When All Is Not Well

Introduction – When Trouble Piles Up Fast

Have you ever had one of those days when everything seems to go wrong at once—one problem triggering the next like falling dominoes?

I once read a brief accident report from a bricklayer that captures it perfectly.

A hurricane left loose bricks on a rooftop. He filled a barrel to lower them, but the barrel outweighed him. As it plunged he shot upward, colliding with the barrel on the way down, banging his head on the beam and pinching his fingers. When the barrel hit the ground and burst, he shot down, met it again, and finally landed on a pile of spilled bricks just before the empty barrel crashed on his head.

His conclusion was dry: “I respectfully request sick leave.”

It’s funny on paper—but all of us have felt that chain-reaction of trouble: a medical scare, a sudden expense, a broken relationship. Christians are not immune. Jesus told us plainly, “In this world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33).

The difference for a believer is not that we escape hardship but that we live by faith. Hebrews 10:38 says, “The just shall live by faith.”

Faith is not a warm feeling or a flash of optimism. Faith is confidence in God when circumstances look chaotic.

Hebrews 11—the great “faith chapter”—profiles men and women who trusted God when life offered no visible guarantees. Their stories show how faith holds steady in three of the hardest situations:

1. When God seems silent

2. When God seems unfeeling

3. When God seems to contradict Himself

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1. Living by Faith When God Seems Silent

Few lives illustrate this better than Job. In a single season he lost his wealth, his children, his health, and the respect of his community. Yet the deepest wound was God’s silence. Job longed to present his case, but every prayer seemed to bounce off the ceiling. Still he declared, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).

Maybe you’ve been there. You followed God faithfully, and suddenly the map changed. Just when you thought you knew the answers, someone changed the questions. You looked for God’s hand and heard nothing.

James Dobson tells of a truck driver who illustrates that tension. Driving too fast on a mountain road, he lost control and went over the edge. Thrown from the cab, he managed to grab a branch jutting from the cliff. Dangling there with his strength failing, he shouted, “Is anybody there?”

A voice answered, “Yes, I am here. Let go of the branch and trust Me.”

He looked at the wreck far below and cried out, “Is anybody else there?”

Faith is what you cling to when the heavens are silent and the options all look bad.

Hebrews 11 lists people who clung like that: Abel who offered his best and was murdered; Enoch who walked with God until God simply took him; Noah who built an ark for decades while neighbors laughed; Abraham who left his homeland without knowing where he was going; Sarah who believed for a child long after her body said no; Moses who chose the hardship of leadership over royal privilege; Israel who stepped into the Red Sea with only God’s word beneath their feet; Rahab who risked everything to hide two spies.

Some of them received miraculous deliverance. Others did not. Verses 35–38 describe saints who were tortured, mocked, flogged, chained, stoned, sawn in two, or killed by the sword—people “of whom the world was not worthy.” They “received not the promise” in this life.

Why? Were their prayers defective? Did they lack faith? No. They knew that some promises are bigger than earthly rescue. They trusted the eternal reward that suffering cannot touch.

Think of the three Hebrews before Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace: “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us… but if not, we will not serve your gods” (Daniel 3:17–18). Whether or not God intervened, their loyalty was settled.

That is living by faith when God seems silent.

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2. Living by Faith When God Seems Unfeeling

Sometimes the challenge is not silence but what feels like divine indifference.

Consider Moses. For forty years he shepherded sheep in Midian, waiting on a promise. Then came forty more years of leading a rebellious nation across a desert. Through every complaint and crisis, the vision of Canaan kept him going.

At the end, God said, “You shall see the land before you, but you shall not go there” (Deuteronomy 32:52). From a human point of view it seems harsh. Why deny this faithful servant the goal he had pursued for eight decades?

Yet Moses died in God’s arms and was raised to heavenly life (Jude 9). The earthly Canaan was only a shadow of the true Promised Land. God’s “no” became a far greater “yes.”