THE FEARFUL SILENCE

1.  The Quietness Before the Storm

All silence is not golden, some is the quietness before the apocalypse.  All silence is not calmness, some is the stillness before the atomic catastrophe.  Sometimes we have misjudged silence until it was very late.  Early in secondary school, one of the relational lessons we learned was to be careful with quiet people, because you never know what is steaming under their silent lids.  The day they burst, even hell could be on fire.  Moses was the meekest man there was.  The day some two close folks thought to take advantage of that and speak against Him, heaven roared against them.  One of the two instantly became a leper, and other shut himself out of Promised Land (Numbers 12:1-9).  The day Moses himself got angry, heaven took notice in millennial ways (Psalm 106:33).  All silence is not a sign of peace.

Paul warns about the “sudden destruction” that usually comes when people misjudge calmness and get distracted with celebrating “Peace and safety” (1 Thessalonians 5:3).  That echoes Jesus’ warning for none to take apparent peace for granted, for, as in the days of Noah, they were still eating and drinking and marrying wives when “the day” suddenly came, and they were all drowned in the flood.  It was the same in Sodom and Gomorrah.  They were still engrossed in their stock markets and lavish parties, still buying and selling, eating and drinking, until “the same day” that it suddenly began to rain “fire and brimstone from heaven,” and all were destroyed (Luke 17:27-30).  All silence is not golden; some is the quietness before the catastrophe.

2.  The Unfindable Omnipresent

It is paradoxical that the Omnipresent God can sometimes be unfindable, filling everywhere yet absent from somewhere (Isaiah 55:6).  Something like it is called Ichabod by the Hebrews.

God speaks; He speaks through many channels, always.  His voice is sometimes lovingly mild, sometimes magnificently loud, and sometimes fearfully thunderous.  Prophets and others like them who have heard His voice have said that it is like a terrible thunder that breaks down trees; like the majestic roaring of many mighty waterfalls (Job 40:9; Psalm 104:7; 29:3-5; Revelation 1:15; 14:2).

Ever-present and loud as this God can be, He sometimes hides Himself, becoming unfindable, or He may withdraw into a dreadful silence while still being present (Job 23:9; Psalm 89:46; Isaiah 54:8; 8:17).  Despite such a silence (not absence), the atmosphere can be electric with a misleading noisiness and everything that gives the general impression of His presence, like the rock-rending mighty winds, the terrifying earthquakes, the alternative thunders from the sky that mimic His awesome voice, and the glowing fires that are not Pentecost.  These may persist, wave after wave, until it is lamentably realised, “but the LORD was not in the wind … the LORD was not in the earthquake … the LORD was not in the fire” (1 Kings 19:11-12).

3.  The Costly Census

Instigated by Satan, but unknown to him, King David set out to conduct an ambitious but abominable census (2 Samuel 24:1-17; 1 Chronicles 21:1-17).  In the end, seventy thousand souls lay dead.  You know the story.  I ask, as you may also have wondered, Didn’t God know that the ruthless census of His beloved king was going to cost so many lives?  Didn’t God know that the “sweet psalmist of Israel” was about to open a dam of bitter tears (2 Samuel 23:1)?  Didn’t God see that the momentary foolishness of one man (as David was later to describe his actions) was going to bring much suffering and pain upon innocent people?  As God is all-knowing, why didn’t He stop David?  Why did He stand by to watch, until David had completed his foolishness, then offer him the three options of severe judgment?

That costly census took over nine months to complete (2 Samuel 24:8), which was enough time for David to have been recovered from his foolishness, or for seers to have warned him.  Strangely, for all that time, God went quiet – the silence before the atomic cataclysm.  In the days of that dangerous silence, David certainly kept his daily routines at the tabernacle, and he probably composed fresh psalms in praise of his great God.  The Almighty accepted his offerings, but about the matter of the foolish census, God said no more, watching until the pot that David had put on the fire boiled over to the point of the tragedy that should permanently cure his foolishness.

