Why did this happen to me? #4 - When God Seems Distant (Bryce Vaught)

Pastor Bryce Vaught explores Job 22-27 to address one of life's most pressing questions: Why does God feel distant in our suffering? He offers three biblical prescriptions—repent, rejoice, and remain—reminding us that through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, God has closed the gap sin created, ensuring we're never truly separated from His love and presence.

Message Summary and Transcript - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2025/10/13/why-did-this-happen-to-me-4-when-god-seems-distant

Subscribe to Orchard Hill Plus! - https://orchardhillplus.buzzsprout.com/share

Connect with Orchard Hill Church
Website | https://www.orchardhillchurch.com
Mobile App | https://https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/app
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/OrchardHillChurchPA
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/orchardhillchurch/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/orchardhillchurch/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/orchard_hill

Transcript

Father, we come to you today, God, when we enter into your presence with thanksgiving, with praise, that's what your word calls us to. God, we trust that in your presence there's fullness of joy, there's pleasure forevermore. Father, if we're honest, there are times where that just seems so distant, at spaces where it just seems impossible to connect with you. So, God, I ask that in this moment, your spirit would empower us to hear, to learn, and to see you in the different situations that we find ourselves in. In Jesus name, amen.

Introduction: Philip's Story

In 1915, there was a book written by author Somerset Maugham that tells the story of a young child named Philip who was born with a clubbed foot. This was something that had always bothered him, especially as he grew and wanted to participate in sports and be with kids, just enjoy life the way that he wanted to.

He eventually came across the passage in Mark's Gospel where Jesus makes this statement: "Ask anything in my name, believing with no doubt, and it will be given to you." So this young boy, Philip, heard that and read that, and he thought, this is it. This is the answer to my greatest problem.

He set his heart and his mind to pray for healing for his foot. He prayed and he began to dream about having been healed, being able to play football and be with friends and not be looked at funny by his peers. He just began to be so excited about what was to come, and he had no doubt that God would hear him and answer his prayer.

The night before going back to school, he said, this is it. I'm going to pray, and God is going to hear me and answer me. So he gets down on his knees in his bedroom, and at one point he even said, you know what? My pajamas are too soft. And he'd take these off. And he humbled himself and he prayed unclothed to please his master.

He was so excited as he went to sleep, couldn't hardly go to sleep. Eventually he did, and it was a deep sleep. And he woke up the next morning, and he just knew he had been healed. But as he went to put on his clothes for the day, he realized that he wasn't.

So he limped back down steps and ate breakfast in silence. The author who wrote this book really wrote this loosely based on his own life. He didn't suffer from a clubbed foot, but he did suffer from a severe stuttering problem that impacted him all throughout his life. And it was that experience that led him to ultimately reject his faith because he couldn't comprehend the idea of someone who has the power to save and heal, sit on the sidelines and do nothing while somebody cried out urgently for help.

Job's Experience of Distance

Maybe you're here today and you find yourself in a similar situation. You're at the end of your rope. If not all of us have gone through seasons to where we struggle to be able to recognize God in the midst of our circumstance, that it just becomes impossible to see what he's doing. And we can begin to ask the question, why does God feel so distant?

Certainly, as we come to Job, chapters 22 through 27, this is Job's experience. Job is getting to this point where he's been suffering for such a lengthy amount of time that he feels like his prayers aren't being heard, that God has forgotten him, abandoned him, neglected him, and he cannot find God anywhere. The question is, what do we do when God seems distant, where it seems like we can't get ahold of the one that we love?

The Paradox of God's Presence

Really, this is a complicated question. If someone were to come to me just in terms of ministry and say, hey, I just feel like God's distant and I don't know what to do, there's a couple ways I might even approach dealing with this. One, I might try to encourage them and say, hey, look, I know it feels that way. But that's not the case, because God is everywhere at all times. He's omnipresent, and the Bible says that he's near to the brokenhearted, so he's close to you.

