Just as in the Old Testament story of Job, God’s hiddenness does not always correspond to punishing us for sin. If it is appropriate to God’s nature, then we should expect seasons of hiddenness will come. And these will come by divine design. The Psalms of lament, much of the Bible’s wisdom literature, and a book like Esther remind us that feeling God’s hiddenness is not divine neglect.

Christians fear the day when God goes dark. It’s a fear that God will drop communication when we need it most. It’s the lonely lament answered by silence. It’s a fear of being abandoned with only the words of Psalm 88, “Darkness is my only friend.” If God is hidden, how can I know God loves me? When God feels distant, how can I endure?

One obvious source of God going dark, otherwise known as God’s hiddenness, is human sin. Another, perhaps surprising, reason is God’s nature. Understanding these relations helps us walk by faith when God feels distant.

Sin

Why can’t believers feel God’s presence all the time? The primary answer is that our sin separates us from God. Scripture tells us sinners will suppress what is plainly revealed by God and that God’s silence is also a punishment for sin (Rom. 1:18-32; Amos 8:11).

But if Jesus cleanses us from all our sin, why does God still seem hidden? Because we still regularly wrestle with sin. The Apostle Paul explains this apparent paradox to the Christians in Colossae. They have been seated with Christ in the heavenly places, and yet they must “put to death what is earthly in you” (Col. 3:1-5). Sin’s penalty is abolished, but sin’s presence is slowly and steadily uprooted.

This battle with sin means believers will go through times where God seems, as the Psalmist says, to “hide his face.” I’ve had moments of lashing out at God, because even though I was doing all the right things to grow, I couldn’t make any progress. I wasn’t just stuck in the same place; I seemed to be moving backwards away from Christ. But God wasn’t pulling away, I had unrepentant sin in my life. In those moments I experienced what many good friends told me before. Our union with Christ is sure, but our communion with God can be disrupted by unrepentant sin.

Likely, God feels distant because we’ve left certain sins off our prayers of repentance. The deeper we hide in darkness the harder it gets to see light.

God’s Nature

Sin is not always the cause of God’s darkness though. God’s hiddenness teaches us something about his nature. He is transcendent, infinite, and incomprehensible. The English reformer, Richard Hooker, says that God’s glory is, “inexplicable and his greatness above our capacity and reach” (Haines 2024, 23). We will not find God the same way we find other things in the world. I can distinguish a pencil from a pen by picking it up and examining the differences, but there is nothing I can pick up and say, “Ah, I see now that this is God.”

A sense of hiddenness is appropriate to God’s nature. As Gregory of Nyssa says, “For how shall he be found whom none of the things we know declares—not look, nor color, nor outline, nor size, nor location, nor shape, nor conjecture, nor likelihood, nor analogy? No, the place where he is found is outside of every move to apprehend him, and hence he wholly escapes the grasp of those who seek him” (Gregory 2012, 377).

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