The Anatomy of the Wait - Part II
The Experiential Wound
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How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? — (Psalms 13:1-2 NIV)
Last week in the The Anatomy of the Wait - Part I, we named the four wounds pressed against a single soul in Psalm 13 and then walked into the first of them, the relational wound Abraham lived through for twenty-five years, the specific ache of being in a covenant that is alive while the promise made within it remains unanswered. We saw the God who walked between the pieces alone while Abraham slept through the ratification, the God who protected the vessel of the promise through Pharaoh’s court and Abimelech’s dream without telling Abraham He had done it, the God who named the son after the very laughter that doubted His word.
This week we take up the second wound, and it is a different species from the first. Abraham’s wound was the wound of a covenant that was alive while the promise was unanswered. The wound this week is the wound of a God who is present but appears to be turned away, whose decision not to let you feel Him is deliberate and sustained and, from inside the season, indistinguishable from silence. Forgetting can be corrected by reminding. Hidden faces cannot be argued back. They turn again on their own timing, or they do not turn at all, and the person on the receiving end of the hiddenness is left to find out whether faith can survive the withdrawal of felt presence.
No one in scripture names this wound more precisely than a man named Job.
“How Long Will You Hide Your Face?” — The Experiential Wound
Job personifies this wound, and if the church has largely reduced Job to a proverb about patience it is because most of us have not sat with the actual book, which is not a devotional but a courtroom. Where the courtroom is set matters as much as what is said inside it. By the time we arrive at Job 23, Job has been in sustained theological combat for twenty chapters. His children are gone, his livestock is gone and his health is gone. He is sitting in ashes, scraping his sores with a broken piece of pottery, and the three closest friends he had in the world have arrived at his side to help him understand what has happened to him, and their help has become an accusation. Eliphaz has just delivered his final speech in chapter 22 and has invented charges against Job. He has accused him of withholding water from the weary and refusing bread to the hungry and sending widows away empty-handed and crushing the arms of the fatherless, none of which is true, none of which has any basis in the narrative or in Job’s actual character. The reason Eliphaz is fabricating sins is that his theological framework of retributive justice, which says suffering is always the visible consequence of hidden sin, cannot account for Job’s suffering by any honest examination of Job’s life, so the framework begins to invent evidence rather than surrender the framework itself.
That is the environment Job 23 responds to. Twenty chapters in, false charges on the table and friends who have become accusers. God has not said a word for the entire dialogue section, and Job is now surrounded by men who are absolutely certain they know what God is doing and are willing to defend that certainty by falsifying the record of a righteous man’s life. Job’s response is not to argue with Eliphaz. His response is to walk past the friends entirely and address God directly, and what he asks for is not what most sufferers ask for. He does not ask for relief, he asks for a hearing. The language throughout the chapter is legal. “If only I knew where to find him; if only I could go to his dwelling. I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments.” He wants to know where God dwells so that he can present his case. He wants to state his arguments and hear the response and receive the verdict, and the whole posture of the chapter is that of a man who is not asking for mercy because he is confident he does not need mercy. He is asking for a trial because he believes if he could get God into a courtroom he would win, and the wound in the chapter is not primarily the suffering. It is the inaccessibility of the One he needs to address about the suffering.
Then Job does something that stands as a reckoning of his experiential wound. He searches. “But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he turns to the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.” Four directions and nothing. Job is not glancing around and noticing that God happens not to be present. He is bringing everything he has, every faculty of mind and every capacity of spiritual sight, to bear on a search that returns empty in every direction he can point. The absence is not the result of casual looking. It is the result of the most sustained and disciplined seeking Job can produce, and the result is nothing.
And then, immediately after describing the empty search, Job says something that reframes the whole dialogue. “But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.” He cannot find God, and he does not conclude from the failure of the search that God has abandoned him. He concludes something much stranger and much more profound, that even though he cannot locate God, God has not lost sight of him. The hiddenness is not mutual. Job is lost to himself inside the darkness, but he is not lost to the One inside the darkness with him, and the pressure of the sustained unanswered seeking is not destroying him. It is producing something unique. Gold does not emerge from ore by pleasant means. It emerges from fire, and the same fire that feels from inside the ore like destruction is, from the perspective of the metallurgist, the mechanism of extraction and refinement.
The chapter ends with Job saying “That is why I am terrified before him; when I consider this, I am afraid of him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me. Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face.” Job is afraid. He cannot see God in any direction. He has been abandoned by his friends and betrayed by his own body and left in ashes for chapters, and he is not silent. He keeps speaking into the void. He refuses to be silenced by the very darkness that is concealing God from him, and the refusal is not a failure of faith. It is the definition of it, because the person who keeps addressing a God he cannot find is doing something more difficult than the person who has stopped addressing anyone at all.
