Why is God Always Silent?

Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named Lincoln:

Dear Lee,

I’ve been a reader of this blog for a few years now and I think it offers a truly beautiful, logical and comforting theology and some great advice for spiritual development and doing good. However, there’s one question that I’m still really struggling with, if God is there, why is He always silent?

Now, I understand all the reasons why God veils Himself and doesn’t appear to all humans at all times, for example, free will.

But what I struggle to understand is why God doesn’t reach out to me personally, as someone who struggles with doubt and does want to hear from Him and be guided by Him? After all, countless people throughout history and in the Bible have heard from God in one capacity or another, so why would He be silent when it comes to me? And is there anything I can do to bridge that gap?

Thanks for the good question, Lincoln. And thanks for your kind words about our blog. I’m glad you’re finding the articles here helpful in your spiritual life!

Honestly, I can’t answer the question of why God is silent when it comes specifically to you. Only God knows that. Only God knows your entire life and your entire self, from inside out and from beginning to end. I don’t have that kind of knowledge. But God does, and God always acts with your eternal happiness in mind.

However, I would suggest that God has not been as silent as you think. It’s natural to want an audible voice from God of the kind that so many people in the Bible and throughout history have heard. That’s how we talk to our family and friends. But an audible voice isn’t the only way God speaks to us.

Yes, there are reasons God doesn’t talk to most people in the ordinary human way. Free will, of course. But also the materialism of our age and our own lack of faith, which make it too easy to doubt and explain away any experience of hearing God’s voice.

But more than that, the path toward hearing God’s voice is not through testing God by requiring God to speak to us in a particular way, but through listening for the ways God is already speaking to us in the Bible, through other people, and through our daily experience, not to mention within our own heart.

God can speak to us

Atheists and skeptics say that God doesn’t speak to you because there is no God. Even some people who believe in God, such as Deists, say that God is not concerned about human affairs, and doesn’t speak to you because God’s attention is elsewhere. These negative voices can be tempting. They can test our faith.

And they’re supposed to test our faith. If faith were easy to come by, it would be easy to lose, too. But faith that we struggle for against doubt, resistance, negative voices, and hard experiences is real faith. And it’s our faith. God allows voices of darkness and doubt to get at us during our lifetime on earth so that we can live in the balance between good and evil, light and darkness. That balance is where we can develop a real and strong faith, and a strong and good character to go with it.

Meanwhile, we have thousands, if not millions, of testimonies to people hearing the voice of God, not only in the Bible, but in many other sacred books, and in the stories people have told their families, friends and communities for thousands of years. If skeptics and atheists choose to reject all this testimony in favor of their own materialistic belief system, that’s on them. In fact, our tendency to write off even overwhelming testimony if it doesn’t accord with our pre-existing belief system is one of the reasons God doesn’t audibly speak to us very often these days.

According to Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the earliest spiritually aware humans on this earth had open communication and conversation with the angels of heaven; but as we became more materialistic, we lost that spiritual connection:

The earliest humans on our planet enjoyed a union with heaven’s angels, which is why their times are called the Golden Age. Because they acknowledged the Divine in human form and therefore were acknowledging the Lord, they talked with heaven’s angels as they did with members of their own family, and heaven’s angels talked with them in the same way; and in them heaven and this world were a single whole.

But after those times, people moved step by step away from heaven by loving themselves more than the Lord and the world more than heaven. So they began to feel the pleasures of self-love and love of the world separately from the pleasures of heaven, ultimately to the point where they did not know there was any other kind of pleasure. Then their deeper levels were closed, the levels that open into heaven, while their outer levels were open to the world. Once this has happened, we are in the light in respect to everything in this world and in darkness in respect to everything in heaven. (Heaven and Hell #252)

God can talk to us. But it is rare today because we live in such a materialistic society.

Materialistic thinking closes our ears to God

Why can’t God speak to all those skeptics and atheists, and convince them that there really is a God?

Of course, God could do that. But despite all the atheists’ challenges to God sit down and have a chat with them in their living room, if God actually did that, it would have the opposite effect. Ironically, the long-term result would be to harden them even more in their denial of God’s existence.

Here’s what would happen if God took up the challenge atheists throw in God’s teeth:

At first, the atheist would be amazed. God talked to me! There is a God after all!

But that wouldn’t last long. Very soon, probably within a day or two, but certainly within a week or a month, their materialism and “rationalism” would kick in. They’d explain the experience away the same way they explain away everyone else’s experiences of God. They’d “realize” that it was just a hallucination, that they had a little too much to drink that day, that they were in an emotional state due to some traumatic event in their lives, or some other non-God thing that they’d attribute it to.

And then they’d be embarrassed—especially if they told anyone else about it. They have built their whole self-image and reputation on rationalism and atheism! How could they be so naïve as to believe that was God? Obviously not, because God doesn’t exist!!! And if it ever happened again, they’d be primed and ready to write it off as a hallucination, secure in their atheistic beliefs.