Prophet Nathan was in the king’s company during that time of the dangerous silence, yet even to that sharp seer, God did not speak about the matter.  Nathan was to show up many months later, after the die was cast, merely to announce the options of three terrible judgments from which David was to choose one: seven years of a localised national famine, or three months of defeat at the hands of his enemies, or three days of a severe epidemic without known cure.  None was a good choice to make, but he still had to choose, and seventy thousand lay dead in one day.  They were innocent, but still they died.

4.  The Neglected Voices

Didn’t God ever warn David about the disaster he was about to cause his nation?  God did, but the warning did not come through the usual channel of his ‘direct line’ of personal dreams and visions; it did not come through the respected prophetic channel of his Special Spiritual Assistant (SSA), Prophet Nathan, or other celebrated wise men such as the famous Ahithophel whose counsel was often as reliable as if one had heard the very voice of God (2 Samuel 16:23).

God sent warnings that were overruled, because they came through mean man rather than through the mighty names in the land, so the Almighty went silent, for over nine months, and watched as David went on, sensing no danger.  At that point, David seemed to have acquired the unfortunate mantle of King Saul whom he succeeded to the throne, in whose tragic last days we are told, “the LORD answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets” (1 Samuel 28:6).  Silence.  Can God go so silent on a man!

Didn’t God ever warn David, before he went so far?  God did, but the warning came through ‘inferior’ channels; through Captain Joab, the commander of the army (who was no known prophet), and also through the heads of the census departments.  By the mouth of those “two or three witnesses,” God was vindicated (Deuteronomy 17:6; Matthew 18:16).  God raised those noble voices to check David’s impulsive madness, “Notwithstanding the king’s word prevailed.”  It resisted and “prevailed,” first, “against Joab,” and next, “against the captains of the host” – we do not know how many they were (2 Samuel 24:4).  The New International Version says, the king “overruled” them all; the New Living translation states, “But the king insisted.”

How elated David must have felt when he won the argument consecutively over two challengers as he exercised his ‘rights’ and his powers to insist on what he wanted!  God went quiet and waited.  In the beginnings, He warned, “My spirit shall not always strive with man” (Genesis 6:3).  That is His nature.  All-powerful though He is, He does not force His way.  Even when He comes to your door, in the house that He gave to you, He stands at the door to knock, and waits outside until He is let in or asked off (Revelation 3:20; Psalm 105:6). This protocol of the All-Mighty is so amazing that the Psalmist wonders, from experience, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4; 144:3).

5.  Manipulated by Satan

It is reported in 1 Chronicles 21:1 that it was Satan who, as part of his broad agenda “against Israel” as a whole, “stood up” and “provoked David to number Israel.”   In other words, that National Project of a census was cooked in hell to be executed on earth, designed by Satan to be implemented by David the man of God.  In those circumstances, we may say that David became Satan’s agent while also bearing the titles of “King of Israel” and “Sweet Psalmist of God.”  Sadly, David was spiritually unaware.  He never realised that his spiritual allegiance had overlapped the two opposite camps of Darkness and Light.  God remained silent.

The slight backsliding showed in David’s character.  He had suddenly become inadvisable, even about matters so sensitive and risky as his ambitious national census.  The warrior who could listen to the counsel of a mere woman yesterday and save himself from bloodguilt in the matter of Nabal the foolish rich man (1 Samuel 25:32-33) had become so proud that even generals could not restrain him.  Who were they, by the way?  How dare such ‘ordinary officers’ assume that they had become his ‘special advisers’?  He silenced them in one royal swoop.  He was determined.  His words were strong, backed by his imperial office, and “the king’s word prevailed.”  He was glad he won.  God went quiet.  Nathan was blind sighted.  Nine months went by. Death was coming.  The pot was soon going to boil over.

We do not always know that we have been overtaken by Satan when that happens.  Peter did not realise it when he began to speak for Satan just after being commended by Jesus, in his previous proclamations, that he was God’s blessed mouthpiece (Matthew 16:16-23).  His words still looked religious, but they were not from God.  They came from lips whose previous psalms and prophecies had been hailed by the Master, yet whatever followed was from the other side.  Strangely, Peter was still a disciple, and David was still the anointed king and psalmist.  In the case of Peter, Jesus intervened suddenly and brutally; in the case of David, silence.  Why?

