How Should You Answer When the World Asks, Where Is Now Your God?

Psalm 115 is part of the Great Hallel sung after the Passover meal. This is almost certainly the very psalm that Jesus and his disciples sang together in the Upper Room before going out to the Mount of Olives — the great defiant declaration that our God is in the heavens, even as the wheels of crucifixion were already turning beneath him.

Core Message Conveyed Through the Blog Post

The core message of the blog post is that when the world mocks faith and asks, “Where is now your God?”, the believer’s response should not be panic, denial, or shallow certainty, but a quiet and steadfast trust that God remains sovereign, present, and good even in seasons of suffering, silence, exile, and apparent defeat.

God’s Sovereignty Is Not Defeated by Human Circumstances

Psalm 115:3 is presented as the response of God’s people to humiliation, suffering, and exile. The destruction of Jerusalem, unanswered prayers, grief, and institutional collapse do not mean that God has disappeared. The reflection emphasizes that God remains beyond the reach of every empire, crisis, or human failure.

Faith Does Not Ignore the Question

The reflection acknowledges that the question “Where is now your God?” is deeply human and has been asked throughout history. Authentic faith does not suppress pain or doubt. Instead, it allows the question to stand honestly before answering it with trust in God.

The Meaning of “He Does Whatever He Pleases”

The blog explains that God’s sovereignty is not arbitrary tyranny. By examining the Hebrew word ‘chafets,’ the reflection shows that God delights in mercy, justice, restoration, and love. Therefore, God’s will is presented as the effective outworking of divine goodness.

The Contrast Between God and Idols

The reflection contrasts powerless idols and temporary empires with the living God who acts in history. While idols can neither speak nor save, God remains active, sovereign, and beyond human control.

Pastoral and Emotional Message

The blog speaks directly to people who feel abandoned, discouraged, mocked for their faith, or overwhelmed by suffering. It reassures readers that questioning during hardship does not make them faithless, and that God’s apparent silence is not the same as God’s absence.

Final Core Message

Even when faith appears defeated and the world asks, “Where is now your God?”, believers are called to answer with the enduring confession that God reigns beyond every empire, works through history with sovereign goodness, and will ultimately accomplish what delights his merciful heart.

The Mockery and the Answer

A Reflection on Psalm 115:3

Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases.

Psalm 115:3

നമ്മുടെ ദൈവം സ്വര്‍ഗത്തിലാണ്‌; തനിക്കിഷ്‌ടമുള്ളതെല്ലാം അവിടുന്നു ചെയ്യുന്നു.

സങ്കീര്‍ത്തനങ്ങള്‍ 115:3

The Question Babylon Asked

Before we read the verse, beloved, we must hear the question that provoked it. Psalm 115 does not open with the confident declaration of verse 3. It opens with the embarrassment of verse 2. ‘Why should the nations say, Where is now their God?’ That is the question hanging over the whole psalm. It is the taunt the empires of the earth were throwing at exiled Israel — Babylon first, then Persia, then every imperial mocker that has ever paraded its power past the broken doors of God’s people.

Picture the scene. The Temple in Jerusalem had been burned to the ground. The Ark of the Covenant had disappeared. The king of Judah had been blinded and dragged in chains to Babylon. The land of promise lay emptied of its psalm-singers, and the choir that had once led worship in the Temple courts now sat in a foreign city, hanging their harps on the willows by the rivers of Babylon. And the gilded idols of the empire were paraded through the streets in glittering processions, while the priests of those idols turned to the exiles and asked the cruellest question one human being can ask another. Where is now your God?

The question has not died. It walks beside the believer in every age, sometimes in the mouths of strangers, sometimes in the silence of one’s own doubt. It is the question the nurse hears at the bedside of the dying child. It is the question the pastor hears at the funeral of the young mother. It is the question the parent asks in the long night after the diagnosis. It is the question that rises, unbidden, when the parish empties, when the friend betrays, when the prayer goes unanswered for the tenth year running. Where is now your God?

