God is…
“Do you really believe in God?”
The question came wrapped in snare and dismissal. But why should that move me?
Yes, I do. I act as if God exists, and I would stake my life on it. Is that not enough? To believe is not to catalogue one more entity among the furniture of the universe—powerful and impressive though He may be. To believe is to orient yourself toward the highest value in the hierarchy of values, toward the source of judgment and mercy. When you live as if truth-telling matters ultimately, as if conscience speaks with authority beyond your own psychological construction, you’re not pretending. You’re aligning yourself with the deepest structure of reality itself. That’s belief. And I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed of it.
I believe God to be true—not merely useful, not merely comforting, but true.
In my experience, reason and intuition has pointed me toward God, not away from Him. Paul declared it plainly: “There is but one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 8:6). That truth resonates in both head and heart. I have considered and am persuaded by the historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ. More personally, I have witnessed the transformative power of the Gospel in lives around me and tasted it, however faintly, in my own journey. I believe Christ truly rose from the dead, and I have what I consider good reason for this belief.
But fundamentally, I see the self-evidence of God woven into existence itself. Paul wrote that God’s “invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). David sang the same reality: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). When beauty and intricacy parade before us—galaxies spiraling, genomes encoding, consciousness reflecting upon itself, physical laws written in elegant mathematics—it doesn’t register as blind luck but as an expression, as Mind behind matter. To live as if this were false requires constant suppression of the sense of the transcendent, that persistent intuition that meaning precedes us, that we answer to something higher than mere survival. Every time we appeal to objective truth, every time we act as if justice matters beyond pragmatism, every time we recognise beauty as more than pleasant neural firing—we testify to what we already know. We confess, whether we admit it or not, that reality has an Author.
And yet…
And yet, God still feels like a mystery to me. I don’t know how to conceptualise Him, perceive Him, or even comprehend the Mind of God. How many times, noticing my own hypocrisy and inconsistencies, have I pleaded for God to strengthen and help me, and felt nothing? How many times have I felt the despair of loneliness, called out to God, and heard nothing? How many times have I been in anguish regarding the general moral ignorance sweeping the world, pleading that God would perform a wonder or sign to wake us all up, and again—nothing?
He seems silent. Perhaps He is. I look out at the world, seeing all the suffering and pain, and cry out like the prophet Habakkuk: “O Lord, how long shall I cry, and You will not hear? Even cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ and You will not save” (Hab. 1:2).
Psalm 74 resonates with me:
We are given no signs from God;
no prophets are left,
and none of us knows how long this will be.
How long will the enemy mock you, God?
Will the foe revile your name forever?
Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?
Take it from the folds of your garment and destroy them!
(Psalm 74: 9-11)
And so, if I am honest, I don’t understand God as well as I would like. Of course, all of us have incomplete knowledge of God, and perhaps “incomplete” understates the chasm. As Augustine confessed, “If you understand it, it is not God.” The very attempt to comprehend the infinite with finite minds verges on category error. Like Job, I am confronted with the reality that God is God, and I am a mere man. The complexity towers beyond me. His ways are infinitely higher than mine, not just by degrees but by orders of magnitude I cannot fathom. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher than my ways and His thoughts than my thoughts. I am reminded of the words of Isaiah:
“Who has known the mind of the Lord or been able to give him advice? Whom did he ask for help? Who taught him the right way? Who taught him knowledge and showed him the way to understanding?” (Isaiah 40:13-14)
The answer is obvious—no one. I love how Paul the apostle pushes the same point:
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgements, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them? For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:33-36)
And yet, that doesn’t always help much, does it? I long for a personal relationship with God. The greatest struggle of my faith is reconciling the silence. That feeling of being disconnected from Him. I want to hear from Him. But I don’t. At least not the way I’d like. No matter how much I ignore it or push it back, I can’t change this fact: I still want to hear His voice. Desperately. For reasons I can neither control nor fully understand, my inner being is compelled, drawn, longing for God. I wonder what He thinks, how He feels, but I often can’t gain that knowledge. I fear being left in the unknown. I seek Him out in the scriptures, and am grateful for everything I’ve learned, but still, I want more. I want to know God like a son knows his father. I wish He would speak to me clearly. Just pause and imagine what it would actually be like to hear or see the Almighty, to be in His actual presence. I can’t think of a more fulfilling moment.
Maybe you, if you’re a Christian, can relate. Recently I watched the 2022 series Obi-Wan Kenobi, and part of it really resonated with me. Obi-Wan had spent ten years in hiding after Order 66 and the fall of his apprentice, Anakin Skywalker. During all that time, he reaches out to his former master, Qui-Gon Jinn, believing he’d reconnect from the afterlife. Ten years of reaching out. Nothing. Complete silence. He feels entirely alone.
