“But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me.’” “Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, Yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; Your walls are continually before Me.” Isaiah 49:14-16 NKJV
When God’s Silence Feels Like Abandonment
I am going through – and have been through – situations where I genuinely wonder if God can see or hear what is happening. I ask Him, too. My brain processes it as: there’s no way He’s watching as this is going on, and He’s doing nothing about it. Not the God I know, and certainly not the God I read about. I have asked Him on occasion to show Himself strong in the situation, whether by causing a turnaround or sitting on my bed to reassure me. To be honest, sometimes He does neither. There are days when I have had to speak over myself. The more I know Him, the easier it is.
What Isaiah 49:14-16 Teaches Us About Being Remembered by God
The Word has found many different ways to explain the Lord’s love and consideration for us. One of the clearest is where He addresses Zion’s despair directly, saying that He has inscribed us on the palms of His hands and that our walls are continually before Him. There is little to escape your own palms, nor the walls that face you. The Lord is specific in His description of where He holds us, and why it causes Him to remember us. It means that we cannot be forgotten by God. We may feel forgotten, but He promises us that He cannot, and that in fact, we are consistently before Him. The truth of His word must trump our emotion or situation.
Tracing Him through His Word
He sees it all. His silence does not mean He is not at work, or that what we see is all we have. We have to trust who God says He is (Psalm 55:3). We know that He’s a good God with good plans for us (Jeremiah 29:11). We know that He has promised to never leave us nor forsake us (Deuteronomy 31:8). We are sharply aware, even more so in harder circumstances, that we lack control and cannot see. These are not new feelings: in 1 Kings 19:10, Elijah tells God that he is the only prophet left who is zealous for His name, and his life is sought after. In 19:18, the Lord reveals that there are, in fact, seven thousand reserved for His name in Israel. He is always working, despite what it may feel like.
My prayer is therefore that you can find God where you are. I pray that you get to a place where your knowledge of Him echoes louder than what you can see or how you feel, and that you are assured by His promises and His character. I pray that you are close enough to ask where He is, and if He can see or hear you, and equally as close to know that He’s always near (Psalm 145:18). The rescue may not be the immediate out you are searching for, but rest assured that He is God.
