Christ’s promise to those who cry out to him is that “the one who seeks finds” (Matthew 7:8). So, when we are plagued by the perceived absence of God, rather than sink into despair, we cry out to God, we wait on him in prayer, we raise our eyes to him in worship, we run to the church — Christ’s body — for support, we look for him in his word, and we remind ourselves of his presence by taking the Lord’s Supper.

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble? (A Grief Observed, 6)

C.S. Lewis penned these words as he struggled to deal with the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis here expresses the experience of many who have struggled to deal with genuine evil in their lives and have turned to God only to find him seemingly absent. This experience has sometimes been called the problem of divine hiddenness.

So, what causes this “absence” of God, as periodically experienced by so many, myself included? And how might we reckon with his absence so that we might find him again?

Willing the Absence

We can come at the question of divine hiddenness from two directions: first, from the “lived-absence of God,” and second, from the reality that God is not immediately apparent to our senses. Let’s take them one at a time.

For many, the absence of God is felt so profoundly because they are actively living as if God were absent in their day-to-day life. As odd as it may sound, this type of lived-absence of God occurs in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike. Stephen Charnock describes this dynamic with the term practical atheism (The Existence and Attributes of God, 1:137–255). Many people, even self-professing Christians, live their lives as if there is no God.

Indeed, one cause of the deep impression of the absence of God may be the presence of unconfessed and unrepentant sin. Charnock suggests that to sin is to secretly desire the nonexistence of God. Thus, it should not be surprising that we experience a deep sense of the absence of God if we live in unconfessed sin. For this form of divine hiddenness, the appropriate remedy is the confession of sin and turning back to God.

Modern existentialism has turned this version of the lived-absence of God into a “philosophy.” In his work The Problem of God, John Courtney Murray describes how the modern existentialist affirms the absence of God: “He says that God must be absent. He asserts his fundamental will that God should be absent. The reason is obvious. . . . If God is present, man is being made by God, and he is being made a man . . . [with] a destiny which he himself did not choose” (117).

The modern existentialist affirms the absence of God, not because he has looked for him and failed to find him, but because, if God is present, then man is accountable to him. “Therefore God must be declared dead, missing, absent. The declaration is an act of the will, a basic will to the absence of God” (The Problem of God, 117). Here we find not existential dread in not finding God, but man actively willing the absence of God, so that he can live his life without divine constraints.

Abandoned and Alone

Another way we might sink into a lived-absence of God is related not to personal sin, but to a sense of having been abandoned in evil circumstances. Again, this absence is common to believers and unbelievers alike. We may become aware of divine hiddenness when evil suddenly looms large and, turning to God, we are shocked by his apparent absence.

This feeling is what Lewis describes in A Grief Observed, and what Elijah seems to have experienced when he fled from Jezebel to a cave in the desert (1 Kings 19). Joseph Minich captures this appearance of absence perfectly:

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