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why does God seem silent?

Adds the setting and its conversation across both testaments.

Psalm 22:1-2

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don’t answer; in the night season, and am not silent.”

This psalm is a lament, a heartfelt cry of a person experiencing profound distress and a sense of abandonment by God. It comes from the Psalms, a collection of ancient Hebrew poems and songs that express the full range of human emotions, often in direct address to God.

What does it mean to continue crying out when you feel unheard?

Then — the setting

Psalm 22 is a lament psalm, a common genre in ancient Israelite worship and personal devotion, likely composed around the 10th-6th centuries BCE. Such psalms allowed individuals and communities to express intense suffering, injustice, and feelings of abandonment directly to God, often in the context of illness, persecution, or national crisis. While expressing deep despair, these laments typically move towards expressions of trust and hope, or a vow of praise, even if the situation hasn't changed. This psalm, however, is particularly poignant in its opening cry of dereliction, setting a tone of profound anguish.

Across the Testaments

This passage is in the Old Testament, expressing a raw human experience of God's apparent absence. In the New Testament, Jesus quotes the opening line of Psalm 22:1 from the cross (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34). This connects the suffering of the psalmist to Jesus' ultimate suffering, suggesting that even God's Son experienced this profound sense of forsakenness. While the Old Testament psalmist eventually moves to hope and praise within the psalm, Jesus' cry on the cross underscores the depth of human and divine suffering, reframing the experience of 'God's silence' not as abandonment, but as a shared journey through the darkest valley.

Keep thinking

Read alongside it

Job 30:20-21
Job expresses a similar feeling of God turning cruel and being deaf to his cries.
Lamentations 3:8
The prophet laments that God has shut out his prayer, blocking his cry.
Hebrews 13:5
A New Testament affirmation that God will never leave or forsake, offering a counterpoint to the feeling expressed in Psalm 22.

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