Only the reader of the book of Job knows what Job himself never knows. Before the catastrophes of chapter 1, before the first messenger arrived with the first piece of bad news, God had commended Job to the adversary in the heavenly court as a blameless and upright man, one who feared God and shunned evil. Job does not suffer because God has forgotten him. Job suffers because God has enough confidence in his character to allow the testing. The hiddenness is not indifference. It is something God is sustaining for reasons that cannot be seen from inside the experience and were never explained to Job. God knows his way. God said so before the first catastrophe arrived. The search that finds nothing is being watched, in every direction, by the One being searched for.
And Job’s friends, who arrive so certain of their theology, are wrong. God says so explicitly in chapter 42, rebuking Eliphaz and the others for not having spoken rightly about Him while vindicating Job for having spoken with anguish and honesty. The dry, searching, directional, east-west-north-south prayer that felt from the inside like it was going nowhere was more faithful than every confident explanation the friends offered from their comfortable position outside the ash heap. Sometimes the pastoral counsel we offer to the experientially wounded is closer to Eliphaz than to Job, and the God who accepted Job’s darkness rejected the friends’ certainty.
There is a season some of us know from inside this exact wound. There was a time when the Word moved, when a specific verse landed on a specific Tuesday with the force of something written for the moment you were living in, when prayer was not a discipline you maintained but a conversation you did not want to leave, when worship broke you open reliably and you knew, with the confidence of felt experience, what the presence of God tasted like. And then without announcement it stopped. The Word went flat. Prayer started to feel like talking to a ceiling. Worship washes over you and you wonder if there is something wrong with you because you cannot feel what the person next to you seems to be feeling. You might still show up. You try to consume the Word through brute force. You are likely still praying if only out of habit. But the felt sense of God that used to make all of it easy has been absent long enough that you have started to wonder if it is coming back and whether you were imagining the presence you remember or whether the absence is now the truth about the relationship. This is the experiential wound, and Job is your companion in it. Job gave us the necessary diagnosis for this wound in verse 10. I cannot find Him, and He has not lost sight of me. Both true simultaneously. The felt absence is real and the actual presence is also real. Faith in the experiential wound is holding both truths at once without collapsing either one.
David and psalm 13 of his that opens the four-part cry we are walking through was written from inside the wilderness, from a season of hiddenness that had gone on long enough for him to demand of God how long the hiding was going to continue. That was David in a season of formation.
In Psalm 13 David asked, “How long will you hide your face from me?” In Psalm 139 he asked, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” and the psalm answers itself with the confidence of a man who has spent his life discovering that there is no direction he can travel that will escape the God who was searching him even during the seasons he could not feel Him searching. The same man but a different question. The question likely did not change because David’s circumstances finally became easier. The question certainly changed because David changed, because in a different season, he understood the workings of the divine presence of God and felt absence could not dismantle his understanding. The key sentence of the whole psalm 139 is the opening one. “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.” The Hebrew word translated searched is chaqar, which means to search thoroughly, to explore, to fathom the depths of something, and it is doing the work of the whole psalm. God was not looking away in Psalm 13. He was searching David the whole time. He was fathoming the depths of a man who could not feel Him doing it, and the hiddenness was never inattention. It was the most thorough form of attention scripture has language for.
The face that is hidden is not turned away permanently. It is searching you. And what God should find in the searching is the persistence of the seeker who keeps opening the Word when nothing moves and the prayers that feel like they hit a ceiling but the altar keeps burning anyway.
We pray:
Lord,
We have looked for you in the four directions and sometimes found nothing. We have kept opening the Word when it felt like cardboard and kept praying when the prayers hit a ceiling, and we do not always know whether the persistence is faith or stubbornness or simply the refusal to admit that we have run out of anywhere else to go. Meet us here, in the darkness that has covered our faces, and do not require of us the recovery of felt presence before we can be received by you.
We confess that we have wanted the presence returned on our timing. We have wanted the verse to move again the way it used to move. We have wanted worship to break us open the way it once did. And we have interpreted the delay of felt presence as evidence that we have done something wrong, when the truth is that we have been searched all along by a God who was fathoming the depths of us while we could not feel Him doing it.
Teach us the grammar of Job. Teach us to hold both truths at once, that we cannot find you and that you have not lost sight of us. Teach us to speak into the void the way Job spoke, not with the certainty of felt presence but with the refusal to be silenced by the darkness. Give us the honesty of the man who kept addressing the God he could not locate, because that address, unheard from the inside, was more faithful than every confident explanation his friends offered from outside the ash heap.
And when the face turns back toward us, and it will, do not let us forget that it was searching us the whole time. Let us come out of the hiddenness knowing what David only learned on the far side of his own wilderness, that there is no direction we can travel that will escape the God who was fathoming us while we could not feel Him doing it, and that the hiddenness was never inattention but the most thorough attention to loved children.
In the name of Jesus,
Amen.