When His Power Feels Like Silence
Recently, I came across two scriptures that are usually celebrated as anthems of victory and faith:
- “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” — Genesis 18:14
- “Ah, Lord God! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power… There is nothing too hard for You.” — Jeremiah 32:17
They are powerful declarations. But when I read them this time, they didn’t ignite hope in me. Instead, they flipped a switch—a switch connected to places in my heart that were still tender and hurting.
Instead of bringing healing, that question—Is anything too hard for the Lord?—sent me spiraling backward through time. It brought back every moment I had prayed, fasted, and hoped for the “impossible,” only for the outcome I desperately needed to collapse anyway. Sitting with those words didn’t comfort me; they rubbed off like salt in an open wound.
The Weight of Unanswered Power
I remember taking my raw frustration to God in prayer, telling Him exactly how it felt.
It feels like having a friend who has unlimited wealth while you are sitting next to them starving. You ask them for a piece of bread, and they just sit there in silence. Years pass, and later you hear that same friend boasting to someone else, “I have everything. I can buy or provide whatever anyone could ever need.” And in the back of your mind, you’re left nursing an ache, thinking: “If you could have done it all along… why did you leave me to suffer?”
It is easier to accept a “no” or an unmet need from someone who lacks the ability to help. But when the One who holds infinite power stays quiet during your deepest desperation, the silence feels heavier. It makes unanswered prayers feel less like a lack of resources and more like a deliberate choice. Being told “God can do anything” when you are sitting in the wreckage of a shattered hope can feel reckless if spoken without empathy.
Walking the Path of the Ancients
Yet, if we feel this way, we are not the first.
Sometimes we look at biblical figures as if they walked on air, immune to doubt. But read the 44th Psalm, and you will hear the raw cry of King David or the psalmists looking at history, remembering how God moved for their fathers, yet facing a present moment of crushing silence. They looked around and saw devastation, feeling as though God had hidden His face. And yet, even in the middle of that abandonment, they could say: “All this has come upon us… yet our hearts have not turned back.”
Realizing this shifts our perspective. The unresolved situations, the closed doors, and the prolonged silence are rarely just random accidents. They are often the frontline of a spiritual battle. The enemy aims our trials directly at our faith, trying to steal our joy , sour our devotion, and whisper the oldest lie in the book: “If He could have stopped this and didn’t, He must not love you.”
When Pain Becomes an Idol
There is another subtle danger we have to guard against in the middle of our waiting: the risk of letting our unresolved pain turn into an idol.
When we spend years consumed by worry, paralyzed by fear, and rehearsing our disappointments over and over, that pain can quietly take the throne of our hearts. Without realizing it, we can begin serving the very grief we are trapped in, letting it dictate our view of God and our posture toward life.
This is why, how we address our unresolved issues matters so deeply. Are we surrendering the broken pieces to God, or are we secretly clutching them as our primary identity? The enemy uses our unmet expectations as a trap—deceiving us into subtly shifting our trust away from God and onto our wounds.
This very battle against deception is something I’ve found myself exploring even deeper in my upcoming manuscript, Drowning in Deceit, where we look closely at how quiet illusions and unhealed pain attempt to steer us away from truth. Escaping that trap requires recognizing the deception. Instead of bowing to our fears, we have to realize that our pain is a reality to be brought to the altar, not an idol to bow before.
The Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego Principle
How do we fight back on that battlefield? We look to the posture of unshakeable, unconditional devotion.
Think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego standing before the fiery furnace. They didn’t posture their faith on a guaranteed rescue. They looked at the king and said, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us… But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods.”
That is the ultimate test of devotion. If our faith only survives on answered prayers and customized outcomes, it is transactional. But when we stay loyal in the silence—when we declare that our love for God is anchored in who He is rather than what He gives us—our endurance becomes a profound statement to the unseen world.
The Master Plan and the Omnipotence of God
Why is this so hard? Because we are trapped in a short-term, earthly timeline, while God operates from a master plan on an eternal scale. He sees the bigger picture that our present eyes cannot comprehend.
It is so easy for us to read stories like Joseph’s or Abraham’s and marvel at how everything worked out, because we are reading them from the finish line. But they lived through decades of heartache without seeing the full design. As the writer of Hebrews reminds us, many heroes of faith “died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them afar off.”
Because He works from the master plan, God’s omnipotence is still absolute. The fact that He did not move in the way we begged Him to does not diminish His power; it only reminds us that His power is the engine of an eternal redemption. He is still the almighty God whose strength does not fail, even when His blueprint breaks our hearts.
Holding Truth, Pain, and the Promise of Restoration
We don’t have to pretend the pain isn’t real. The grief of unanswered prayers, the sting of disappointment, and the ache of rejection are heavy, and God does not ask us to sanitize our heartbreak before coming to Him.
Each time the enemy tries to put that grief and pain in front of us, we can acknowledge the struggle while anchoring ourselves in His majesty: Yes, I know this is painful. But He is still the all-powerful God who sees the end from the beginning.
Because at the end of the day, God still heals, and He will still fulfill His promise.
Think of Joseph. After walking through betrayal, abandonment, slavery, and years of undeserved prison, he didn’t just survive—he lived to see God’s ultimate redemption. When his sons were born, he named the first Manasseh, declaring, “For God has made me forget all my toil.” And he named the second Ephraim, saying, “For God has caused me to thrive in the land of my affliction.”
The God who kept Joseph through the dark years is the same God who meets us in our silence. He is a God of restoration.
This brings us to a deep, quiet kind of joy—the joy of unwavering resolve. When we make the conscious choice that echoes the old hymn: “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back.”
The real fight of the Christian life is simply to keep the faith. At the end of the day, God’s word is true, and He will defend His own name. We give Him the platform to reveal His sovereign power as He is by refusing to retreat into bitterness.
There is a profound assurance in knowing that when we eventually cross eternity’s threshold—and even in the unexpected chapters He writes for us here on earth—we can stand tall in our devotion and say: “I prayed for things that didn’t come to pass, my heart broke, but I remained in You. I kept the faith.”
Even when nothing has changed and the answers haven’t come yet, we keep holding on. His power has not slipped. However He chooses to work out the details of the master plan, we remain—fully confident that He is a God who heals, restores, and ultimately fulfills every promise He makes.
Over to You
Have you ever wrestled with the silence of an all-powerful God? How do you hold your real, human pain in one hand while choosing to trust His character with the other? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