Then at the end of the series, Obi-Wan returns home after this long journey—rescuing Princess Leia, facing off against Darth Vader – and there, waiting for him, is his old master Qui-Gon, appearing from the afterlife. Obi-Wan speaks: “I was beginning to think you would never come.” Qui-Gon responds, “I was always here, Obi-Wan. You were just never ready to see.” They head off into the desert together, with Qui-Gon saying they have a lot of work to do.
I know it’s a bizarre comparison, but like Obi-Wan, I feel the need to hold on. To keep faith. I trust that God will one day reveal Himself.
I often sit with this silence and wonder what it’s meant to teach me. Why does God remain quiet? Why does He allow evil into His world? But perhaps I’m asking the wrong question. Maybe God didn’t allow evil itself; He allowed the possibility of it. And that distinction matters. Because a world where evil’s possible, where we get to choose—maybe that world’s got more soul, and will prove more valuable than some sanitized, deterministic version where we’re all just programmed to be good.
Think about it. A dangerous man who chooses to do good has more weight than a safe man who never had the option to be anything else. The restraint, the daily decision to turn away from what’s wrong, that takes muscle. That takes character.
And maybe this silence, this waiting—maybe it’s God giving me space to become who I’m supposed to be. The testing may be necessary, not for God’s knowledge (He already knows what I will do) but for my own formation. Will I maintain faith when it offers no immediate consolation? Or will I abandon conviction when it proves costly, as countless others have? This struggle might be precisely what refines character, transforming me into someone with the strength to persevere, someone who can weather the barren seasons when God feels afar. In fact, if I’ve learned anything from reading the Bible, it’s this: trusting in God is going to be bloody difficult.
Take Abraham. Called by God to leave home and country, he journeys forward. And what does he encounter after heeding God’s call? First, famine. Then the tyranny in Egypt, the potential loss of his wife to more powerful men, exile from his adopted country, conflicts over territory with his kinsmen, war and the kidnapping of his nephew, extended childlessness, and worst of all, terrible conflict within his family.
Or consider Joseph, called by God to save Egypt and Israel during a seven-year famine. But before this comes to fruition? Joseph is abandoned by his brothers, sold into slavery, then unjustly imprisoned.
Generations later, Moses is appointed by God to bring Israel out from Egyptian tyranny. Yet before his appointment, he spends forty years not hearing from God, living effectively as an outcast. Then once Moses does lead Israel out of Egypt, they immediately start worshipping other gods. From then on, Moses faces nothing but struggles.
And think about Job. Job is a righteous man who honors God, and yet what happens? All his livestock are killed or stolen. His beloved children die suddenly. He’s afflicted with agonizing sores all over his body. His wife basically tells him his life isn’t worth living. Then his friends blame him, saying his suffering is just well-deserved karma (which it isn’t). Job is left confused, questioning: “God, why are you letting this happen?”
I could keep going. The point is, almost all the men and women called by God throughout the Bible faced tremendous challenges and felt loneliness from God to extents I can’t yet comprehend. Does that mean God isn’t real and didn’t care? By no means. In the end, God revealed Himself and answered—in every case.
Right now, God feels very silent to me, but that doesn’t sway my confidence in Him. Throughout the Bible, there are patches where God doesn’t seem to speak or connect with His people for hundreds of years. at least not on record. Yet throughout scripture is the foretelling of a time when God will speak to all in both final judgment and salvation.
Whatever God’s reasoning, I trust that one day I’ll know Him more personally, that He will further reveal Himself to me. I’m confident about this because of the salvation message inherent in the gospel. In the meantime, I’ll continue to learn and seek out what is good and order my life in ways that honor God’s intentions and standards. I’ll keep on up the road of repentance. I have the scriptures to continually refer to. I’ll continue to pray and trust that He hears. Ultimately, I recognize that He is God and I am man. He will do as He pleases. And that’s alright.
Although God is not obvious, He is inevitable. I thank God for the finished work of the cross and trust in the gospel for my salvation and redemption. And whether it be in this life or when I die, because of what Christ did, I’m confident my longings for Him will be met.
What about you?
If you believe in God, I’d encourage you to honestly assess where your faith stands. Don’t dull it down—be truthful with yourself. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Perhaps someone who needs to repent, to clear out bad habits and unhealthy thought patterns.
Once you’ve reflected, consider what practical steps you can take to strengthen your faith. It might be prayer, studying and meditating on scripture, or acts of worship like generosity toward the poor and vulnerable. Do good, uphold love, and encourage justice.
Most importantly? Trust in God. Wait on Him, whether that’s for months, years, or your entire life.
It’s like being a farmer. You plant the seeds, you water the ground, you do the work, and then you wait. The field looks empty. Silent. For weeks, maybe months, there’s nothing but dirt and sky. You wonder if anything’s even happening down there beneath the surface. You can’t see it. You can’t hear it. But deep down, you trust that the Master of the harvest knows what He’s doing. The silence isn’t absence, it’s preparation. And when the time is right, when the crop is ready, God will reveal Himself. He will come and reap the harvest. That’s His promise. Your job? Stay faithful to the field. His job? Everything else.