The Silence of the Empty Temple

And there is a long, terrible moment in the psalm before any answer is given. Verse 2 hangs in the air. The mockery is allowed to stand. The psalmist does not rush to defend God. He does not produce a hurried apologetic. He lets the question be heard, in all its cruelty, before he answers.

This is itself a great pastoral kindness, beloved. The biblical writer does not pretend that the question is illegitimate. He does not scold the questioner. He does not say, as some less honest religion has been known to say, that those who ask such questions are simply faithless. He records the question. He gives it a verse of its own. He honours it by letting it sound.

And we should honour it too, today, before we move on. Whoever you are, if the question Where is now your God has come to you, in any of its modern forms, you are not the first. You are not faithless. You are not outside the family of the Psalter. You are exactly where the people of God have stood for three thousand years — at the threshold of the very verse we are about to read.

And Then the Answer Rises

And then, slowly, from somewhere deep in the soul of exiled Israel, the answer rises. It does not come as a shout. It does not come as a defence. It comes as a confession — quiet, defiant, unbroken. ‘Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases.’

Hear it again, slowly. Our God is in the heavens. Not in the temple the Babylonians burned. Not in the city they sacked. Not in the gilded statue they paraded past us in mockery. Not in the chains they wrapped around our king. Our God is in the heavens — beyond the reach of every imperial fire, beyond the borders of every empire’s map, beyond the longest reach of every army that has ever set out to silence him. The mocker can burn a temple. He cannot reach a heaven. The mocker can carry off an idol. He cannot capture a God who has never been confined to wood or gold.

And from that transcendent height, the second half of the verse arrives like a thunderclap. He does whatever he pleases. The Babylonians thought they had imposed their will on history when they burned Jerusalem. The Persians thought they had set the terms when they let the exiles return. Every empire since has thought the same — that its power is the final word, that its decree is the last sentence, that its army is the true arbiter of how the story will end. The psalmist looks at them all and laughs, quietly. Our God does whatever he pleases. Your empires are weather. He is the climate. Your decrees are footnotes. He is the text.

But Read the Hebrew Word

Friend, we must pause here, because the second half of this verse has been misused in our age more often than almost any other line in the Psalter. Read carelessly, ‘he does whatever he pleases’ can sound like the boast of a tyrant. Read carelessly, it can be used to silence honest grief, to crush legitimate questions, to flatten every loss into a bland fatalism — well, it must be God’s will. That is not what the Hebrew says, and that is not what the psalmist means.

The Hebrew word translated ‘pleases’ is chafets. It does not mean arbitrary preference. It means delight, good pleasure, the loving inclination of a heart that takes joy in what is good. The same word is used when the Psalter says that the Lord delights in the integrity of his servants, when the prophets declare that the Lord delights in mercy rather than sacrifice, when Isaiah sings that the Lord delights in his people as a bridegroom delights in his bride. Chafets is the vocabulary of divine joy, not of divine whim.

So when the psalmist tells us that our God does whatever he pleases, he is telling us something far more wonderful than the rough English suggests. He is telling us that whatever God delights in comes to pass. And what God delights in is always the good. He delights in mercy. He delights in justice. He delights in the restoration of his people. He delights in the gathering of the nations. He delights in the bruised reed that he will not break and the smouldering wick that he will not snuff out. The verse is therefore not the confession of a slave before a despot. It is the confession of a child before a Father whose every delight is good and whose every good delight is effective.

A Wake-Up Call for Today

So here, beloved, is the bold word for this morning. Take this verse with you into the working week as armour. The question Where is now your God will come at you, in one form or another, before you reach Friday. It may come from a colleague who has never been religious. It may come from a friend who has stopped attending church. It may come from a news headline. It may come from your own heart, in the small hours, when you cannot sleep.

When it comes, do not flinch. Do not produce a hurried apologetic. Do not pretend you have not heard the question. Honour it, as the psalmist honoured it — let it stand for a moment, the way the truly faithful have always let it stand. And then, from somewhere deep in the soul that has been formed by three thousand years of this same answer, let the verse rise.