But at the same time, I might also say something to the effect that, well, of course God seems distant. This world is not the way it should be. It's broken and it's full of pain and suffering, and we're sinners. So there is this separation that exists. And it's natural to feel like God is distant because in reality there is this distance between us. We're not in right relationship with him.

The apostle Paul says it this way in Acts chapter 17. He's teaching and doing mission work in the city of Athens. And as he's been walking through this town, the city square, he sees all these different idols built to gods. And he comes across this one that says, "to the unknown God." And so he speaks up, saying, hey, let me tell you about this God that you think you don't know.

He says it this way in verse 26 of Acts 17: "From one man, he—that's being God—made all the nations that they should inhabit the whole earth. And he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us."

In this one passage, the Apostle Paul is affirming two truths. That one, God is intimately involved with every person's life in the world, that God cares, that he knows your situation and your circumstance, and more than that, he's intimately involved with every creature. Jesus affirms that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father's awareness—that he's close.

But at the same time, sin has done such a number on us, it has impacted us so deeply that we're blind to God's presence, that we're not sensitive to his work or his ways. And so it's almost as if he's absent and needs to be found.

Three Factors That Create Distance

So we have this complicated situation, and I would say that most of our lives, we go through our lives unconcerned whether God is near. In fact, I would say there's a lot of moments where we would prefer that God would be distant, that we would have our own way and do things the way that we decide to do them. But then there are some things that come into our life that cause us to be sensitive to our smallness, to the fact that we don't have what we need.

There are a lot of things that can factor into this. I want to point out three that the Book of Job highlights for us that impact and help us to see our need for God and create that feeling of being distant from Him.

1. The Experience of Suffering

One is just this, the experience that we all go through, which is the experience of suffering. It's clear that Job, his words in Job 23:1-9, this feeling of being distant from God is a direct result of the suffering that he's been going through. We see earlier in chapter one that he's lost his family, he's lost his possessions, that his livelihood has been taken from him, and it's just this ongoing pain that he's dealing with.

And we might ask the question, well, why would God even allow that to begin with? I love this quote from C.S. Lewis, who says it this way: "God whispers in our pleasures, he speaks to our conscience, but he shouts in our pain. Pain and suffering is basically his megaphone to arouse a deaf world."

In other words, there are some times where God allows pain and suffering in our life so that we would be aware of that distance that exists between us. And we would begin to turn to him and find comfort and relief in him, that we would be renewed and learn a lesson about who he is and who we are.

One thing that I even took from that early on in my Christian walk was I had this understanding that all pain and suffering was really just to teach me a lesson. And what I began to believe is that, well, once I've learned my lesson, the pain should end—that, okay, I've gotten what you wanted me to learn, so let's move on. But then it didn't. Then I would find myself going from a place of being grateful for learning more about who God was to a place of being entitled. Okay, now give me what I deserve.

And so pain and suffering have this ability to one, create clarity of our need for God. But we also can see that it clouds our understanding of who God is. And it can cause us to miss what he's doing and begin to feel as if he's not close.

2. Wrong Beliefs About God

Second factor, I would say, that leads to this feeling of distance is what I would just say is a wrong belief about God. We can see this in the life of Eliphaz, Job's friend. In Job chapter 22, he starts his speech and he asks this question in verse 2: "Can a man be of benefit to God? Can even a wise person benefit him? What pleasure would it give the Almighty if you were righteous? What would he gain if your ways were blameless?"

See, Eliphaz had this belief—and this is coming after Job has been trying to defend his character against his friends, saying, look, I'm not in the sin that you think I am. So Eliphaz says, so what? Even if you were righteous, God doesn't care. It doesn't benefit him. If you do good, he's not concerned. The only—in Eliphaz's mind, the only time that God intervenes in humanity is when they need to be punished. Otherwise, he is not interested in you.

