WHY DOES/DOESN'T GOD...?

Why, O Lord, do You stand far off?

Why do You hide Yourself in times of trouble?

Psalm 10.1

The Psalms have about 150 questions about God and His ways.

They have about that many answers from God.

Here's one of them, expressed two ways.

I think the basic answer here is answered by God with Isaiah 59.1-2:

Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,

nor His ear too dull to hear.

But your iniquities have separated you from your God;

your sins have hidden His face from you,

so that He will not hear.

Apparently, God is not hiding some place "far off," careless and indifferent.

More likely, our being concerned with our own agendas that God seems not to pay attention to means that we are not paying much attention to what God is doing, particularly those things that God is saying that He expects of us.

James 4.1-3 says pointedly that we don't get what we want from God because all we want from God is what we want, for our own selfish purposes and pleasures.

If in our selfishness we are blind to one another, pretty much unaware and unconcerned about needs and desires of others, perhaps its understandable that we would think God is not interested in us.

The Bible's picture of the situation is that

1. God is not standing far off, but that are avoiding Him and His ways.

2. God is not hiding from us, but we are hiding from Him until we get into trouble and then we can't seem to find Him, or at least blame Him for the trouble we got ourselves into. It's more like, "Why didn't You prevent this, God?" than "Why was I not listening when God was giving me directions and warnings?"

3. God is not short-handed, but we are staying out of His reach, out of touch with what He is trying to say.

Since we intentionally avoid God until we want something from Him, we tend come up with all kinds of complaints, "questions/questioning" about God's not taking care of us and finding fault with how He is or is not running the rest of the world the way we think it should be done, seen from our very limited, very selfish, very discontent point of view.

Our limitations and complaints are probably not going to impress God to the point He abandons His sovereign wisdom and power to cater to our complaints and criticisms, whims and whinings.

Until we see and recognize our own mismanagements and "eye-beams," we probably ought not be too abrasive in our judgments about what we think is wrong about the way God is doing things, or not doing them, as we may think.