Wrestling with God Editor: Jeff 
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"Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief."
— C.S. Lewis
About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff  and I'm one of the regular editors of the official Spiritual Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 500 newsletters across the site in that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email me directly or submit feedback in the comment box at the bottom of this newsletter. |
Wrestling with God
There have been seasons in my life where I've asked God to show up, plainly and specifically, and felt like I got nothing back.
Not silence in the peaceful, contemplative sense. Silence in the frustrating sense; the kind where I've asked a direct question and the answer is a resounding silence. I've prayed for clarity in moments of real uncertainty and felt no clarity arrive. I've asked for comfort in my pain and felt no comfort land. And in those moments, it's tempting to conclude one of two things: either God isn't there, or God doesn't care enough to respond.
It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize there might be a third option.
The Book of Job is one of the strangest and most radical texts in the Bible, and I don't think it gets discussed nearly as often as it deserves. Job is a righteous man who loses everything — his wealth, his children, his health — through no apparent fault of his own. God allows it to happen as a way of proving a point to Satan. Job's friends show up, and true to form, they offer him theology. You must have done something to deserve this. God is just, so this must be justice. Everything happens for a reason, and the reason is probably you.
Job rejects every single one of these explanations. Not quietly or politely; He argues and insists he's done nothing to deserve what's happened to him, and he demands that God show up and explain himself directly rather than existing in the words of well-meaning friends offering tidy answers that don't actually address his suffering.
What's remarkable isn't just that Job argues. It's that this book of the Bible treats his argument as legitimate. His friends, who defend God's justice at every turn, are the ones God rebukes at the end of the story. Job, who spends thirty-some chapters in open protest, is the one God ultimately vindicates.
I think there's something important in that detail that's easy to miss: Job's friends are comfortable. Their theology lets everyone off the hook. If suffering always has a tidy explanation, then the universe is orderly and safe, and all you have to do is behave correctly to avoid Job's fate. Job's protest is uncomfortable because he refuses to accept an explanation that would make everyone else feel better while leaving his actual pain unaddressed.
That refusal to accept a dishonest explanation is itself a form of faith. The fact that Job stays in the conversation — furious, grieving, demanding — suggests he still believes there's someone on the other end worth demanding an answer from. You don't wrestle with someone you've already concluded isn't there, and you don't argue against someone you think isn't listening anymore.
There's a related moment earlier in the Hebrew scriptures, when Jacob spends a night physically wrestling a stranger who turns out to be God in some form, and walks away wounded, blessed, and renamed Israel — which is often translated as "one who struggles with God." The name itself suggests that struggle isn't something to be avoided by people of faith; that God expects and even wants his sons and daughters to come to him with their complaints and laments just as often as their praises.
I'll admit I don't know nearly enough about other spiritual traditions, but my understanding is that Zen Buddhism has its own related concept, sometimes called "great doubt," paired alongside "great faith" and "great determination" as three qualities considered essential to genuine spiritual practice. Doubt isn't treated as an obstacle to overcome before real practice can begin; it's treated as part of the practice itself. That resonance suggests struggling to understand and interact with spiritual power isn't a uniquely Christian challenge. Wrestling honestly with the object of your faith might just be what faith, taken seriously, tends to produce.
Looking back at my own seasons of unanswered prayer, what I've come to recognize — slowly, and usually only in hindsight — is that the absence I felt wasn't actually an absence. It was a mismatch between what I was asking for and what I was being given. I wanted an answer, a clear word, an intervention I could point to. What I got, more often, was presence that I would have noticed if I had been looking. It was like expecting someone to come swoop in and save the day for you, and realizing that the real, authentic interaction was someone instead willing to sit with you and be there for you in your pain and/or lament.
I didn't recognize that as God showing up at the time, because it didn't look like what I'd demanded. It took distance to see it at all.
Job never gets the full explanation he demands, either. When God finally responds, at the end of the book, it's not with an accounting of divine justice or a satisfying answer to the question of why Job suffered. It's a long, overwhelming description of the scale and mystery of creation; essentially, a demonstration of how much Job doesn't know and can't fully grasp. It's not a comforting answer by most standards. And yet Job, having received it, is satisfied in some way the text doesn't fully explain.
I don't have a tidy resolution to offer in place of the one Job didn't get either. What I have is the recognition that the wrestling itself — the demanding, the arguing, the refusal to accept easy answers — might be less a departure from faith than the clearest evidence of it. You don't argue with silence unless some part of you still believes someone's on the other side of it. And when you start looking for the ways God is showing up rather than holding him to your expectations of what he should be doing, it changes everything.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
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Spiritual: August 05, 2026 Issue [#13884]