Really, this is what we would call today a deistic worldview. In other words, it's this view that God exists and he created his creation and placed humanity within it. But then he left. And he's kind of like this absentee landlord that you never hear from until your rent is late and then he's at your door.

Now the reality is, throughout the Christian faith, that has never been the view of God. We know he cares, that he's close, and that he's intimately involved with our lives. But I would say probably even, especially over the last couple hundred years, many Christ followers have lived in such a way where they don't believe this to be true, but we function as if it is.

You really trace this worldview back to the time of the Enlightenment, a time when some of the world's greatest thinkers began to separate what was physical and observable as being fact, and then what was spiritual and unobservable as being feeling or just theoretical, that you couldn't know this area to be true. And so we should keep those things separate.

You see, that's impacted our culture more than we realize. As some of our greatest educational institutions, even in our country, started as Christian institutions, have now abandoned that worldview completely. I would say it hasn't just affected our culture, but it's affected us personally.

I recently read a story of a pastor who was sharing about a time where he was helping his daughter with a science project. And they had had issues with doing science projects in the past. So they said, you know what? Before we start this, we need to pray. And so they prayed, and they go through this experiment that they needed to do at home. And it worked. The results came out exactly as they were supposed to.

And so they get to the point where they're starting to write down the report of what they did, and the daughter turns to her dad, who's a pastor, and says, "Okay, now what did we do first?" And her dad said, "Well, we prayed." And the daughter said, "Well, yeah, but we can't put that." And he just kind of took a step back and he asked why not?

He had this moment where he was beginning to realize that here's his daughter, raised in a Christian home, raised in a place where she had Christian friends, had developed a Christian worldview. But all of a sudden, this culture had more influence over her than her entire upbringing. That this culture says you can't have God with your everyday life, that you need to keep him separate. And we start to live that way. We start to live and just go about our business without really investing in our relationship with God. And naturally, because of that, we can begin to feel as if God is just distant. Wrong belief can impact us.

3. Our Own Sin

And then, last factor that I would point to that can cause us to feel this distance with God is just our own sin. Job's friends had this right—that sin does lead to consequences.

And when I say sin, I think oftentimes we think of sin in terms of just wrong actions or bad behavior. But it's so much more than that. One of my favorite quotes defining sin is that sin is really just the vandalism of shalom. And when I say shalom, that's more than just an experience of peace. Shalom is this Jewish word that really points to the perfect harmonious relationship of all living things and between every living thing and creation and between every human with each other in this perfect relationship with God.

And that sin is anything that vandalizes that, which includes our behavior, but it also includes our motives and our desires and our attitudes and our beliefs—that sin is not so much about breaking a law, but it's also breaking God's heart.

And sin leads to this separation. The Bible says that the wages of sin, the consequences of sin, is death. Death is really just by definition a separation. When somebody dies physically or naturally, their material being and their immaterial being are separated. When Adam and Eve sinned in the beginning, there was a separation that took place between them and between them and God. That sin leads to a separation and a distance between us and God.

Sin has a funny way of working because at one point it can harden our hearts to the point that we become insensitive to God. But as soon as we become aware of our sin, it creates this overwhelming guilt that feels we can never be loved by Him.

God's Prescriptions for Healing

So how do we deal with this distance? The good news of the Bible is that the story of the Bible is really just the story of God closing the gap from Genesis to Revelation. He's not okay with this distance being there. And so he begins to move close and draw near to people with the ultimate goal of re-establishing a recreated world and dwelling with his people for all time, where there is no distance and there is no separation and we get to be with him forever.

And in the meantime, as we look forward to that world to come, I would say that God has, in his grace and mercy, has given us what I would call prescriptions to help begin to experience some healing when we do find ourselves feeling separated from Him.

