Why God Isn't Obvious

How to Respond When God Hides

“If God were real why wouldn’t he just make himself known!?”

I’ve heard this question asked time and time again. Most often it’s in the context of an argument for or against the existence of God. But it’s worth considering even if one already believes in God. Because even the believer experiences what theologians call, “The Hiddenness of God” — Deus absconditus.

Q: Why does God hide?

A: So we can seek him.

It really is as simple as that. He hides because he loves and values our freedom to choose anything, including himself. Imagine if he didn’t hide, would you love him? Definitely not!

We think we would, but consider those in scripture who “saw” God. Their response is enough to tell us that ours would not be love, it would be terror. We would cringe before him in complete and utter fear! There would be little chance for us to even discover that he is good, because he is perfectly and magnificently holy and powerful.

So he hides for our sake. But he is not far away.

When my kids were younger I’d play hide and seek with them. Once I made the mistake of taking the game seriously, so I hid in a really good spot. After remaining there for 15 minutes I realized I could very well die there and they would never find me.

God doesn’t hide like that, he hides in such a way that the one seeking will find him. The prophet Jeremiah captures God’s hiding strategy perfectly:

When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord…” (Jeremiah 29:13-14)

His hiddenness is meant to either allow us the convenience of maintaining an allusion of a world without God, or it’s meant to trigger us to seek him. Hence the psalmist wrote, “The LORD is near to all who call on Him, to all who call out to Him in truth” (Psalm 145:18).

Indeed, the experience of God’s hiddenness does not end after one becomes a disciple, it’s a strategy God may utilize whenever he wants a person to discover more of him. CS Lewis brilliantly captures this through the mouth of Uncle Screwtape:

“You must have often wondered why the enemy [God] does not make more use of his power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree he chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the irresistible and the indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of his scheme forbids him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as his felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve…. Sooner or later he withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish… He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand… Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. — The Screwtape Letters

God’s inconspicuousness does not point to his nonexistence — even the sentence is nonsensical, it points to his love and desire for us to choose him freely. When we sense that he seems absent, it’s an invitation for us to check our own attitudes and behaviors and open our hearts to a divine recalibration.

“Truly,” the prophet Isaiah wrote, “you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isaiah 45:15).

For this we should give thanks and get to seeking.