Our God is in the heavens. He is not bound to the temple they say has fallen. He is not chained to the parish whose pews have emptied. He is not contained in the institution that has wounded you. He is not absent because the headline is dark. He is in the heavens, beyond the longest reach of every empire that has ever set out to silence him, and he does whatever he pleases. And what he pleases is goodness, mercy, justice, restoration, the gathering of his people, the healing of his world. The empires of our age, like the empires of Babylon, are weather. He is the climate. They will pass. He will remain. And his delight is good.

This is the answer, beloved. Take it with you. Carry it into the mockery you will meet. And let the empires of the world hear, one more time, the quiet, defiant, unbroken confession of the people of God.

A Prayer

Lord God of every exile and every empire, you who sit in the heavens beyond the reach of every fire and every taunt, hear us as we add our voice to the long psalm of your people. We have heard the question, sometimes from others and sometimes from within. We have stood at the threshold of doubt and wondered, with all the honesty of our hearts, whether you are still there. Forgive us our flinching. Lift our gaze to the heavens where you dwell. Restore to us the quiet, defiant confession that has carried your people through every mocking century. And teach us, today, to trust that what you delight in is good, and that what you delight in comes to pass. In the name of Jesus Christ, your Son, who delighted to do your will all the way to the cross, and through whose obedience the gates of every empire have been broken. Amen.

Johnbritto Kurusumuthu

Founder & Principal Author

Rise & Inspire   

Inspired by the verse shared this morning, 19 May 2026, by His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur, a cherished practice he has faithfully continued for over three years.

From the Mockery to the Architecture of the Psalm

(Connecting Pastoral Wisdom with Scholarly Inquiry)

If you have walked with us through the question Babylon asked and the slow, defiant answer that rose from the soul of exiled Israel, dear reader, you have already heard the verse the way it was first meant to be heard. Psalm 115:3 is not a free-standing devotional sentence. It is an answer. It is the people of God refusing to be ashamed of a God who, in the moment of his apparent defeat, sits unmoved in the heavens and does whatever he delights. The reflection has carried us through the form of that answer. The Scholarly Companion that follows will take us into its architecture.

Because, beloved, Psalm 115 is a carefully constructed liturgical piece. It is one of the great Hallel psalms — the psalms of praise that Israel sang at her highest moments and during her deepest exiles. It has a structure, a movement, a careful interplay of voices, and a long history of liturgical use that stretches from the Passover meal of the Second Temple period to the Easter Vigil of the Church of our own day. To read verse 3 in isolation is to lift one stone out of an arch. To read it within the psalm is to see the arch hold.

Why does this matter for a working soul on a Tuesday morning? Because the verses immediately surrounding our own carry the polemic forward in ways no isolated quotation can hold. Verse 4 launches into one of the most devastating satires of idolatry in all of Scripture. The idols of the nations, the psalmist sings, have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear. They are made of silver and gold by the hands of men. They cannot lift a finger. They cannot answer a prayer. And then in verse 8 comes the line every preacher of every age has trembled over: ‘Those who make them become like them, and so do all who trust in them.’ The psalmist is not merely saying that idolatry is foolish. He is saying that we become what we worship.

Verse 3 sits at the centre of this polemic. Our God is the God who acts. The idols of the nations are objects that cannot. We worship a Lord who does whatever he pleases; the idolaters worship statues that can do nothing. The contrast is the engine of the entire psalm, and the Scholarly Companion will walk us through it word by word.

The companion will also take us through the Hebrew of the verse itself, with special attention to the verb chafets — the word for divine delight that the modern English translations have largely flattened into ‘pleases.’ It will set the verse alongside its sister verses in Psalm 135 and Ecclesiastes 8, where the same theology of divine sovereignty appears with slightly different inflections. It will hear how the Fathers of the Church read the verse, especially Augustine and Athanasius. And it will trace the psalm’s use in both Jewish Passover liturgy (where it is sung as part of the Hallel that Jesus himself almost certainly sang at the Last Supper) and Christian Easter celebration.