Before I get into talking through these prescriptions, I would want to point out that just like medical prescriptions, sometimes prescriptions can take time to start working. That it's not like you just take it once and everything is just back to normal and you're feeling better immediately. I would say too that sometimes our situation and health is so complicated that you need a combination of prescriptions to work and to experience healing. And third, I would say this, that just like medical prescriptions, sometimes they can be misused, misapplied to the point where they become abusive, and it can leave you asking the question, I don't know if these prescriptions are doing more harm or are they really helping me?

Prescription 1: Repent

And so with that, I just want to get into the prescriptions that I believe God gives us to experience healing. And the first one is this, this prescription to repent.

Job's friend Eliphaz, he says this in Job 22:21: "Submit to God and be at peace with Him. In this way, prosperity will come to you. Accept instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart. If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored if you remove wickedness far from your tent."

One of the difficult things about studying the Book of Job is we know that Job's friends are wrong. But every now and then they say something that's actually right, and his friend is right here. That this call to repentance is really a call to find life. That he's calling him to lay aside his sin and the effects of sin and to be in right relationship with God. That really the call to repent is a call to experience salvation.

I mean, this is at the heart of Jesus' ministry. As he begins his ministry in Mark chapter 1, he comes out saying, "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news."

The apostle Peter in Acts chapter 3—this is at a time where Jesus is resurrected, he's ascended to heaven, and the disciples are facing intense oppression and pressure from the Jews—and the apostle Peter says this in chapter 3, verse 19, he calls the Jewish people. He says, "Repent then and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord."

That as uncomfortable as it is to be confronted with our sin and told that we need to repent, it's an invitation to be refreshed, to be renewed, to have your slate wiped clean, and to find life.

Even going back to the passage we looked at earlier, in Acts chapter 17, the apostle Paul, as he's teaching in Athens, he tells this community, he says, "Yes, God does seem distant." But in verse 30, he says, "In the past, God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because God desires that all people would repent and find salvation."

The question is, what is repentance? If this is the entryway into experiencing life with God, what does that look like? Repentance literally means to have a change of mind, to have your mind renewed and have your life continually conformed to a life of righteousness. So it's not just about feeling sorry for your sins or saying that you're sorry. Although that is included in repentance, it's not just a moment decision. It is this ongoing process of being changed from the inside out—from not just your behavior, but your very heart.

And maybe I can illustrate it by looking at dental work and what I mean by that. If you're fortunate to not have had a whole lot of dental work, good for you. That was not my experience.

I have always had pretty clean teeth. I've never had many cavities, but at one point, a tooth came out, and I didn't have an adult tooth behind it. So I'm missing a tooth because I'm from Arkansas, so that would make sense. But then I also had this weird random tooth that was just growing at the top of the roof of my mouth, away from every other tooth that had to be removed. But then I also had my upper teeth, my front teeth. Of course, one was just sticking way out to the front, and the other one was pointing to the back. So I was a real catch.

But because of that, I had to have braces. And the way that braces work is they put a bracket on each tooth, and then they have this wire that is fixed to the ideal shape that your teeth need to be in. And so then they place that wire in the brackets, and they tighten down the brackets, and it's a very pleasant experience. But the point of it is, over time, day by day, those brackets are pulling your teeth and getting them in position to match the shape of the wire so that your teeth are in their proper place.

It's not something that happens over a day. They start with a pretty flexible wire, but then you come back and they take that wire out and they put in a more stiff wire. And that happens several times. And over the course of a long time, your teeth are conformed to the proper shape so that they can function in the proper way.

And I think for a lot of us, when we think of repentance, we think that it's more like having your teeth cleaned, that every six months or five years, whatever your rhythm is—it should be every six months, just so you know—you go in and you have the tartar buildup cleaned off, and you get them nice and polished, and you just come out, you feel refreshed, and then just go back to your same old eating habits, and eventually you'll go back another six months and have them cleaned again.

But repentance isn't so much about having your teeth cleaned as it is about having braces. It's this continual process, day by day, where your life is consistently conformed to the character and person of Jesus as revealed in Scripture.

