Before you call I will answer; while you are still speaking I will hear. Isaiah 65:24
The Bible is filled with people who struggled with tremendous doubt and cried out to God, “Where are you?”
The people of God have a term for these kinds of moments: lament. Lamenting is a deep cry of the soul, one that, in the face of struggle, remembers the past goodness of God and cries out to Him to be faithful once again. It is a passionate plea, literally a “calling out” of God.
Time and again in the Bible we come across people who cried out to God. They cried out because they knew that He had been faithful in the past, and that they needed Him to be faithful once again in the present. “God, where are you? I thought you were a loving God. Where’s this loving God that I thought you were?”
When we ask hard questions of God, we are standing in the stream of this ancient tradition, one that is captured over and over in the Bible. It is in the asking of your honest, gut-wrenching questions—the ones filled with anger and frustration—that you are expressing a deep sense of faith. We cry out to God, in frustration and in anger, because we believe that He is the only One who can do something about it.
We believe, ultimately, that God is a God who hears. And it is this truth that gives us hope now.
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