Job 13:17-28: in context

In the depth of his suffering, Job speaks boldly to God, longing to argue his case and to understand. But amid his bold words comes a cry of anguish that reveals his deepest pain. It is not only the loss and the physical suffering, but the sense that God has turned from him. Why do you hide your face, he asks, and consider me your enemy? Will you frighten a driven leaf? Job feels that God, whom he had known as friend, has hidden his face and become hostile, and this felt absence of God is the heaviest part of his suffering.

The cry, why do you hide your face and count me as your enemy, gives voice to a particular anguish in suffering: the sense of God's felt absence. Job's suffering was severe in itself, but what pierced him most deeply was the feeling that God had hidden his face, turned away, even become hostile toward him. The God he had known as near now seemed absent; the God he had trusted as friend now seemed an enemy. This felt hiddenness of God, this sense of his absence in the midst of suffering, was Job's deepest pain, heavier than the outward losses. This is an anguish that many who suffer know. In deep affliction, it is often not only the outward hardship that pains us but the sense that God has withdrawn, hidden his face, become distant or even hostile. We feel abandoned by the God we trusted, alone in our suffering, as though he had turned away. Why do you hide your face from me, the psalmist cries; how long will you forget me? The felt absence of God in suffering is a real and deep anguish, and Scripture does not pretend otherwise; it gives voice to this very cry. Even Jesus, on the cross, cried, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. The sense of God's hiddenness in suffering is a genuine part of the experience of the faithful. And yet Scripture holds out a truth alongside this anguish: that God's felt hiddenness is not his real abandonment. God tells his people, through Isaiah, for a brief moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you. The feeling that God has hidden his face is real, but it is not the whole truth; behind the felt absence, his love does not fail, and he has not truly abandoned his own. This is a comfort for those who feel God's absence in their suffering. The anguish of feeling that God has hidden his face is real, and we may bring it honestly to him, as Job did, crying out our sense of his absence. But the feeling is not the final truth; God's felt hiddenness is not his real abandonment. When we feel that God has hidden his face and become distant in our suffering, we may voice that anguish honestly, as Job and the psalmists did, and yet hold to the truth that behind the felt absence, God's love does not fail, and he has not truly forsaken us, but will show, in his time, the everlasting compassion that the felt hiddenness could not undo.

When my suffering is deepened by the sense that God has hidden his face, turned away, even become hostile, so that his felt absence is the heaviest part of my pain, can Job's honest cry, why do you hide your face, give me leave to bring that anguish to God, while holding to the truth that God's felt hiddenness is not his real abandonment, and that behind the felt absence his everlasting love does not fail, and he has not truly forsaken me?