So read on, friend. Keep the mockery of Babylon and the defiant answer of Israel still in your mind as you turn the page. The arch is about to be examined stone by stone, and the centre stone — the verse you have already received — will be seen in its full weight-bearing strength.

The Arch and Its Centre Stone

(Insights on Psalm 115:3) (Scholarly Inquiry)

Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases.

Psalm 115:3

1.  The Psalm and Its Historical Setting

Psalm 115 belongs to the great collection known in Jewish tradition as the Hallel — Psalms 113 to 118 — the songs of praise sung at the major festivals of Israel, especially Passover. The psalm is undated in the text itself, but the internal evidence points unmistakably to a setting either during or immediately after the Babylonian exile. The mockery of verse 2 — ‘Where is now their God?’ — was the recurring taunt of the gentile nations during Israel’s lowest moment, when the Temple had been destroyed and the people scattered. The polemic against idol-worship in verses 4 to 8 mirrors the great anti-idol passages of Isaiah 40 to 55, which scholars uniformly date to the exilic and post-exilic period. The psalm therefore almost certainly emerges from the same theological furnace as Second Isaiah.

This setting matters for our reading of verse 3. The verse is not the casual declaration of a comfortable believer. It is the defiant confession of a community whose external circumstances had collapsed and whose theology was being publicly mocked. The psalmist sings these words against the wind of imperial scorn. Every modern reader who has ever held faith under pressure stands in this tradition.

2.  The Structure of the Whole Psalm

Psalm 115 has the architecture of a liturgical dialogue. Verse 1 opens with a corporate prayer of humility — ‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory.’ Verse 2 introduces the mockery of the nations. Verses 3 through 8 form the great central confrontation: our God (verse 3) versus the idols of the nations (verses 4 through 8), with the chilling closing line that those who make idols become like them. Verses 9 through 11 issue a threefold call to trust — addressed to Israel, to the house of Aaron (the priests), and to those who fear the Lord (a broader category that probably includes God-fearing Gentiles). Verses 12 through 15 deliver the priestly blessing in response. Verses 16 through 18 close the psalm with a final declaration of God’s sovereignty over heaven and earth and a corporate commitment to bless the Lord.

Verse 3 therefore sits at the head of the central confrontation. It is the opening claim of the polemic, the foundation stone on which the entire anti-idol satire of verses 4 through 8 is built. Without verse 3, the satire would have no ground to stand on. With it, the satire becomes inevitable.

3.  A Walk Through the Hebrew

אֱלֹהֵינוּ (Elohenu) — ‘Our God,’ from Elohim with the first-person plural possessive suffix. The word does not say ‘the God’ but ‘our God,’ planting the verse in the soil of covenant. The psalmist is not making a generic philosophical claim about deity. He is confessing the God who has bound himself to a particular people by name. The defiance of the verse rests on this possessive pronoun. Our God — not the gods the empires worship, not the abstract deity of the philosophers, but the God who is ours by covenant and whom we are by covenant.

בַשָּׁמַיִם (vashamayim) — ‘In the heavens,’ with the prefixed preposition ba and the definite article. The Hebrew shamayim is a dual or plural form, often translated ‘the heavens’ rather than simply ‘heaven.’ It carries the cosmological vision of the ancient world in which the sky is the vast dwelling place of God, vaulted above the earth and beyond the reach of any human power. To say our God is in the heavens is therefore to say something specific in the context of exile. The gods of the empires were located in temples that could be entered, statues that could be carried off, cities that could be sacked. Our God, by contrast, dwells beyond the longest reach of every army.

כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־חָפֵץ (kol asher chafets) — ‘All that he delights in.’ The word kol is the comprehensive ‘all, whatever, everything.’ Asher is the relative pronoun. The crucial word is chafets — a verb whose semantic range is far richer than the English ‘pleases.’ Chafets denotes delight, good pleasure, the loving inclination of the heart toward what one finds desirable. It is used of human delight in a beloved (Genesis 34:19, of Shechem and Dinah), of God’s delight in his servants (1 Kings 10:9, of his delight in Solomon’s wisdom), of God’s delight in mercy (Micah 7:18 — he delights in steadfast love), of God’s delight in his people as a bridegroom delights in his bride (Isaiah 62:4). The verse does not therefore declare that God does whatever he arbitrarily pleases. It declares that whatever God delights in — and what God delights in is always the good — comes to pass.

עָשָׂה (asah) — ‘He does, he makes, he accomplishes.’ Asah is the standard Hebrew verb for accomplished action. It is the verb used in Genesis 1 when God ‘made’ the heavens and the earth, and throughout the Old Testament whenever God’s effective work in the world is in view. The form here is the simple perfect, which in Hebrew poetry often functions as a timeless or gnomic present — not merely ‘he has done,’ but ‘he does, he is doing, he will do.’ The verb cements the verse’s affirmation that God’s delight is not merely an inner disposition but an effective force in history. What he delights in, he accomplishes.

4.  The Theology of Chafets

The verb chafets deserves its own paragraph, because it carries the weight of the whole verse. In modern English the word ‘pleases’ has narrowed almost to the point of becoming the language of preference — ‘do as you please’ has come to mean ‘do as you wish, no one will stop you.’ But this is precisely not what chafets means in biblical Hebrew.

Throughout the Old Testament, chafets is the vocabulary of God’s loving disposition toward the good. The prophet Hosea hears the Lord declare, ‘I desire (chaphatzti) steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings’ (Hosea 6:6). The prophet Micah closes his book with the wonder, ‘He delights in steadfast love’ (Micah 7:18). Isaiah sings, ‘You shall no more be termed Forsaken… for the Lord delights in you’ (Isaiah 62:4). The psalmist declares, ‘The Lord takes pleasure in his people’ (Psalm 149:4). Even the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53:10 is said to be the one in whom the Lord’s good pleasure prospers.

To read Psalm 115:3 with this background is to hear something quite different from the modern English suggestion. The psalmist is not saying that God does whatever capricious thing crosses his mind. The psalmist is saying that what God loves comes to pass. What God delights in — and the rest of Scripture makes abundantly clear that what God delights in is steadfast love, mercy, justice, the gathering of his people, the restoration of his creation — what God delights in is what happens in the end. The empires may posture. The idols may parade. But the deepest delights of God will be the deepest realities of the cosmos when the curtain finally falls.

5.  Canonical Parallels

Psalm 115:3 has a near twin in Psalm 135:6, which uses almost identical language: ‘Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.’ Psalm 135 is likewise a Hallel-style psalm and likewise contains an anti-idol polemic that closely parallels Psalm 115. The two psalms appear to draw from a common liturgical tradition affirming the sovereignty of Israel’s God against the dead idols of the nations.

The theology of divine sovereignty in this verse also resonates with Ecclesiasticus 8:3, where the Preacher declares that ‘whatever the king does pleases him, and he is more powerful than any one of his subjects’ — but the Preacher’s point is precisely to contrast earthly kings, whose pleasure is often arbitrary and harmful, with the God whose pleasure is always good. Daniel 4:35, on the lips of the chastened Nebuchadnezzar, makes the same point: ‘He does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand.’ Daniel and Psalm 115 stand together as Israel’s witness, even in foreign courts, to a sovereignty that exceeds every imperial reach.

In the New Testament the same theology surfaces in Ephesians 1:11, where Paul declares that God ‘accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will.’ The Greek verb energeo, ‘to accomplish, to work effectively,’ is the New Testament counterpart to the Hebrew asah of our psalm. The single most important fact about the universe, for both psalmist and apostle, is that God works what he wills.

