Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 2: Where Are You God? (Psalm 10 & Hebrews 2:5-18)
Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 2: Where Are You, God?
July 27, 2025
Psalm 10 & Hebrews 2:5-18
By Pastor Mike Conner
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“At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock. Then at three o’clock Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ …Then Jesus uttered another loud cry and breathed his last” (Mark 15:33-34, 37).
This terrible moment appears in Mark the Gospel writer’s story of Good Friday, the day when Jesus, after being arrested, convicted, mocked, and beaten by those in positions of religious, legal, and political power, was crucified on a hill outside the city of Jerusalem. Nailed to the cross, Jesus experienced a moment of spiritual crisis, of felt abandonment. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
It was his “God, Where Are You?” moment, a moment that we all, for one reason or another, experience. It was a moment that he, the Son of God, came to experience with us, as one of us. Jesus knows what it’s like to lose sight of God and to feel that God has lost sight of him.
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In time, we each enter one or more “God, Where Are You?” moments. We don’t plan for them or seek them out. But like rip currents hidden in the tides of life, they grab hold of us and drag us out far from shore. Great change, great loss usually bring that question to our lips: “God, where are you?” The death of a loved one. The loss of a job. Moving away from home. Debilitating illness. The betrayal of a friend. Divorce. Stock market crash. Flunking out of college. Relapsing. Realizing through trial and error that you’re not called to a path that you thought you were called to.
There are so many things that might bring us to these moments of darkness and abandonment.
I wonder what some of your “God, Where Are You?” moments have been? Perhaps you’re moving through one today.
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The Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible comprises 150 prayers that Jews and Christians have prayed for millennia. Jesus himself prayed these prayers. The cry from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” -- is itself a line from Psalm 22. In his moment of God-forsakenness, when all Jesus could see was the darkness, he quote Psalm. He probably didn’t think of it that way. It was just the prayer language that had shaped and made a home in his heart.
The Psalms record many “God, Where Are You?” moments, and, most often, these moments are a result of exposure to avoidable forms of suffering. Specifically, they afflict the Psalmist when he or she resolves to see the world with eyes wide open, and feels overwhelmed by the brutality, the cruelty, and the pervasiveness of injustice in what he or she sees.
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The theme of human beings partnering with God to shape a world in which all people receive adequate and equitable care is one of the primary themes of both the Old and New Testaments. The Book of Deuteronomy records Moses’s final teachings to the Israelites whose forty years of wilderness wandering had come to an end. They were about to enter the Promised Land, and God had some very specific instructions about how they were to conduct themselves in their new home in order to reflect his care and mercy.
In chapter 15 of Deuteronomy, God, through the prophet Moses, says this: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deut 15:11).
That was a general, timeless command to care for the needy, but God and Moses also set forward some very specific expectations for how that openhandedness was to be practiced. Here are just three examples (and there are many, many more):
· “If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them” (Exod 22:25).
· “You shall not strip your vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God” (Levit 19:10).
· “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because…their livelihood depends on them” (Deut 24:14-15).
Lending without interest, leaving fruit in your fields for others to glean, and paying a fair and timely wage. These acts of justice were meant to extend to both citizens and refugees. From this project of societal wholeness and health, God’s people repeatedly strayed.
The prophets whose words form a third of the Hebrew Bible rose up throughout the Israelites’ history in the Promised Land to condemn that failure, evidenced by the mistreatment of those who were socially or economically vulnerable by those who were socially or economically powerful. Yes, the prophets also rail against idolatry, the ways that the people abandoned God and placed their trust elsewhere: in the accumulation of wealth, in military prowess, or in strategic allegiances with neighboring powers. But these spiritual deviations always had social, material consequences. When the leaders of the people stopped trusting the God who had liberated them from oppression in the first place, and who had only ever asked them to mirror His eternal care in their own spheres of influences, they found themselves enslaved to ways of life predicated on greed, security at all costs, and exclusion.
When that happened -- and it happened all the time -- God sent prophets to rebuke the leaders of the people with words like these from the prophet Isaiah:
“The Lord enters into judgment
with the elders and princes of his people:
It is you who have devoured the vineyard;
the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people,
by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.” (3:14-15)
And these:
“Woe to those who make iniquitous decrees,
who write oppressive statutes,
to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their rights,
to make widows their spoil
and to plunder orphans!” (10:1-2)
***
Our Psalm for today, Psalm 10, captures a few aspects of our natural emotional response to a society full of injustice, where “cursing, lies, and threats” (v. 7a), “trouble and evil” (v. 7b), “murder” (v. 8), and “capture” (v. 9) dominate social relations. The Psalmist is stunned that such acts are being perpetrated without any conscience or remorse.
