Longing for Lament

It is not difficult to find tragedy.  It is everywhere.  

Recently, one of my fathers friends (in his early 80's) has just lost his son to cancer.  His son was 62 and died within 14 months of diagnosis.  This is the second son he and his wife have lost in 5 years as well as the death of a grandson in an accident.  

Recently I sat with a widow who had lost the love of her life on the cusp of retirement.  A lifetime of plans shattered with a cruel and debilitating illness. I could do little but weep with those who weep.

A couple in a small Highland village were recently overwhelmed with grief as their baby was stillborn almost at full term.  

Death, loss, shattered dreams and tragedy.  All events have a ripple effect to family, friends, children, churches and communities.  The effects are often felt for a lifetime.  People rarely 'get over' tragedy - they adjust to life but the pain often remains and can often remain very acute.  I have recently seen a very old man wrestle with grief as raw today as it was 40 years ago when he lost his 14 year old daughter to cancer.  

One of the reasons I am a Christian, is because as I read the Bible I see that suffering is not meaningless and that there is hope.  Much of the Bible is about suffering because the Lord knows we live in a broken and sinful world.  

This is the absurdity of many churches which preach the prosperity gospel, the very opposite of the true gospel.  Many churches make no room for lament in the midst of a world filled with tragedy and death.  As Christopher Ash says in his excellent commentary on Job; There is a version of Christianity around that is shallow, trite, superficial, ‘happy clappy’ (as some put it).  It is a kind of Christianity that, as has been said ‘would have been singing a chorus at the feet of Lazarus’.  We have all met it – easy triumphalism.  We sing of God in one song that ‘in his presence our problems disappear’, in another ‘my love just keeps on growing’.  Neither was true for Job…, and yet he was a real and blameless believer.  

The thing is, people see through the gushing emotionalism and desperate theological shallowness and long for a deeper gospel that speaks to their pain.  The widow I recently visited said she had lost count of the Christians who had said to her of her husband 'you shouldn't mourn - your husband is in a better place'.  Many were as helpful as Job's friends or have been conspicuous by their absence.  Why do people find it so difficult to weep with those who weep?  People going through deep suffering don't want 'cheered up' they want empathy.  They want people to walk with them through their brokenness.  Why can't we, as Christian's, lament in our sorrows?  Is this not why we were given the book of Psalms to sing?  It gives expression to the sorrow the Christian will experience in this life as well as the joy in God's love and mercy.

One of the largest books in the Bible is Job. The theme of suffering is in much of the Bible but there is a reality about the suffering in Job that is very stark.  As Tim Keller says: No other book in the Bible or, to my mind, in all of ancient literature, faces the question of evil and suffering with such emotional and dramatic realism yet also with such intellectual and philosophical deftness (Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, p 270).  Surely such a large book with 42 chapters about suffering should teach us that this is an issue we as the church should take seriously and preach on regularly?  The reality is that many people find Job quite a frightening book.  I have been hugely helped by Christopher Ash's book 'Job - The Wisdom of the Cross' (Crossway, 2014).  This a very readable commentary that will help you navigate your way this deep and important book.

We are told that Job was blameless (not perfect but genuine and authentic), upright, one who feared God and who turned away from evil (Job 1 v 1-5).  We are also told that he was very, very wealthy.  The first five verses of Job 1 read like a vindication of the prosperity gospel.  Job is righteous and is rewarded with peace and prosperity.  But things change quickly.  Job loses his sizeable wealth through raiding parties, he looses his children in an 'act of God' and he looses his health.  We find him in chapter 2 of Job sitting on the local landfill site scraping his infected and blistering skin.

When we face suffering in life, we often wonder why?  Why me?  The religious answer is often that we must have done something wrong or bad.  But Job was an example of righteous and innocent suffering.  The world may respond by saying there is no reason for suffering therefore God cannot exist and if he does he must be evil and cruel.  Job shows us that neither of these responses are true.  While the book does have a lot to do with suffering it asks an even more fundamental question: 'why do men serve God?'  Satan asks God to take everything away from Job to test if he will still love God.  Given Jobs greatness and goodness, it is almost like a test case.  If Satan can get Job to abandon God surely this will destroy many other peoples faith in God as well.  

God is undoubtedly refining Job - he is stripping everything away to strengthen Job's faith.  But his great problem is that he can't find God.  He cries in Job 23 v 3 Oh that I knew where I might find him?  As Christopher Ash says One of the strange signs of hope in Job is that he must speak.  The suffering believer cries out in suffering even when they have no sense of the presence of God.  Job looks everywhere.  As the Christian Standard Bible translates Job 23 v 8, 9; If I go east, he is not there, and if I go west, I cannot perceive him.  When he is at work to the north, I cannot see him; when he turns south I cannot find him.  Job experiences what every Christian will experience at some time, he looses God's presence.  He doesn't know where God is and he has no idea what God is doing.

Yet in the middle of Job's gut wrenching suffering what is his confidence?  We are told in chapter 23 verse 10; Yet he knows the way I have taken; when he has tested me I will emerge as pure gold (CSV).  Faith bursts through the darkness.  Faith goes beyond feelings.  In the midst of confusion and pain Job bows to God's sovereignty and trusts in God's wisdom.  In the furnace of divine suffering God is both proving/testing and improving Job.  He is purifying Job of all his impurities as he tries him in the furnace of redemptive suffering.  As Job suffers, he has a confidence that God's hand is on the thermostat and his eye is on the clock.  Job won't suffer a second longer than is necessary and God won't turn up the heat a degree further than is necessary.  

Job is a book of deep suffering.  The majority of the book is taken up with Job's friends and their long winded speeches.  But rather than helping they make things much, much worse.  As Ash comments they are like a dry wadi to a thirsty traveller.  This is what we find when we are suffering deeply.  The wisdom of this world is of limited help.  Often the wisdom of other Christian's can never reach our pain.  That is why we need the Champion or redeemer that Job lay hold of by faith. That is why we need the gospel.  To quote Ash again:

A world in which there is no such thing as redemptive suffering, suffering that brings glory to God, is a world in which there will be no comfort for the suffering believer.  It is a world without grace, and in the end it is world without love.  Human philosophy and all religions impose upon the human condition a simple framework of cause and effect in which there can be no such thing as suffering that simply and necessarily brings glory to God because it expresses the obedience of the believing heart that bows down to God simply because he is God.  And yet it is precisely this obedience, the obedience of the one man (Romans 5 v 19) that will bring the redemption of the world.  The sufferings of Job foreshadow the redemptive sufferings of Christ.

Job is a book of realism and hope.  There is a time for lament.  The Bible encourages it.  It is not rare or exceptional.  Some of the godliest people have experienced wave after wave of affliction.  But suffering for the believer is never wasted and never without hope.  We have a High Priest who knows what it is like to suffer (Hebrews 2 v 17,18).  Whatever you are going through at the moment, rest in God's sovereignty and trust in God's wisdom.  God know what he is doing.  As Dr Guthrie once wrote; 

We seem sometimes to forget, when we cower down before the tempest, and look before us with a fearful eye on the mighty billows that are rolling on. We seem to forget what the sailor boy said ‘my fathers at the helm'.