A Biblical Response to Rejection

In 2015, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience published an article titled, “Emotional responses to interpersonal rejection.” Specifically in relation to other people, the author wrote, “Several specific emotions arise from the prospect or presence of rejection, including hurt feelings, loneliness, jealousy, guilt, shame, social anxiety, embarrassment, sadness, and anger.” Of course, in addition to how people discard us, similar sentiments often emerge when rejection comes in the form of a college refusal letter, a dismissed job application, or even when an idea you had was turned down. Denial is tough to accept, and we often do anything but accept it.

If we were to be transparent, a quick overview of our lives would likely reveal a plethora of instances of how we fell short in responding well to rejection. It hurts when that person doesn’t want you. It’s confusing when we don’t get the position we thought we were qualified for. It’s frustrating when our lives don’t seem to be going our way. These outcomes are not only hard, but they often leave us wondering: “Well, what now?” These are the responses we most frequently have toward rejection. And yet, these responses are simply wrong and unfruitful. There’s really no point in being less blunt.

If you have put your faith in Christ, I wonder: Do you realize who it is you serve? To be a follower of Christ means to be adopted into the Kingdom of God, with an eternal inheritance in heaven. It means to serve a loving Father who has chosen you “before the foundation of the world.” Perhaps most significantly, we serve a God who is utterly sovereign over all things, perfect in all His ways, and unchanging throughout all generations. This God is not fazed by rejection. In fact, He allows it — and sometimes, He intentionally plans it.

“Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” Romans 9:20 asks. For the Lord Himself proclaimed, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways. … For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). It’s utterly impossible for us to fully comprehend the character of God, much less His actions. We are finite beings, and it would befit us to remember that. Our understanding is lacking, but His is “infinite and boundless” (Psalm 147:5). We can’t see past this moment, yet He knows all our days, “every one of them … when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:16). And since these things are true about our Lord, should they not then also apply to the realm of rejection?

When tempted to view rejection as mere rejection, I implore we more eagerly view it as redirection. When we see rejection as an evil, I implore us to recall our God is One who “works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” His purpose. Beloved, the God who holds “the depths of the earth” and “the heights of the mountains” in His hand is the same God who holds your life — who authors your life. There’s no such thing as unforeseen circumstances to Him, and the moment we lose sight of this is the moment rejection becomes blinding, and our lives feel daunting, chaotic, or hopeless.

Take notice of what James wrote in James 4:13-15: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” Here, James draws special attention to the fact that our lives aren’t ultimately rooted in what we will, but in what the Father wills. In effect, he’s reiterating the truth observed in Proverbs 16:9, “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” Scripture makes it easy to deduce that our top priority should be to pursue God’s will, for only His will shall ultimately prevail. What is that will, you ask? Well, according to Ecclesiastes 12:13, we’re to “fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”

We were created to worship the Lord and be in fellowship with Him. Our sole purpose on earth is to know God and to make Him known. So long as we understand that eternal purpose for our existence, we can rest in the truth that our good God has already accounted for all loss, rejection, and earthly troubles. Not only has He accounted for them, but He uses them to redirect us toward His plan for our lives, which is far superior to our own. He uses trials to put a spotlight on His glory and our dependence on Him. “Look at the birds of the air,” Matthew 6:26 reads, “they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

And consider this: the God of the universe sent His Son to earth to die for you so that you may live. As Paul wrote in Philippians 2:5-8, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Really, Christ is the ultimate example of what it looks like to be rejected, as the rejection of men led Him to the cross — again, a rejection ordained by God as part of His plan of redemption.

Isaiah 53:3 states, “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces He was despised, and we held Him in low esteem.” But even this rejection, within God’s sovereign reign, was used for good — the ultimate good — as 1 Peter 2:5 makes clear: “He was rejected by people, but He was chosen by God for great honor.” Furthermore, Psalm 118:22 assures us that “the stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone,” the one upon which we stand. And notably, John 15:18-19 reminds us that we will surely face rejection when he wrote, “If the world hates you, remember that it hated Me first. … I chose you to come out of the world, so it hates you.”

Inseparable from these realities is the promise that God is on our side. We don’t have to fear men and their rejection, for Colossians 3:1 asserts we “have been raised with Christ,” and Romans 8:1 says “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” As such, when we fuel our souls and equip our minds with these truths, we can face rejection. And amid this rejection, we can say, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again” we “will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). After all, no matter what we face in this life, Paul already expressed in Romans 8:31 how we’re to react: “What, then, shall we say in response to these things?” he asked. “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

And indeed, Psalm 94:14 declares, “The Lord will not reject His people; He will never forsake His inheritance.” Praise the Lord for His faithfulness! Those in Christ will never be rejected by Him. My encouragement is this: When faced with rejection, don’t despair, and please, don’t ask, “Well, what now?” Rather, acknowledge that if we’re spared from the worst rejection we could have ever faced, the real question is then, “Well, what else is there to be concerned about?”