6.  A Note from the Fathers and the Liturgy

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Letter to Marcellinus on the Psalms, observed that Psalm 115 was given to the Church for use ‘when the nations mock the faith of God’s people’ — that is, for every season in which the surrounding culture treats the Christian confession with derision. Saint Augustine, in his Expositions on the Psalms (Enarrationes on Psalm 115), drew out the verse with characteristic depth, noting that God’s being in the heavens does not mean he is absent from the earth but that he is sovereign over both. ‘He is in the heavens by his majesty; he is on earth by his grace.’ Saint John Chrysostom, preaching to a Constantinople battered by political upheaval, returned to verse 3 as the foundation of Christian courage in unstable times — ‘the empire of heaven is the only empire that does not change hands.’

Liturgically, Psalm 115 has a place of unique honour. In the Jewish Passover Seder, it forms part of the Great Hallel sung after the Passover meal. This is almost certainly the very psalm that Jesus and his disciples sang together in the Upper Room before going out to the Mount of Olives, as the gospel writers record: ‘And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives’ (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26). To read this psalm is therefore to overhear what may have been on the lips of our Lord on the very night of his betrayal — the great defiant declaration that our God is in the heavens, even as the wheels of crucifixion were already turning beneath him. In the Christian liturgy, Psalm 115 is sung during the Easter Vigil and in the Easter Octave, where its declaration of divine sovereignty becomes the Church’s response to the empty tomb.

7.  A Word on the Verse’s Misuse

Psalm 115:3 has, in our age, suffered from two common misuses worth naming briefly. The first is fatalist. The verse is sometimes deployed to silence honest questions and to crush legitimate grief — ‘well, it must be God’s will’ — as though the verse were a blunt instrument for ending difficult conversations. This misuses the Hebrew chafets and ignores the polemical context. The psalmist was not telling exiled Israel that the destruction of Jerusalem was God’s good pleasure. He was telling them that the empires which destroyed Jerusalem would not have the last word, because the God who sits in the heavens delights in mercy, justice, and the restoration of his people. The verse is therefore not a sedative for grief; it is a stimulant of hope.

The second misuse is voluntarist. Some traditions have used the verse to construct a portrait of God whose sovereignty is purely arbitrary, whose will is to be obeyed simply because it is his will, regardless of whether it accords with what we recognise as good. This too misuses chafets. The biblical God’s will is not arbitrary; it is the effective expression of his loving character. The God of Psalm 115:3 is not a tyrant in the heavens whose pleasure is unfathomable. He is the Father whose pleasure is always congruent with mercy, steadfast love, and the flourishing of his people. To say he does whatever he pleases is therefore good news, not threat.

The cure for both misuses is the same. Read the verse with the verb chafets restored to its full Old Testament weight, and read it within the polemical structure of the psalm as a whole. The verse is the people of God answering imperial mockery with the confession that their God is both unconstrained and good — and that his unconstrainedness and his goodness are the same single thing.

8.  For Today’s Reader

The believer who closes this companion and returns to ordinary life carries, I hope, a sharper hand on the verse. Psalm 115:3 is not a smooth devotional sentence. It is exilic Israel’s defiant answer to imperial mockery. It is the people of God refusing to be ashamed of a God who, in the moment of his apparent defeat, sits unmoved in the heavens. It is the confession that what God delights in comes to pass — and that what God delights in is good.

Carry the verse with you, beloved, into the mockeries of your own week. The empires of our age, like the empires of Babylon, are loud and seemingly secure. The voices that ask Where is now your God will not fall silent in our lifetime. But the answer is in your mouth, written into the deepest memory of the people of God, sung by our Lord himself on the night before he died. Our God is in the heavens. He does whatever he delights. And what he delights in is good.

Johnbritto Kurusumuthu

In what form has the question ‘Where is now your God?’ come to you this week — and what would it mean to answer it with Psalm 115:3?

If today’s reflection found you, friend, then come walk further with us. Every morning at Rise & Inspire we open a verse, slowly, the way one opens a window before sunrise. No noise. No hurry. Just one biblical word for the working day. Subscribe to the Wake-Up Calls newsletter and let one bold thought find your inbox before the world does.

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