There’s an old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Ironically, in the end, hearing God’s voice would make them reject God even harder.

That’s why God doesn’t talk to atheists and skeptics. And it’s why God doesn’t talk to material-minded people in general. They say that if they had evidence for God, they would believe in God. But in fact, their disbelief in God has nothing to do with evidence or lack thereof. It has to do with their own materialistic belief system. (And yes, despite atheists’ protestations to the contrary, materialism is a belief system.)

For people who really want evidence for God and spirit, there is more than anyone could ever ask for. See:

Where is the Proof of the Afterlife?

The first general answer to the question of why God is silent is that we’re not listening because our minds are focused on material things rather than on spiritual things and on God.

Lack of faith closes our ears to God

Ironically, the very thing you mention, struggling with doubt, is another reason God does not speak to us in an obvious, audible way.

When God spoke to people in the Bible, it was not to overcome doubt about God’s existence. The biblical figures who heard God’s voice all knew and believed that God was real, powerful, and present with them. God did not speak to them to overcome a lack of faith, but to inform and direct their already existing faith. Even the Apostle Paul, when the Lord spoke to him on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9:1–31), already believed in God. He just had some wrong beliefs about God that needed correcting.

Doubt, or lack of faith, creates an atmosphere of cloudiness that blocks the rays of God’s presence from shining through. God is still there, but our lack of faith closes our eyes and ears to God’s presence with us.

This is about as close as I can come to possibly answering the question of why you (Lincoln) don’t hear God’s voice. But once again, I can’t see into your heart, and I can’t see your whole life and character as God can. This may not be the reason at all. Plenty of people who have a shaky faith have heard God’s voice. The sun does sometimes shine through the clouds. The most I can say is that doubt and lack of faith makes it harder for God to speak to us because it creates around us an atmosphere of spiritual obscurity that tends to block out any awareness of God’s presence and voice.

Does this mean you should just “have more faith,” and then God will talk to you?

No.

This is a common idea among many fundamentalist and evangelical preachers. If you had real faith, they say, you would be rich and famous and healthy as a horse, and all your earthly troubles would go away. And then they pass the collection plate.

The reality is much more complex. Faith is not something we can just muster up by an act of will. It is something that grows over time as we walk the path of faith.

Free will is essential to our salvation

And yes, as you suggest, free will is a major reason God rarely speaks to us in an obvious, audible voice.

The reality is that God is everything, and we are nothing by comparison. Everything that happens is done by God, not by us. Yes, God acts through us. But without God keeping us in existence, and giving us life and power every moment, we would not only be unable to do anything, but we would instantly cease to exist.

However, for most of us, if we actually believed that we are nothing and God is everything, we would lose all our will to do anything, and even our will to live. We would just waste away, without any motivation to move our life forward. That’s because as we start out in life, our sense of self is all tied up with our ego. If we were honest with ourselves, and had a clear view of our inner motives, we would see that most of what we do is driven by our desire for pleasure, money, power, and so on. We naturally think that the world revolves around us and our own pleasure and pain.

That is our sense of self at the start of our spiritual journey. Even though it is a false and faulty sense of self, it’s the only sense of self we have. And God does not rip it away from us. To do so would be to destroy us as human beings.

Instead, God leads us in complete spiritual freedom, step by step, if we are willing, out of our original self-absorbed sense of self toward a new, heavenly sense of self that God gives us along the way. This heavenly sense of self is not focused on our own pleasure and pain, but on loving and serving God and the neighbor as Jesus taught.

Why does God lead us in freedom? Because only the things we choose out of our own free will become a permanent part of us.

If God were to step in and say, “No, that’s the wrong way. Do it this way instead,” not only would the results not be our own, and not become a part of us, but we would come to resent God for interfering in our life!

Why?

Because God’s purposes for us are at cross-purposes with our own purposes and motives, especially early on in our path of spiritual rebirth. We want pleasure, happiness, money, power, status, and reputation in this world. God wants us to stop focusing on these things, and focus instead on love, understanding, forgiveness, service, humility, and innocence.

That is another reason God does not speak to us in an obvious, audible voice. Ironically, if God did so, most of us would be annoyed at God, because the things God said to us would be the exact opposite of the things we wanted to hear. For example, we might want to hear God say that some incapacitating injury will be taken away from us. But God might tell us that our incapacitating injury is a necessary part of our spiritual path, and that without it, we would walk a downward path instead of an upward one.

This does not mean that God purposely injured us. God never does evil. But God will permit evil to happen to us if God sees that it can move us farther along our spiritual path than we would otherwise go—or finally get us onto a spiritual path in the first place.

