Where was God when this happened to me?
Some questions are not born in a theology classroom but in a hospital ward, at a graveside, after a betrayal or in the middle of a sleepless night. “Where was God when this happened to me?” is one of them. Perhaps you lost a child, your spouse or your parents. Perhaps you suffered violence, illness, financial ruin, abandonment or an injustice that marked you for ever. If you are asking that question, you are not alone, and you are not sinning by asking it. The Bible is full of people who asked it of God out loud. In this article we do not pretend to give you easy answers, but to walk with you through what Scripture says about pain, about a God who is not far away, and about a truth many have discovered: sometimes it is in the worst moments of life that we find God closest.
Your question is in the Bible
Many believers think that questioning God is a lack of faith. Yet the Bible contains the hardest questions a human being can ask. The psalmist cried: “How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). The prophet Habakkuk complained: “O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!” (Habakkuk 1:2). Job cursed the day he was born. Jeremiah wept over the ruins of Jerusalem. And Jesus himself, on the cross, prayed in the words of Psalm 22:
“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:46
If the Son of God could say “why hast thou forsaken me?”, you too can bring your question to God. Lament is not the opposite of faith; it is faith that keeps talking to God in the darkness.
Job: the man who lost everything
The book of Job is the Bible’s great meditation on the suffering of the innocent. Job was a blameless man who in a single day lost his possessions and his ten children, and then his health. His friends came to comfort him and for seven days sat with him in silence; it was the best thing they did. When they began to speak, they tried to explain that he was suffering for some hidden sin. They were wrong. At the end of the book, God himself says that Job spoke more rightly than they did (Job 42:7).
Job never received a full explanation of why he suffered. What he received was something greater: an encounter with God. “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5). And in the midst of his pain he spoke one of the most beautiful confessions of hope in the Bible: “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Read also the story of Job in our series.
Joseph: “God meant it unto good”
Joseph was hated by his brothers, sold as a slave, falsely accused and forgotten in an Egyptian prison for years. He surely wondered many times where God was. But the Bible repeats one phrase again and again: “the Lord was with Joseph” (Genesis 39:2, 21, 23). He was with him in Potiphar’s house and he was with him in prison. Years later, when Joseph came to rule Egypt and saved his family from famine, he could say to his brothers:
“But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”
Genesis 50:20
God did not cause the brothers’ evil, but he turned it into a path of salvation. Often we only understand the meaning of a painful season when we look back. Read the story of Joseph.
God is not indifferent to your pain
One of the most comforting truths in the Bible is that God sees, hears and is moved. When Israel was suffering in Egypt, God told Moses: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people… and have heard their cry… for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). When Hagar fled into the desert with her son, she called God “Thou God seest me” (Genesis 16:13). And the psalmist wrote:
“The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.”
Psalm 34:18
God is not far from those who suffer; he is near to the brokenhearted. In another psalm, David says that God counts his wanderings and puts his tears into his bottle (Psalm 56:8). Not one of your tears has gone unnoticed.
Jesus wept
The shortest verse in the Bible is also one of the deepest: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). Jesus stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. He knew that in a few minutes he would raise him, and yet he wept with Mary and Martha. He did not rebuke them for their grief or give them a sermon; he wept with them. That is what our God is like: he does not watch human suffering from a distance, but enters into it.
God was on the cross
Christianity’s deepest answer to the question “where was God?” is the cross. In Jesus Christ, God himself experienced rejection, betrayal, injustice, torture, loneliness and death. Isaiah had foretold it:
“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”
Isaiah 53:3-4
When we suffer, we do not pray to a God who does not know what pain is. Hebrews says that “we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15). The God of the Bible is not a spectator; he is the God who suffered with us and for us. And the cross was not the end: on the third day came the resurrection, the proof that pain and death do not have the last word.
Sometimes God draws us near through pain
It is a delicate truth, and it must be said with care: God does not delight in suffering, but he can use it to draw us closer to him. When everything is going well, we often live as though we did not need God. Pain shatters our securities and makes us look up. The psalmist acknowledged it: “Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word… It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes” (Psalm 119:67, 71).
The writer C. S. Lewis, who lost his wife to cancer, wrote that God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: pain is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Paul, who knew prisons, beatings, shipwrecks and a “thorn in the flesh”, wrote:
“And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”
2 Corinthians 12:9-10
Paul did not ask for suffering, but he discovered in it the grace and power of Christ as he had never known them before. Read also Paul’s thorn.
Many find God in their darkest moments
The Bible is full of people who found God when they hit rock bottom. The prodigal son “came to himself” while feeding pigs and starving (Luke 15:17). Manasseh, one of the most wicked kings of Judah, humbled himself before God when he was in chains in Babylon, and God heard him (2 Chronicles 33:12-13). Jonah prayed from the belly of the fish. The thief on the cross turned to Jesus in the last hours of his life and received the promise of paradise.
And the same happens today. Many people say they met Christ in a prison, a rehabilitation clinic, a hospital bed, after a divorce, after the death of a loved one or in the middle of a financial crisis. When they had nothing left, they discovered that God was still there. If you are in one of those moments today, perhaps this is also your moment to meet him. Read The Lord rejoices when one of his children returns.
What not to say
Anyone who walks with someone who is suffering should be careful with clichés. “Everything happens for a reason”, “God needed another angel” or “you must have done something to deserve it” can wound deeply. Job’s friends talked too much. Paul advises: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15). Sometimes the best response is silence, an embrace, a short prayer and faithful presence. God often comforts through the people he places beside us.
The final promise
The Bible does not end in pain, but in hope. Paul wrote that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18), and that “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28). And the last book of the Bible shows us the end of the story:
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”
Revelation 21:4
The same God who gathers your tears today will one day wipe them away for ever.
What to do if you are suffering today
Talk to God honestly. Tell him what you feel, even if it is anger or confusion. The Psalms can give you words: read Psalm 13, 22, 42 or 88. Do not isolate yourself. Reach out to a pastor, a believing friend, your family or a support group. Seek professional help if the pain overwhelms you: a doctor or a psychologist can be God’s instruments for your healing. If you are in danger or thinking of harming yourself, ask for help right now: in Colombia call the emergency line 123; in other countries, your local emergency number. Ask for prayer: you can write to us in Request prayer and we will pray for you. Take one step at a time. You do not need to understand everything today; it is enough to trust a little today.
Prayer
Lord, I am going to speak to you truthfully, because I have no strength left for anything else. When that happened, I looked for you and did not see you. I cried out and heaven seemed shut. I still ask where you were, and sometimes that question turns to anger. Do not take it from me with a pretty phrase. Stay with me in it. They say you are near to the brokenhearted; well, here is one. They say you keep tears in your bottle; mine must weigh a good deal by now. Come, Holy Spirit, Comforter: do not come to explain, come to hold me. Show me Jesus weeping at a tomb, Jesus crying out on the cross, so that I know I am not speaking to someone who watches pain from a distance. I do not understand, Lord. But I am not leaving. Do not you let go of me. Amen.