That what happens is as we spend time in God's Word, we develop this awareness of what sin is, and we put that to death. And we have a greater understanding of who God is and what he's doing in our lives. And so all of a sudden we begin to develop a sensitivity to his presence. That really repentance is the key to intimacy and developing relationship with God. That's how we enter into a relationship with God, and that's how we grow in our relationship with God.

But then, as I mentioned before, this is probably the most powerful prescription. It can still be misused. We can go back to the story of Job and Job's friends, and they keep calling him to repent. In their mind, Job, you must have something in your life that is broken. You're sinning in all these different possible ways. And so you need to repent, Job. But they didn't realize that Job was repentant.

And so all of a sudden, this call to repentance, which should be out of a kindness and a love and just an intimacy with that person, it's no longer a call to freedom. It's become a source of oppression and burden for those of us who are repentant and we feel distant from God. Maybe we don't need to lean into the prescription of repentance. Maybe we need to lean into the prescription to rejoice.

Prescription 2: Rejoice

Which is the second one that I have for us, this call to rejoice. I'm always amazed that Job's initial response after his suffering comes in chapter one. In that we see that after he loses everything in his life that he holds dear, his immediate response is to fall on his face and worship.

What we see is, as time goes on, he is fighting with everything he has to maintain this kind of posture before God. When you come to read Job chapter 27, which I'm not going to read it for the sake of time, we see Job—he's like wrestling within himself, trying to maintain his integrity. Because in Job's mind, this isn't so much a season of divine punishment, but it is a divine test. And that if he can just maintain his integrity, if he can maintain his proper worship, that eventually he will pass the test. God will relent from causing him pain. He will experience this new life again.

And we see this kind of mindset and understanding even in our own day with the prosperity gospel movement, with this "name it, claim it" kind of message that if you just have enough faith, that if you want to experience the breakthrough or get out of your suffering, then you need to believe more, you need to worship louder, you need to be more authoritative in your life, or you need to do something.

And they'll point to different parts in Scripture to prove this point. One of the big passages, even looking at the life of Paul and Silas, when we see them in prison in Philippi, they are beaten and put in prison for preaching the gospel. And then we see them at midnight. The Bible says that they begin to sing and rejoice and praise God by singing hymns, and God responds by causing an earthquake which sets them free from prison.

And so in some cases, people will look at that and say, well, if you want to be freed from your suffering, you have to praise. You have to praise before it happens. And then it will happen. But what's often overlooked is that Paul was put in prison. He was freed there miraculously. And God can do miracles, but he doesn't have to.

Eventually, Paul was put in prison again and again and again, and then he was killed there. So we have to ask the question, did Paul's worship diminish over time? Did his faith weaken and is that why he wasn't rescued at the end? No, because in all of his instruction to the churches that he would write to, it was always the same: Rejoice always.

To the Philippians, he wrote, "Rejoice in the Lord. Again, I say rejoice."

See, there's a bit of a difference between the apostle Paul and Job. That Job is kind of operating with this understanding that I need to worship and rejoice so that I can pass this test and I can find God's favor and blessing. But for Paul, he worshiped and rejoiced in God because Jesus had passed his test and he already had God's favor and blessing.

That in the midst of suffering, we rejoice not to get what God can do for us, but just to be with God. That whether you're in worship through song or you're rejoicing in the Lord by just meditating on the goodness of his hand towards your life, it sets your mind on things above and it actually makes it to where the God who is near begins to feel near, that we find intimacy through rejoicing.

Ultimately, it leads us to setting our mind on who Jesus is and what he's done for us on our behalf.

Prescription 3: Remain

Which leads us to the last prescription, which is the prescription to remain.

The night before Jesus' crucifixion, he has just told his disciples that he's about to leave them, that they're going to be on their own. And they're struggling to comprehend what that really means and what that's going to look like. But what is about to take place in their life is going to be so overwhelming, so full of just this fear and pain and sadness. Very literally, I mean, this is Jesus, who is God in the flesh, is going to leave them. And so for the disciples in this moment, God will be very distant.

