Hiddenness, Steadfast Love, and Worship

“The sense of God’s absence implies relationship: it presupposes 

what has been, or anticipates what might become, . . . it remembers 

a taste or betokens a desire not yet satisfied” 

(Wainwright, Doxology, 1980:42).

In Psalm 13, the psalmist cries to God: 

"How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?"

Yet, the psalmist is able to proclaim of God: 

"... I have trusted in thy steadfast love,"

For the psalmist to be aware of God's hiddenness or absence is for the psalmist to remember a time when he was in the presence of God, and to long for the return of God's presence.

Because the psalmist is cut off from the divine presence, he is no longer able to participate in God's steadfast love.  As a result, the psalmist experiences distress; furthermore, neither is the psalmist under God's protection from external enemies. 

Within this psalm, no mention is made as to why God has hidden the divine face from the psalmist or even why the psalmist should think that God is hidden. God's hiddenness in this psalm is unrelated to any sense of sin on the part of the psalmist. Neither is there any concrete evidence of sickness or the nature of the psalmist's suffering. 

Although it may be inferred that the psalmist is near death, death is not the problem for the psalmist. The problem for the psalmist is his separation from God.  God had deliberately hidden from the psalmist. 

Yet, it is as if God's hiddenness becomes God's purpose for and counsel to the psalmist. 

For one who has known the divine presence and has become reliant upon it, divine absence is a curious form of divine presence.  By evading the psalmist, God became more and more manifest to the psalmist.  It was God's very hiddenness from the psalmist that unmasked the psalmist's absolute need for his God.  But even more, there was disclosure of an intrinsic quality of God's presence, steadfast love.

Thus, God's hiddenness is not the absence of God.  Indeed, God can disclose the divine self in the very being of divine absence. This means that God's hiddenness actually becomes a mode of divine presence. Moreover, it is by the use of multiple modes of self-revelation that God manifests divine steadfast love.  It is apparent that one cannot set limits to the modes in which God may reveal the divine presence.  All that one can be certain of is God's steadfast love.

God hiddenness, of which suffering is the most profound experience, may indeed be a moment of communion with the God who is never really absent from the creation that this God made and never ceases to love.  For us who worship a God who indeed can hide from us, our final expectation is of open communion with this God, in this God’s visible glory - the final act of God’s steadfast love toward us.

Indeed, Paul states it best when he is:

sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord  (Romans 8:38).


See also:  God’s Surprising Silence by Frank M. Hasel (Perspective Digest)