Is God listening? (The Spirituality of God – 7).
Is God really listening? Many times in the psalms we find the psalmist crying out desperately, feeling as though the Lord has turned His face away. “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Ps 13:1-2). “How long, O LORD? Will You hide Yourself forever? How long will Your wrath burn like fire?” (Ps 89:46). “Return, O LORD! How long? Have pity on Your servants!” (Ps 90:13).
One of the first things that is encouraging about psalms like these is that they show this to be a normal aspect of spiritual experience. Feeling as though God is not listening to you is well within the range of what is spiritually “normal” in the Christian life. It’s encouraging because it reassures us that, just because we feel abandoned by God at times, it doesn’t mean we are abandoned. God hears our prayers! We have a very clear example in King Hezekiah.
In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, the Assyrians came against Judah and took all the fortified cities of Judah. The Assyrian king then sent his envoy, the Rabshakeh, with a vast army to Jerusalem itself, the city of the king. And as the Rabshakeh came boldly, he taunted the people of Judah saying:
“‘Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you. Do not let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD by saying, “The LORD will surely deliver us. This city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.” Do not listen to Hezekiah. For thus says the king of Assyria: Make your peace with me and come out to me. Then each one of you will eat of his own vine, and each one of his own fig tree, and each one of you will drink the water of his own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards. Beware lest Hezekiah mislead you by saying, “The LORD will deliver us.” Has any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their lands out of my hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?’”” (Is 36:14-20).
The verbal attack of the Rabshakeh was extremely cunning, the Assyrian King had chosen his mouthpiece well. On the one hand, the Rabshakeh denied the doctrine of God’s self-existence. What I mean by that, is that he sought to overthrow the confidence of the Judeans in the living and true God. The Rabshakeh’s claim amounted to such a denial, for in effect he was saying: “The God in whom you trust will not deliver you! He is not who He says He is, and He is no more alive and powerful than the gods of the nations whom we have already overthrown!” On the other hand, the Rabshakeh tempted the men with a vision not unlike the vision God himself had given for them in the promised land – a land of prosperity and peace. The threat of resistance was that the city would be besieged, and that “the men sitting on the wall… are doomed… to eat their own dung and drink their own urine” (Is 36:12). In other words, they would be starved out and destroyed.
Now you tell me, how do you suppose you would feel if you were one of the men of Judah in that day? You’re confronted by a foe vastly outnumbering your own forces, a foe that had systematically crushed all its opponents, how would you feel? I daresay that your faith might be tested, and fear might threaten to overwhelm you. You might say: “How did it come to this? Where is God?” Perhaps you have faced similar situations in your own life, situations that threatened to overwhelm you. Perhaps you feel as though the turning tide in western culture today bodes ill for true believers. Is there a time of persecution approaching for us? Perhaps.
But the thing we must realise is that none of this should undermine our confidence in God, for He is the true and living God. He will not fail as the false gods of the nations fail when their non-existence or diabolical origin becomes apparent. He hears the prayers of His people. The Rabshakeh taunted the Judeans, and when his taunt came before the King, the faithful response of Hezekiah is insightful:
“Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and read it; and Hezekiah went up to the house of the LORD, and spread it before the LORD. And Hezekiah prayed to the LORD: “O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, You are the God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; You have made heaven and earth. Incline Your ear, O LORD, and hear; open Your eyes, O LORD, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God. Truly, O LORD, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their lands, and have cast their gods into the fire. For they were no gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed. So now, O LORD our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You alone are the LORD.”
Did you notice the basis of Hezekiah’s appeal? His appeal was rooted in the self-existence of God – the life of God. The Rabshakeh had likened the true and living God to the dead gods of the nations around. In so doing, he had mocked and scorned God, and on this basis Hezekiah had a mighty leverage in his prayer. We do not serve a dead God, but the living God revealed through Christ, as recorded for us in scripture. As Hezekiah therefore appealed to God, appealing that He preserve a testimony to His own name and glory, the Lord heard and responded. The angel of the Lord then struck down 185,000 of the Assyrians in the night, and the Assyrian king returned to his own land and was soon killed by the treacherous hand of his own sons (Is 37:36-38).
The Lord does not promise that we will have a carefree life. There will be trials and suffering. And yet this in no wise undermines the truth that He is and remains the true and living God who hears our prayers. We can take great confidence in this, in the knowledge that His ear is toward us. Just as a child speaks to a parent and is heard, so too our Heavenly Father hears us as we approach Him through Christ. Do not ever doubt that your prayers have been heard. Let us repent of any notion in our heart or mind that God is an unhearing God. Let us repent of any inward fear that – somehow – He is ignoring us or is indifferent toward us. In 1 John 5:14 we read: “And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of Him.” This is our heritage as Christians! “Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us, that we should be called the sons of God!” (1 Jn 3:1)
Soli Deo Gloria!
Q. How does God’s self-existence motivate us to take confidence in the knowledge that He hears our prayers?
A. We can take great comfort in the knowledge of God’s self-existence, knowing that He is not a dead idol or a false God, but that as the living and true God He always hears the prayers of His people.