I am up early this Monday morning, the first one awake in my house. Palm Sunday has just passed, and I am sitting in our living room. I come here in the mornings to meet with God. It is still dark, and I am alone.  

A blanket lies lightly on my lap, a flimsy thing and not the one I prefer. My favourite—our family’s favourite—is a heavy afghan made by an elderly woman from the first church where I served as a pastor. I can’t find it this morning, so I settle for something less. 

Throughout this Lenten season, my faith feels cold. There is no stirring in my heart toward God and no sense that God has much interest in moving toward me. Still, I come and sit and pray—or not.  

And God stays silent. 

Many people are acutely aware of the fine line in their heart between belief and unbelief in God. Let’s call them Honest Doubters.  

Some of these Honest Doubters identify as believers or Christians, but they often wonder whether God is real, if Christianity is true. They notice their happy and content atheist neighbours and admit to themselves that they, too, could easily cross into unbelief. Other Honest Doubters identify as unbelievers, but they are not always comfortable in their unbelief. They experience too many inexplicable gifts: beauty in nature or song, inspiration in vocation, deep affection in relationships. These echoes of transcendence tempt them to believe.  

Honest Doubters, whether they identify as believers or unbelievers, share an unwillingness to live on borrowed certainty. Their heart will not allow them to deny their doubt or their experiences of Someone who seems to address them from beyond the material world.  

I consider myself one of them. I am also a pastor who leads a church of earnest and sincere Christians. For over twenty years I have ministered to people who find their hearts navigating that fine line between belief and unbelief: a teenager abandons the faith of his family because his questions are perceived as a threat; a faithful church elder endures a long season of doubt; a widow once hurt by the church finds herself sitting in a pew, praying again.  

These people, earnest believers and unbelievers alike, are not resistant to God, yet God stays silent. They seek God, but God seems to be hiding.  

In his book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, Canadian philosopher John Schellenberg concludes that the human experience of God’s elusiveness proves that God does not exist. His argument can be summarized in the following three-point syllogism: 

“Nonresistant nonbelief does occur.” If a premise in a syllogism can ache, surely this one does. Schellenberg offers the nonresistant nonbeliever in her earnest and frustrated search for God as Exhibit A of God’s non–existence. If God loves us and wants us to love him, would he really be so coy?  

It is Holy Wednesday and a pleasant spring day. Holy Week is late in 2025, and the flowers are already in full bloom. I am sitting alone and weary at the desk in my study. I am writing my sermon for Good Friday, but my heart is not in it. Acedia, the noonday demon, is close at hand. I must finish this sermon today. Tomorrow is dedicated to finishing my second sermon for this week, the one for Easter Sunday. Sermon writing is always a challenge, but in the face of God’s silence and my apathy, it is torture.  

The Good Friday text is John 19:38–42, the Deposition of Christ from the Cross, the story of how Christ’s body goes from the cross to the tomb. Earlier this week, realizing I have never preached on this text before, I had hoped it could offer something fresh. But now I wish I had chosen something more familiar. My mind cannot get around what this text might mean for God’s people, let alone for me. I flip through a commentary for some inspiration. I pray and ask for help. Nothing.  

My spirit is in full wilt.  

The church often does not know what to do with a believer who is enduring a season of doubt. Well-meaning friends, family members, and pastors appeal to apologetic arguments, proofs intended to provide certainty. Others suggest that Christian values are necessary for a flourishing society, regardless of whether its historical or metaphysical claims are true. Both responses assume that divine hiddenness is a kind of puzzle that, when solved, will result in a faith unmuddied by doubt. 

But Scripture tells a different story: God’s hiddenness is an expression of his patient self-revelation. It gives time and space for each soul to respond in freedom—a response rooted not in rational certainty but in faith awakened by grace.  

Consider Jesus’s appearances after the resurrection. The resurrection could have been the cardinal event through which God could dispel all uncertainty among his followers. But in the Gospel stories, the disciples’ post-resurrection encounters with Christ are occasions not of epistemological assurance but of mystery, confusion, and doubt. 

On the road to Emmaus, the resurrected Jesus walks alongside Cleopas and another disciple for miles, but his identity is deliberately hidden from them until the moment he breaks bread at the table (Luke 24:13–35). Likewise, Thomas is absent when Jesus first appears to the disciples and famously doubts the claims of his friends that Jesus is alive, enduring an entire week of divine hiddenness while his friends rejoice. 

At the end of the Gospel of John, Jesus cooks breakfast for his friends on the beach and commissions Peter to be a pastor—but only after the disciples encounter Jesus as a stranger calling from the beach (chap. 21). When Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, she sees but does not recognize him until after he speaks her name (20:13–16). 

There is an intimate quality to each of these stories. The concealing before revealing is how Jesus deals personally with his friends; something must have happened during the week of Thomas’s doubting that prepared him to declare, “My Lord and my God!” when he saw Jesus’s scars (John 20:28).  

Jesus does not overwhelm his followers with the full revelation of his glory all at once. The Lord is patient with Thomas, with Cleopas and his companion, with Mary and Peter. He first purposefully conceals himself in a way that intensifies their curiosity, confusion, uncertainty, doubt, or pain, so that when their eyes are finally opened, their hearts are ready to respond. 

