Was God angry and giving humans “the silent treatment?” Was God allowing for a beat before the entry of His Son, like a dramatic pause in a great concerto? God doesn’t choose to explain Himself on this point. Depending on your experience with silence, this can sound ominous or understandable but inevitably leads to other questions. We refer to them as the 400 years of silence or the intertestamental period. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. ( Matthew 1:1 ESV)īut there were 400 years between these books with no recorded (written) prophecies or canonized Scriptures. The first verse of the New Testament is found in Matthew’s gospel: And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” ( Malachi 4:5-6 ESV) “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.

The final verses of the Old Testament concluding with the book written by the prophet Malachi read: God’s 400 years of silence occurred between the Old and the New Testaments. We shouldn’t be surprised then that God entered a period of silence-400 years of silence, to be precise.

Ecclesiastes 3:7 says there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (ESV). As a talker and woman of words, it’s taken me several decades to appreciate the power and value of silence.

Lost ark perfect timing