What if we lived during a time when God is silent; He is not speaking through any means. Use your imagination and try to envision living when there was a drought of God’s word. In this case silence is not golden – that only applies to kids!

It was not hard for Samuel to visualize life like that because he was living that nightmare.

“Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD in the presence of Eli. And the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” (1 Samuel 3:1)

Samuel was the son born to Elkanah and Hannah. He was born out of a vow; they promised to give their firstborn to the Lord for service. Samuel eventually was taken to the Temple and given to Eli the priest. He was to live there and serve the Lord his entire life however God saw fit to call and gift him. Samuel would become the last judge and first prophet of Israel. What we know about the times of the judges is that the Israelites were doing whatever they wanted to do:

“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25)

The unchecked, wholesale wickedness of the day was in direct proportion to the absence of God’s revelation. If there is no direct revelation from God then people will do all sorts of wicked and unconscionable things (cf. Proverbs 28:18 [“Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law”]).

A quick read through the book of Judges gives you a sense of the vicious cycle they were in: comfort, complacency g disobedience g punishment g repentance g God shows up with grace. This cycle repeats itself for about 410 years. At the core of their decline was forgetting what God had done in the past and compromising with sin in the present.

It’s a catch 22 – people don’t hear from God therefore they live wickedly, and because people live wickedly God doesn’t speak. What is the answer to the dilemma? The answer is found in hearing from God.

This is where our responsibility comes into play. We must put ourselves in the position of hearing from God. We need to beg God to speak to us through His Word, but we cannot expect God to speak if we neglect the Bible. The answer is not avoidance, the answer is engaging. We need to be engaging ourselves in God’s Word. This means we will not be content with having someone else read and explain it for us; this means that we will open the sacred pages of God’s inspired Word and read it for ourselves.

Maybe we don’t hear from God because we’ve grown spiritually fat in our culture and are content to let sin continue. Disobedience only brings punishment. God cannot, and will not, allow sin to be left unchecked even if we do. We must repent of our sin of a lethargic attitude toward the Bible and go in a new direction. We must get back into the Bible in order to get our lives back on track. Or, are we content with God’s silence?

Grace & Peace,