The main point is, when we are still struggling along the path of spiritual rebirth, God must leave us in freedom to think that our life is in our own hands, and that we must struggle forward by our own efforts. Otherwise we will not engage in the struggle at all, and we will never be reborn and go to heaven. For most of us, having God give us audible instructions all along the way would short-circuit that process. It would do more harm than good, because we would no longer feel like our life is our own. We would feel like puppets on a string.

And it’s not as though God hasn’t spoken to us in many ways, and made it very clear to us what God wants and expects of us.

The Word of God

One of the enduring traditional names for the Bible is “the Word,” or “the Word of God.” That is not by accident. For Christians, the Bible is quite literally where God speaks to us, delivering God’s words to us.

According to Swedenborg, God gave us the Bible specifically to make up for the fact that we are no longer listening to God with our own spiritual ears:

I have been told from heaven that the earliest people had direct revelation because their inner natures were turned toward heaven, and that this was the source of the Lord’s union with the human race at that time. After those times, though, there was not the same kind of direct revelation, but an indirect revelation through correspondences. . . .

Once all knowledge of correspondences and representations had been lost, then a Word was written in which all the words and the meanings of the words are correspondences and therefore contain that spiritual or inner meaning in which angels are engaged. So when we read the Word and grasp it in its literal or outward meaning, angels grasp it in its inner or spiritual meaning. In fact, all the thought of angels is spiritual, while ours is natural. These two kinds of thought do seem different, but they are one because they correspond.

This is why, after we had moved away from heaven and broken the connection, the Lord provided that there should be a means of union of heaven with us through the Word. (Heaven and Hell #306)

When we read the Bible, God is speaking to us. Or I should say, God is speaking to us if we are reading the Bible because we want to hear God’s voice and receive God’s guidance and direction for our life.

When you read the Bible, it won’t come across as a living voice in your head. But any time you want to hear God speaking to you, pick up the Bible (whether physical or digital), and read it. If as you read you are listening for what God wants to say to you, you will hear it in your mind, and you will know that it comes from God because you heard it while you were reading God’s Word.

God speaks to us in prayer

God has also provided a more direct and personal way to hear God’s voice: prayer.

This also usually does not involve God speaking in our head in audible words. And yet, God’s voice does come through if we are listening for it in prayer. Here is a particularly beautiful passage about prayer from Swedenborg’s writings:

Regarded in itself, praying is talking with God, while taking an inward view of the things we are praying about. In answer we receive a similar kind of inflow into the perceptions or thoughts of our mind, so that there is some opening of our inner depths to God. The experience varies, depending on our mood and the nature of the subject we are praying about. If we pray from love and faith and focus on or seek only what is heavenly and spiritual, something resembling a revelation emerges while we pray. It shows itself in our emotions in the form of hope, comfort, or an inward stirring of joy. (Secrets of Heaven #2535)

Another way of saying this is that when we are talking with God through prayer, God speaks to our heart, and from there, enlightens our mind.

In addition to reading the Bible, praying to God and opening yourself to God’s response within yourself is another thing you can do to bridge the gap and hear God’s voice in your heart and mind, even if not with your ears.

Hearing God all around us

God not only speaks to us directly in the Bible and in prayer, but indirectly through the people around us, and through our experiences in the human community and in nature.

Sometimes this is not subtle at all. A preacher’s words seem to be aimed at us personally, and they change us. A trusted friend or family member talks to us about the presence of God and spirit, and it touches us.

Other times it comes to us in actions rather than words. Someone appears just when we need him or her, and helps us out of a jam, either physical or emotional. We see someone giving a helping hand to someone else, and it lifts our spirit. We see someone laboring away at a thankless task just because it’s the right thing to do to make life better for people. God speaks to us through all the good and thoughtful actions of the people around us—all of which are inspired by God prompting them with love from within.

And then there’s the world of nature. Who doesn’t feel refreshed by a walk in the woods, or a stroll along an empty beach by a lake or the ocean? God is present in the world of nature, which is God’s own creation. Yes, nature is not all sweetness and light. Yet even in the more hard-edged parts of nature, we can see the force of God’s character delivering messages that we may not want to hear, but that we need to hear. Mostly, though, nature gives us a sense of the beauty and peace of God’s character and presence.

These are just a few examples of how God speaks to us, not in words, but in actions and experiences. If our mind and heart are open to it, we can see and hear God’s voice in everything and everyone around us.

God is silent?

Is God really silent?

I don’t think so.

It’s just that God doesn’t necessarily talk to us in the way we want God to talk to us. But even someone of shaky and doubtful faith can see intellectually that God will speak to us in the ways that God thinks are best for us, not in the ways that we think are best.

God is always talking to us, in so many ways! The real question is: are we listening?

Here is a shorter video version of this article:

This article is a response to a spiritual conundrum submitted by a reader.

For further reading:

• Why Is Life So Hard? Why are there So Many Struggles?
• Pray to God, but Row Away from the Rocks
• Where is the Proof of the Afterlife?
• Can We Really Believe the Bible?
• How do I Love God with my Whole Heart?