The wicked are too proud to seek God.
They seem to think that God is dead.
***
The wicked think, “God isn’t watching us!
He has closed his eyes and won’t even see what we do!
…God will never call us to account.” (10:4, 11, 13b)
This situation created a crisis of faith for the Psalmist, who experienced profound confusion and sadness because, well, the wicked seemed right on this point. Where was God? Did God care? Did God see?
This prayer opens in agony: “O Lord, why do you stand so far away? / Why do you hide when I am in trouble?” (10:1).
This is a real “God, Where Are You?” moment. And many of us are familiar with it. Jesus certainly was.
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Injustice against the poor was one of Jesus’ primary concerns. He made it his business to eat with sinners, feed the hungry, heal the sick, hang out with the ostracized, and forgive the unforgiveable. He died in large part because he named the practices of exclusion and greed that he saw in the religious elites of ancient Israel.
And that’s a real concern for us, too, especially with the amount of exposure we have to news from every corner of the globe. We feel the heaviness of avoidable suffering. It’s devastating when we could be collectively choosing a different way, but don’t. Children are starving in Gaza and dying of preventable diseases like measles in the United States. People are being torn from their families and communities by masked agents. Parents are having to choose between paying for rent, groceries, or childcare. At least eight million metric tons of plastic will enter the world’s oceans this year, and an estimated 12 million people will lose health insurance over the next 10 years. To name but a few things…
When you start to really face it -- and more, when you really start to care about it, and to access through prayer and through friendship with the most impacted how God feels about it all -- these injustices flood your vision and settle like a heavy weight over the chest. It’s all that there appears to be. And knowing that so much pain could be alleviated if we would but choose to share our resources and stop the cycle of enemy making -- it’s devastating. Confusion and sadness tempt us toward despair. We behold a broken world divided into camps of haves and have nots, of us and them, and we ask, “God, where are you? Don’t you see? Don’t you care? Have you left us here alone, or are you going to rise up and do something about all this?”
***
We wish our discipleship journey could bypass these “God, Where Are You? moments. But it can’t. We are followers of Jesus and Jesus himself passed through this darkness. But here’s what I want to emphasize:
Asking “God, where are you?” is not disqualifying. It’s deeply, profoundly human. And it’s a human experience that, in Christ, God has incorporated into His divine life. Which is to say: It’s not the end of the story. It feels like the end of the story. But really it’s a hinge swinging open to something new, something that only God can bring us.
When we are overwhelmed by the injustices that we witness or experiences -- whether through policy violence, warfare, or anything else -- Jesus is there with us in that moment of asking, “God, where are you?”
This is what the writer of Hebrews was getting at when he wrote, “As it is, we do not yet see everything subjected to him. But we do see Jesus -- made lower than the angels for a short time so that by God’s grace he might taste death for everyone… [He] had to be like his brothers and sisters” -- like us -- “in every way… For since he himself has suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Heb 2:8-9, 17, 18).
We might not be able to make sense of everything that’s happening in the world. We might be disappointed as we look up to heaven or out toward the horizon for glimpses of God’s sovereign purposes. But in this time between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of his New Creation, we are given him, his fellowship in our sufferings, his cry to join our cries to, and -- AND -- his resurrected life.
God didn’t answer Jesus’ question. God raised him to life! God continued his story!
God will not always answer our questions, but God will always raise us out of that darkness of seeming abandonment and continue our story, so long as we stay close to Jesus, even in our sadness.
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As we move more deeply into the question of how God wants us to be people of peace and prayer in and for this world of enemies, there will come moments when we feel like it is impossible, like the task is too much, and those are moments when we need to just hold on. Hold onto Jesus. Hold onto his story. Hold onto the promise of his ongoing life with us.
Crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is not disqualifying.
Asking, “God, why do you hide yourself when I am in trouble?” is not a failure.
A ministry that is full of radical love and purposeful action will come. But it will not come from us.
We first have to come to a kind of end: an end of our understanding, of our self-righteousness, of our own misplaced hopes in the next election cycle, or the next piece of policy, or the wealth that might vault us into a place of influence over others or insulate us from pain.
You see, in those moments of asking “God, where are you?” we’re as lost as those who we believe to be wicked.
They don’t see God, we say, and God doesn’t seem to see them.
But neither do we see God, and we confess that God doesn’t seem to see us.
But we do see Jesus -- lowly Jesus, who shares our condition, voices our questions, carries us toward a new future.
It may not be satisfying, but it’s where we are right now. Let us hold onto him, and feel that he is already holding onto us.
Amen.