Where was God?
The groaning of creation
There is a question older than the book of Job, and the twentieth century pressed it past anything its asking had borne before. In the trenches, in the camps, in the cities turned to ash, suffering came on a scale that made every easy answer obscene. Where was God. The honest believer does not rush to fill that silence, and Scripture does not rush either. The sons of Korah do not explain the horror; they fling it at heaven — wake up, why do you sleep, Lord; arise, do not reject us forever. The Bible hands the sufferer no tidy account that would tie the abyss up neatly and let God off the hook. What it offers instead is stranger and harder and, in the end, deeper. The whole creation, Paul writes, groans and travails in pain together until now, and we groan inside it, waiting for a redemption we cannot yet see. And at the center of the faith stands a cross. The God of the Bible does not stand at a safe distance and account for the dark. In Christ He came down into it, was tortured and killed inside it, and cried out from within it. He does not explain the abyss. He entered it.
“Wake up! Why do you sleep, Lord? Arise! Don't reject us forever.”
— The sons of Korah — Psalm 44:23 (WEB)
“The whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now.”
This is Disorientation at its sharpest edge, where the loss of bearings is not confusion but anguish, and the wilderness becomes an abyss. The phase asks the hardest thing of all: to hold the question open without forcing an answer, to let God be silent of explanations while refusing to call Him absent, and to stand at the edge with the crucified One rather than the tidy one.
If your suffering has gone past the place where answers help, hear this first: you are allowed to shout the psalmist's question into heaven with no rebuke, wake up, why do you sleep, where are you. Faith does not survive the century of atrocity by finding the missing reason. Faith here is not finding the missing reason; there may be none you could bear, and the search for one has wounded more grieving people than it ever helped. What you are given instead is harder and deeper. At the center of your faith stands a cross.
The God you cry to did not stay outside the dark and account for it; in Christ He went down into it, was killed inside it, and cried out from within it. The temptation is to hand the sufferer a system — a hidden purpose, a greater good, a ledger that balances in the end — and every such system, spoken over an open grave, is a kind of violence. The God of Scripture does something else. He answers the abyss not with an argument but with a presence, and the presence is a crucified one. The cross does not tell you why the dark fell. It tells you the dark fell on Him too, that there is no forsakenness you can name into which He has not descended first.
And the groaning creation is not abandoned to its groan. It travails, which is the labor of birth, not the rattle of death. So faith here is not the possession of an explanation. It is the refusal to let go of a God who suffered, and the stubborn hope that the groaning is toward something.
Before the great atrocities of history, the whole Church has had to learn when to put down its theodicies. The twentieth century pressed the ancient question past anything its asking had borne before, in the trenches and camps and cities turned to ash, and every easy answer spoken over that scale of suffering became obscene. Scripture itself does not rush to fill the silence; the sons of Korah fling the horror at heaven rather than explain it. The honest Body does the same. It does not defend God with a system that lets Him off the hook; it groans with the whole creation that travails in pain until now, and points to the crucified One who entered the worst of it. Faith for the Church at the edge of the abyss is not a tidy argument. It is holding fast to the God who suffered.
When the worst that can be shaken has shaken — and the twentieth century shook nearly everything a soul could lean on — what remains is not an explanation but a Person: the crucified God who entered the dark. Hebrews promises the shaking removes what is made so that what cannot be shaken may remain. This remains.
- Have I been demanding from God an answer that no answer could honor — and what would it mean to stop?
- Can I bring my hardest question to a God who does not explain the abyss but entered it?
- Where am I being asked to groan with those who grieve rather than hand them a tidy reason?
Lord, before suffering this vast I have no words but the psalmist's: where were You. I will not pretend to an answer that would dishonor the dead. Hold me instead to the cross, where You went down into the dark. Groan with me, and bring the redemption the whole creation labors toward. Amen.