The experience of divine hiddenness in the Christian tradition is not confined to Scripture. Many saints speak of a time in their life when all hope of an encounter with God was lost, even in the very moment when they most needed to see his face. John of the Cross in the sixteenth century was the first to give systematic expression to the experience of divine absence as “the dark night of the soul.” But Christians before and after him experienced similar periods of uncertainty, including Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, David Brainerd, Teresa of Calcutta, and C.S. Lewis.  

Even John Calvin, not typically counted among the Honest Doubters, recognizes divine hiddenness in the Institutes: 

Apologetic arguments have some utility with their universal appeal to reason, but they miss the subjective questions and anxieties people carry. I am pessimistic, too, that appeals to Christianity’s usefulness to bolster democracy can also strengthen weary hearts. I have watched burdened shoulders slouch when I’ve mistakenly offered one more pious work or spiritual discipline as a solution to a weary soul’s ache for connection with God. Often, it has been my own weary shoulders slouching under the weight of self-imposed burdens. 

Good Friday morning, 5:30 a.m. I do not want to get out of bed. In a few hours I will stand behind the pulpit and proclaim the Lord’s death as God’s act of salvation for us. Do I even believe that? In this moment, I doubt it. But my doubt is not what bothers me. I simply don’t care. The apathy of the previous thirty-eight days is a heavy burden to bear from bed to pulpit.  

I walk the two miles to our downtown church and grow increasingly resentful. Why would God give me the task of preaching about the hinge of all history without the heart to care about it? 

I plod along the path beside the St. Joseph’s River and mull over the fuzzy outline of my sermon. As I contemplate the story from the Gospel of John, a vivid image suddenly comes to my imagination. Jesus, after blood and water flowed from his side, hangs lifeless on the cross. How long did he hang there dead? How did they get his body off the cross? How did they move him from Golgotha to the tomb? Who was tasked with that bloody job? 

I imagine it done by the Roman soldiers. I see them carelessly tip the cross over; the splintered wood slams to the ground. His bloodied body shudders as the nails pin his hands and feet to the cross, holding firm against the force of gravity and the soldiers’ lack of care. 

Their apathy toward him feels uncomfortably familiar. 

A few years ago, in the waning days of the pandemic, I took a pilgrimage to Fall Creek Abbey, a retreat house tucked into an urban neighbourhood on the north side of Indianapolis. I scheduled two sessions of spiritual direction with David Booram, who runs the abbey along with his wife Beth. 

In my first session with David, I explained how empty my faith had become. I felt like a failure in my vocation and as a follower of Jesus. I was attempting to lead our congregation through crisis while grasping for something to hold on to in my personal faith. When I most needed God to act and show his face, he remained hidden. My heart was somehow both heavy and empty.

I unloaded all of this onto David. He listened until I had no more words to say. After a long silence, David asked, “Ryan, are you attracted to God?”  

The question arrested and embarrassed me. Not because the answer was plainly no, but because I had not considered that the Creator of the universe was someone to whom I should feel attracted—a person to enjoy.  

In my ministry, I often share about the love of God for us and for God’s desire to be loved by us. Augustine’s “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” has found its way into dozens of my sermons over the years. But now I was being asked, “Ryan, are you attracted to God?” The question was addressed to me in a moment when my own heart was restless enough to receive it. And God’s absence created a longing in me I did not know was there.  

David was patient with me, and he was patient with God. He was not anxious to resolve the tension of my spiritual anxiety; instead, he asked a question that intensified it. The wall of separation between God and me became his means of communication—a link leading me into deeper reflection on my life, my vocation, and my relationship with God. I spent the rest of my time at the abbey exploring the ache of God’s absence as an invitation into something different: a friendship with God.

According to the writer of Hebrews, faith is the “assurance of what we cannot see.” God could overwhelm our senses with so much evidence of his existence that it would abolish the necessity of faith. But this sort of evidence, Pascal says, would “help the mind but harm the will.” It would, in other words, rob us of our freedom—the freedom to pursue and love God in faith. 

There will be a time when everyone will see him, when every knee will bow and tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. But until then, God gives us the assurance of what we cannot see. Faith is not the fruit of intellectual searching or the product of our earnest offerings of personal piety. Faith is a gift—a gift only a hidden God can give. 

As I continue my Good Friday walk, another image comes to mind. It wasn’t the Roman soldiers who performed the bloody job of removing Jesus from the cross. It was, the Gospel of John tells us, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who tended to his wounded body after his death. 

I imagine them: They are full of care. They gently lay the cross to the ground, careful to do no further harm to his broken body. The cross rests against that terrible hill; his body is still. I watch as Joseph and Nicodemus painstakingly dislodge the nails from the wood and pry them from the sinews of his cooling flesh. They lovingly cover his nakedness in a shroud. With tears, they carry their burden to the tomb.  

I groan. I double over, my hands clutching my knees, and I am sobbing. The tenderness of Joseph and Nicodemus toward the body of their Lord exposes me in my utter lack of care for the beauty and horror of the crucifixion. But in that moment I also sense the depth of God’s grace toward me. I feel ashamed and loved. My heart softens, and my burden eases. I heave one more sob, take a deep breath, and walk toward the pulpit.  

I do not know which came first: God’s hiddenness or my apathy. Was the drama of that season initiated by God or caused by my lack of care? I could have been more devoted, perhaps, more earnest in my Lenten disciplines, more intentional in prayer. But living as I am on the other side of Holy Week, I am able to see divine hiddenness as Jesus dealing with me as his friend. The tears of repentance and gratitude I shed would not have been wrung from me without the experience of God’s hiddenness that preceded them.