There came a woman to Jesus who prostrated herself before Him, and asked Him in agony and tears to help her. "And He answered her never a word" That is the mystery. It has baffled many. The awful silence of God…For silence does not mean inactivity any more than noise means power. Hume tells us that, immediately before the Battle of Hastings, the English camps were filled with shouting and revelry whilst an awful silence brooded over the Normans. The silence that reigned along the British battle-line before Trafalgar has been the repeated subject of comment. And the most distinguished hero that European Protestantism ever claimed was known by the significant title of "William the Silent."
The quietest room in a Lancashire cotton-mill is the engine-room. It is called the "power room." A river steamer on the Thames is brought to her moorings amid the wildest shoutings and the vilest imprecations between the captain and the handful of men that form his crew. A ten thousand ton liner is berthed at Liverpool docks without the slightest shouting or confusion.
Men make more noise in one hour's work in the harvest field than God's rain and sunshine and heat and cold have made in producing the crops that they harvest.
A man makes more noise in clearing the snow off his front path than the sun makes in melting a million tons of it. God is so wonderfully silent because God is so wonderfully active.
For all practical purposes a whisper is enough. The truth of a whisper is as great as the truth of a shout. A whisper from God is enough to tell me that God is; it is enough to tell me that God cares for me, for God whispers to me.
Frank William Boreham, ‘The Whisper of God’, The Whisper of God and Other Sermons (London: Arthur H Stockwell, 1902), 16-18 selected portions.
Image: “A (wo)man makes more noise in clearing the snow…”