Scripture · 2026-08-02
What it means when God feels absent — and why the most honest cry in Scripture is also an act of faith
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?"
— Psalm 22:1
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There is a verse in the Bible that sounds like it should not be there. It is raw, desperate, and jarring — a man crying out to God in what feels like total abandonment. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And yet this is Scripture. This is the Word of God. That alone should change how we think about the silence.
We often assume that spiritual maturity means feeling close to God. That if we pray enough, trust enough, and hold on tight enough, we will always sense His presence like warmth in the room. So when the silence comes — when we pray and nothing seems to move, when tragedy arrives and heaven feels locked — we assume something is wrong with us. We must have failed. We must have been abandoned.
But Psalm 22 opens with exactly that cry and does not apologize for it. David does not begin with answers. He begins with honest pain. And Jesus himself — hanging on the cross, bearing the weight of the world — quoted this very psalm. The Son of God, in His darkest hour, reached for these words. That means your darkness is not outside the reach of Scripture. Your silence is not outside the reach of God.
The passage continues. By verse 24, something has shifted — not because the suffering ended, but because David kept speaking to God through it. He wrote: "For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help." The silence was not absence. God was present in the very place where His presence felt impossible. And He is present in yours too.
Many people read Psalm 22:1 and assume it is a moment of spiritual failure — a lapse in faith, a sign that David has lost his way. Others skip past it quickly when they encounter it on the cross, treating it as an anomaly rather than a deliberate cry. The common assumption is that if God truly loves us, we should always feel His presence, and silence means punishment or abandonment.
Psalm 22 is a lament psalm — a biblical genre that gives full voice to suffering while still addressing God directly. The very act of crying out to God is itself an expression of faith, not its absence. David does not walk away; he keeps talking. More profoundly, Jesus quoted this psalm from the cross (Matthew 27:46), meaning the incarnate Son of God entered the full human experience of felt abandonment — validating rather than invalidating the experience. The psalm ends not in despair but in trust and worship (vv. 27–31), showing the arc of lament as a path through darkness, not a sign of being lost in it.
If you are in a season where God feels absent, your honesty is not a sin — it is a form of prayer. The psalms give you language for the silence. Bring your cry to God the way David did, the way Jesus did: with your real words, your real grief, addressed directly to the One you are not yet sure is listening. He is.
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Hay un versículo en la Biblia que parece no debería estar ahí. Es crudo, desesperado, perturbador — un hombre clamando a Dios en lo que siente como abandono total. "Dios mío, Dios mío, ¿por qué me has desamparado?" Y sin embargo, esto es la Escritura. Esto es la Palabra de Dios. Solo eso debería cambiar la forma en que pensamos sobre el silencio.
Con frecuencia asumimos que la madurez espiritual significa sentirse cerca de Dios. Que si oramos suficiente, confiamos suficiente y nos aferramos con fuerza, siempre sentiremos Su presencia como calor en la habitación. Así que cuando llega el silencio — cuando oramos y nada parece moverse, cuando llega la tragedia y el cielo parece cerrado — asumimos que algo está mal en nosotros. Debemos haber fallado. Debemos haber sido abandonados.
Pero el Salmo 22 comienza exactamente con ese clamor y no se disculpa por ello. David no comienza con respuestas. Comienza con dolor honesto. Y el mismo Jesús — colgando en la cruz, cargando el peso del mundo — citó este salmo. El Hijo de Dios, en Su hora más oscura, recurrió a estas palabras. Eso significa que tu oscuridad no está fuera del alcance de la Escritura. Tu silencio no está fuera del alcance de Dios.
El pasaje continúa. Para el versículo 24, algo ha cambiado — no porque el sufrimiento terminara, sino porque David siguió hablando con Dios a través de él. Escribió: "Porque no menospreció ni abominó la aflicción del afligido, ni de él escondió su rostro; sino que cuando clamó a él, le oyó." El silencio no era ausencia. Dios estaba presente en el mismo lugar donde Su presencia parecía imposible. Y Él está presente en el tuyo también.
Psalm 22:1-2
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest."
These are the exact words Jesus cried from the cross. They are not a failure of faith — they are a model of it. The psalmist brings his worst experience directly to God, without dressing it up.
Psalm 22:24
"For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help."
The same psalm ends here. The silence was not abandonment. Psalm 22 begins with absence and ends with trust — not because the circumstances changed, but because the psalmist chose to trust in the character of God he knew even when he could not feel it.
Matthew 27:46
"About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Jesus quoted Psalm 22 from the cross. This means God, in human form, experienced the very silence this psalm describes. You are not in territory God does not know from the inside.
Psalm 22 begins as one of the most desperate cries in the entire Bible and ends as one of the most triumphant. That arc is not accidental — it is the shape of honest faith. Not faith that never doubts, but faith that brings the doubt directly to God and keeps talking until something shifts. The shift in Psalm 22 does not come from changed circumstances. It comes from the psalmist moving from his feelings to his memory — from "I feel forsaken" to "our ancestors trusted you and were not put to shame."
The silence of God is one of the most common and most frightening experiences in the spiritual life. Every tradition within Christianity has grappled with it. The mystics called it desolation. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. Mother Teresa, in her private letters, described decades of feeling nothing from God while publicly projecting faith. What the tradition consistently finds is that the silence is not the same thing as the absence — and that it often precedes a depth of trust that good feelings alone cannot produce.
Jesus's quotation of Psalm 22 from the cross is one of the most important details in the Gospels. The Son of God, fully human, experienced the felt abandonment this psalm describes. That means the silence you feel has been entered by God himself. You are not in foreign territory to Him. You are in territory He knows from the inside — and He came through it.
If you are in a season of God's silence, the instruction from both Psalm 22 and from Jesus is not to give up but to keep talking. "My God, my God" — the address itself is the act of faith. You are still calling Him "my God" in the middle of the question. That is what faith looks like in the dark.
Scripture does not give a single answer to this question, which is itself instructive — God does not owe us an explanation for His timing. What Scripture does offer is consistent testimony that the silence is not the same as absence (Hebrews 13:5), that it is a common human experience among the most faithful believers, and that persevering through it produces a depth of faith that good feelings alone cannot build (Romans 5:3-4).
Yes — and Psalm 22, Psalm 88, Lamentations, Job, and many other scriptures model exactly this. God preserved these raw cries in Scripture for a reason. Honest prayer about God's felt absence is not faithlessness; it is the most intimate form of faith — staying in relationship even when the relationship feels one-sided.
A term coined by 16th-century mystic John of the Cross to describe a period in the spiritual life when a believer feels profound spiritual dryness and the absence of God's presence. Far from being a spiritual failure, John describes it as a purification — God weaning the soul from dependence on spiritual feelings so that faith can be rooted in something deeper and more durable than emotion.
Use the Psalms. They were written precisely for this. Psalm 22, 42, 88, and many others are ready-made prayers for seasons of silence. Sometimes praying someone else's words when you have none of your own is exactly the right move. You can also simply tell God what you just told that question: "I feel like you're not listening." Start there.
A new prayer every morning. Real words for real life.