wow.

"in Psalms 74 & 77, the psalmist shows us that when it seems like God is ignoring us, when He seems to be silent and still, neither answering us nor fighting for us, we have to consciously remember what He has done in our lives, because God's deeds speak for Him.

Because God's deeds reveal His character, and since His character is unchanging, that must mean what He has done He will continue to do: His deeds in our past are also promises for our future, and He who has been faithful and good to us will continue to be faithful and good to us.

The psalmist also teaches us that God's silence and stillness are due neither to His deafness nor to His departure; instead, they are His gifts of absence to us: He *gives* to us His silence, and He *gives* to us His stillness.

Since we know that God gives good gifts to His children, it must mean that His absence is a redemptive absence, meant to sanctify us: it is meant to drive us, as it has driven the psalmist, to look to the past to reflect on God's deeds, so that our meditation on history might instruct us in a lesson on prophecy, and we learn to trust that God's deeds for us are God's promises to us, and to trust God, because of who He is to us." - Jieqiang