There are many reasons why God is silent, but I am going to touch on something he recently put on my heart. Sometimes God may be silent simply because he has already spoken to you! If you think about it, how can you accuse God of being silent when he has left you sixty-six letters, thousands of verses? There is no need for him to repeat himself. Aren’t you glad that the book of Genesis doesn’t say, “God said, ‘Let there be light. Let there be light’”?
If you and I had been there on that first day when God said, “Let there be light,” we would have been dancing and rejoicing from 6 o’clock in the morning until about 6 o’clock in the evening.
But suddenly, when it starts to get dark, we begin to panic. “Oh, no, I knew it wouldn’t last! I knew the light was going to go away. Maybe we’ve done something wrong. Maybe we weren’t reading the Word enough.”
The light fades away, and we spend the next twelve hours in sorrow — until the light reappears, and we realize that when God said, “Let there be light,” he didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be night; that there wouldn’t be seasons when we cannot see. He didn’t mean that we would always be able to understand everything that is going on in the heavenly realm. However, the light always reappears, and we see that what God spoke continues to be fulfilled without his having to speak again.
One reason God may be silent is because there is an appointed time for his Word to be fulfilled. One example of this in the Bible is Joseph, who was given the incredible promise that he was going to reign one day. He was going to be a man through whom great provision would be unlocked. However, there was an appointed time for the fulfillment of the promise and he had to follow God’s plan.
Carter Conlon joined the pastoral staff of Times Square Church in 1994 at the invitation of the founding pastor, David Wilkerson, and was appointed Senior Pastor in 2001.