the Lord is saying to me.”

Dr. James Black said there are three Scripture texts which accurately reflect the varying attitudes of Scotsmen toward things they cannot understand. First, there is the world of old Jacob: “All these things are against me.” Returning from Egypt with grain to save the starving household, Jacob’s sons tell him that the Prime Minister of Egypt demands that Benjamin, his favorite son, be brought back on the returning journey for provisions and held as surety, and old Jacob in alarm and despair says: “All these things are against me.”

Then there is the text of Jeremiah, the gloomy prophet, when God seems to have suspended the operation of his moral law: “God will not do evil, neither will He do good.”

Finally, there is the word of St. Paul: “We know that all things work together for good to them who love the Lord, to them who are the called according to His purposes.”

When things happen which we do not understand, things which seem for the time being to rule God out of His universe — at least to make Him very far from and unreal to us — there are three possible attitudes we may take: First, we can take the way of unbelieving pessimism and say with old Jacob — “all things are against me.”  Second, we can take the way of agnostic indifference — “God will not do good, neither will He do evil.” Third, we can take the way of courageous faith and say even in the teeth of tragic hard things we do not understand, with Paul, “Yet, I know that all things, even mysterious suffering things — work together for good to them that love the Lord;” and cry with Job, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him . . . Though He hideth from me, yet He knoweth the way I take, and when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”

Finally, we must seek God with a helping heart, or we shall not find. An open, desiring heart, a grateful heart, a faithful heart, a helping heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

         I sought my God, but my God I could not see.

         I sought my soul, but my soul eluded me.

         I sought my brother and I found all three.

Have you ever driven your automobile through the Lombardy underpass and up the steep ascent to Broad Street? If you have, you’ve seen and felt the rush and tension of the heavy traffic — out of town vacation tourists, heavy trucks who crowd our city streets for want of a city skirting expressway, and local passenger cars all mixed up together. And you know, too, that most of the highway traffic takes a left at Broad Street. Well, have you ever observed that most drivers who’ve never been that way before — (particularly if they be of a timid disposition) — have a tendency to keep in the right lane (hugging the curb), and so are out of line for their highway turn? Feebly, the signal and attempt to get over into the left lane when at last they see their mistake — but all and sundry who know the way will not give a grudging inch and the poor traveler has to miss his (Broad Street) turn (and, subsequently get lost in the intricacies of city one-way streets) and wander blocks off his course before getting back on the highway.

Just driving discourtesy, you say? Perhaps. But I fear it is illustrative of a deeper human failing. How unwilling most of us are to take the time and trouble to help those less experienced than we get on the right road in life. We had rather sneer at their mistakes and criticize than put ourselves out a bit to help them on their right road. Obsessed with our own loads — too heavy for us to carry — our own puzzling problems with which we worry, worry, worry, we have no time for the other fellow and his — so we miss the chance God is offering us to find both God and our own deliverance through unselfish service.

There was a man of the land of Uz, named Job. He suffered many excruciating experiences. His soul in torment raised many perplexing problems: “Why do the righteous suffer? Why is light given to a man whose way is hid? Why does God hide Himself from us?”

“The real land of Uz is not on the map. It is in the hearts of those who have passed through night to light, through storm to calm, through frost to spring, through woe to weal; who have built stepping stones of stumbling blocks; who have found that the via-crucis is but another name for the via-lucis, who have found their God because they searched for Him with all their hearts — with an open, grateful, faithful, helping heart.” (Smith — Keynote Studies on the Bible)