The Answer

Yet You are holy, O You are enthroned upon the praises of Israel. Psalm 22:3

Holy – Perhaps this is the wrong word for our inquiry.  Perhaps we should have looked at the conjunctive “vav” (a single Hebrew letter attached to the word).  It can be translated in a dozen different ways, usually “and,” “but,” “yet,” etc.  That’s why this verse is sometimes written, “But You are holy.”  No matter what the translation, the intention is clear.  This Hebrew letter connects what comes before with what follows.  What comes before is David’s cry of dereliction.  What comes before is the crushing reality of God’s silence.  And now, we are connected to the answer.  It is all that we need, but it is not what we expected.

The answer to the affliction of silence is God’s holiness.  This is a bit tricky.  Go slowly.  The holiness of God (in Hebrew qadosh) is the most important fact of all creation.  It is more important than His compassion, His mercy and His grace.  Holiness is the guarantee that whatever God does, He does with absolute moral perfection, without any trace of second agendas or any hint of compromise.  Kaiser calls holiness “the central organizing feature of the Old Testament.”  It is not simply an attribute of God.  It is the expression of God’s essential character.  Because God is holy, He is utterly trustworthy and totality reliable.   Holiness extends to everything that God does.  From an ethical perspective, God’s holiness sets the final standard for everything else, and that means that holiness is the reason God can lay claim to all that is, including every aspect of your life and mine.

Now we can see why David’s answer to silence is the acknowledgement of God’s holiness.  The Bible never raises a question that it does not answer (although sometimes the answers are not what we want to hear).  The answer to the question, “Why have you forsaken me?” is this: If I feel as though God has forsaken me, I am the one who needs correction, not God. God never does anything that does not issue from, support and confirm His holiness.   Since God is utterly reliable and trustworthy, my experience of His absence cannot mean that He has gone.  It can only mean that either I am not listening or His felt absence is essential to the purposes of holiness.

One more time.  Holiness guarantees that God will never fail to be Who He is.  God is the God Who reveals Himself.  He will never fail to do so.  In those moments when my hands are clean and my heart is pure – and I still feel His absence – my answer resides in Who God is.  Because He is holy, He will never do anything perverse, evil or tempting.  Therefore, I am assured that He is with me, even when I do not or cannot feel Him. My faith must move from what God does to Who God is.  My faith must reside in God’s character, not in His acts toward me.

This answer may not be the one I wanted.  I wanted God to fix things.  But my faith says that I can trust who He is.  I do not place my faith in what He does.  There will be many times when I will not understand what He does, but there will never be a moment when I cannot count on who He is.  If He is silent, He is still holy.