And so what's Jesus' instruction to the disciples? He just tells them point blank in John chapter 15, verse 5, he says, "I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. This is to my Father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples."

Jesus gives them this prescription to remain in him, which is really just a call to endure, a call to not lose heart, to continue believing in God, to remain committed to Jesus and his ways. It says, keep coming back to my word that I'm giving to you now. Keep coming back to prayer. Not because every time you do, something miraculous happens, because that's where the miraculous happens. So keep coming back to it. When you fail and when you fall, get up. Because there's forgiveness. It's this prescription to not quit.

And I put it as a prescription, but it's also a promise. In verse 3 of John 15, he says it this way. He says, "You are already clean because of the word I've spoken to you. Remain in me as I also remain in you."

And the encouragement here is he said, hey, I need you to stay committed to me. But hear this: I'm more committed to you. You can stay and endure because I'm not going to let you go.

In fact, Jesus is so committed to his disciples that he would go to the cross and he would take their sin on his shoulders. And he would take the wrath of God, the judgment that we deserved. And in that moment, Paul Tripp says it this way: "In that moment on the cross, the Father turned His back on the Son so that he would never turn his back on us."

That Jesus entered into this space where he was separated from God so that we will never be separated from him, that we can remain in God and forever experience his intimacy and his closeness. Remain in me as I'm going to remain in you.

Job's Faith

Going back to Job, there's this verse at the end of the verses that we had heard read at the beginning in Job chapter 23. He's wrestling with this feeling of abandonment. But he says this in verse 10: "But he knows the way that I take. When he has tested me, I will come forth as gold."

It's a beautiful verse, and it could be read and honestly, it could be translated a couple different ways. It could be translated this way in which Job is saying, look, I know I'm righteous, and if God would just test me, he would see that I'm righteous and I would pass this test.

But one scholar I read said it actually could better be translated as saying, "He knows the way he takes, and when he has tried me, I will come forth as gold." In other words, it could be translated as Job saying, I don't know where God is or what he's doing, but I trust that he's good and that he has his hand on me and that he is going to bring me through.

And we can experience this closeness just being reminded that God has committed to us.

Closing

One thing is, when God begins to seem distant, we have the privilege of being able to look into the distant future where one day we will have been with God for so long that we won't even remember what it was like to be without Him.

That's a beautiful hope that we can lean into and hold onto in the days that we struggle to see where he's at.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. This truth of the gospel, that it just gives us life and peace in our deepest and darkest moments. God, because of our sin, we have separated ourselves from you in this moment. God, help awaken us to the truth of the gospel. That you are near and that you desire a relationship with us. God, we love you and ask that this truth would just begin to resonate in our hearts and minds as we move forward from this day. In Jesus name, Amen.

Communion

We're going to close today by partaking in communion together. And what a beautiful way to respond to really just this topic, that it's an opportunity for us to repent of some maybe behaviors and ideas or attitudes that have led some distance. It's an opportunity to rejoice as we remind ourselves what Jesus has done on our behalf.

Here at Orchard Hill, we practice open communion, which means that if you're a follower of Jesus even if you're not a member of Orchard Hill, we invite you to come to the table. You can come—we have tables lined up at the front, to the sides, in the balcony and in the lobby. You can come take the bread, dip it in the wine and eat and then return to your seat and respond with the team.

If you're here today and you're not a follower of Jesus, you're just here exploring, considering what that would look like, we would just ask that in this moment you not come, that you would reflect on the word shared today. Consider what it would look like for you to follow Jesus this time.

I invite you to stand. And as the team comes and leads us in worship, please feel free to come forward and respond by taking communion.

AI-Generated Disclaimer: This transcript was cleaned and formatted using artificial intelligence. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, there may be minor errors or omissions. Please refer to the original audio recording for the most accurate representation of this sermon.