6.  Between Samuel, Jonah, and David

When God called the little Samuel in the house of Eli the high priest, the boy made three consecutive wrong turns, yet God would not give up on him, but kept calling until he matured enough both through the teachings of Eli as well as from the lessons out of his own previous failures.  When he was better instructed, he no longer made his previous mistakes.  That is to say that his past errors were not deliberate but merely the result of his spiritual immaturity (1 Samuel 3:1-11).  “And the child Samuel ministered unto the LORD” (1 Samuel 3:1).  Samuel was a ‘minister’ “unto the LORD,” but Samuel was still a “child.” God understood.  Did David have as many chances as that?

God called Jonah, yet that prophet chose to go in a different direction.  God kept patiently reaching out, with a storm along his route, with three days in the slimy stomach of a fish – an experience that drove him into intense prayers (Jonah 2), until he was where Destiny wanted him all the while.  Why did God persist with Jonah but not with David in the case of the foolish census?  Only God knew what He saw in Jonah.  To everyone, He gives their chances.

7.  Costly Late Repentance

After seventy thousand innocent citizens had died, the king’s eyes opened.  His conscience smote him, but he could not bring back the dead.  He confessed that he had “sinned greatly” and had “done very foolishly,” still, seventy thousand corpses lay scattered in many homes across the land.  Wails, tears, countless graves, meanwhile, the man who caused all that trouble stayed alive.  Also, there is no record that he lost any member of his own family.

“David’s heart smote him,” but that was only “AFTER that he had numbered the people,” after he had committed the sin, after seventy thousand innocent people were dead.  Why didn’t that heart smite him before he sinned, or before he had completed the act?  Maybe it did, but he would not heed, until orphans and widows had suddenly multiplied in the land; mothers weeping for their sons, and children grieving for their breadwinners forever gone.

David repented, but that was after NINE significant months of a satanic ‘pregnancy’ that brought forth deaths, not births; nine silent months of a weird incubation – while God kept dangerously silent, a silence that was far from divine approval; an apparent peace before “sudden destruction.”  Paul warned, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).

8.  The Silent Years of Abram

Abram was promised a son.  He waited many years, but the promise didn’t come through.  During that time, his wife reinterpreted the promise.  He didn’t go back to ask the One who made him the promise, if his wife’s ‘new version’ was correct; if Hagar was to be the channel for the promised son.  He went on, had Ishmael from that error; one son that, over time, became the source of much of the troubles that have threatened the promised seed.

Why didn’t God intervene?  Why was God silent all the time that those transactions were going on about Hagar?  Is it possible that the man himself was tired, or he had also been thinking lustfully along the same lines, until his wife provided the ‘license’?  Whatever the case, God was quiet until about fourteen years later, only to support the same wife who had introduced the mess, telling him to send the child away with the mother.  Why was God silent until then?

9.  Final Words

Often, God speaks once, and those that fear Him usually hear it twice (Psalm 62:11). On some issues, or with some people, we may also hear, “And the word of the LORD came unto me the second time” (Jeremiah 1:13; 13:3; 33:1; John 3:1).  A Samson on Delilah’s laps might have as many as three wasted chances until the tragic withdrawal and the silence before the sword (Judges 16:4-21).  A little Samuel might seem to have endless chances while he grows up, yet a David who ignores the voice of God in the voice of his men might have the crisis of which Proverbs 29:1 warns: “He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.”

God does not always speak from above; sometimes He speaks from below in the voice of those who are close to us, as He did when He called Samuel in the apparent voice of Eli his boss. God is present everywhere, but He can hide Himself from somewhere or someone, or go silent on some issues, while we still sing Him our psalms and bring Him our offerings, until Judgment Day when one is forced to choose between terrible options.

Silence is not meaningless; sometimes it could be louder than voice.  All silence is not peace or approval; some is the quietness before “sudden destruction.”  The God whose voice roars like many thunders also goes thunderously silent – before the fire falls … upon the heedless.

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:

 24 And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting (Psalm 139:23-24).  Amen.

From The Preacher’s diary,

February 7, 2026.