Guest Post: Looking at Lamentations, Part 2

Benj continues his look at Lamentations  from part 1 by exploring suffering, sin, pain and the problem of evil in part 2 of his essay…

What is a book of protest doing in the Bible?  Let me offer a suggestion—not an easy answer, but perhaps the beginning of some answer.

In an article entitled, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” Walter Brueggemann talks about the deficiencies that result in the life of the church when laments—like the book of Lamentations, or the psalms of lament—are marginalized in liturgy and interpretation.[1]  He argues that laments provide a sense of genuine covenantal interaction between God and human beings: “Where lament is absent, covenant comes into being only as a celebration of joy and well-being….The greater party (God) is surrounded by subjects who are always ‘yes men and women’ from whom ‘never is heard a discouraging word.’”  He wonders: what kind of relationship would we have with God, if we could never bring to him our complaints, our anger, our pain?  Certainly not a genuinely personal relationship.

Consider some folks in Scripture who had intensely personal relationships with God.  In many circumstances, these relationships were adversarial.  God appeared to Jacob several times, including a bizarre meeting in which God wrestled with Jacob all night long, and Jacob was winning before God cheated.  Moses argued with God about serving him, and then blamed God for giving him such a stubborn people to take care of.  Elijah was suicidal and begged God to take his life.  Even Jesus himself, the second Person of the Trinity, asked his heavenly Father in a moment of anguish and pain to take away the task he had given him.

I think anyone who has walked with God along the difficult road of life knows what it means to feel protest or complaint.  Some of us have suffered much, some have suffered not as much, but we all suffer.  My parents have gotten divorced in the last few years, and I’ve watched several family members die without Christ, and others walk away from the faith.  My wife’s parents watched her cling to life as a toddler when cancer nearly took her life.  She survived, but their friends’ child did not.

And suffering is not proportional to sin.  Wasn’t Corrie a sinner just like the other child?  I’ve suffered some for my own sins, but my sufferings are nothing compared to the sufferings of others who are much more godly than I am.  But in all these sufferings, God invites us to call on him, as innocent sufferers in some situations, and as penitent sinners in others.

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Allow me summarize a few things we can gain from pondering Lamentations.  First of all, it’s OK to complain to God, even vigorously and emotionally.  Now, let me immediately qualify this assertion.  In one sense, it’s not right for us to make demands of God.  He is the Creator; we are his creation, and he doesn’t owe us anything.  He could require of us eternal toil, in exchange for nothing, and he would be perfectly within his divine prerogative.

But God has revealed himself in Scripture.  He’s shown us that certain actions are unjust, and we are right to protest when such things occur.  We should never hesitate as Christians to speak out against injustices in the world.  God has also revealed himself through special covenants with his people, and it’s absolutely right for us to appeal to God’s faithfulness to his promises.  Even though we don’t deserve God’s grace, he has promised it to us, through Abraham, through David, through the promises to Israel and the prophets—and now in Christ Jesus his Son.  When we pray, we pray “In Jesus’ name”—invoking God’s promises and holding him to them.

God didn’t have to make us his daughters and sons, but he has—and now we can call to our Father in distress.  As we experience weariness and pain in a sin-marred world, God shares our weariness and our anger, and when we protest sin and injustice, and appeal to his covenant—we are behaving as his faithful children.

A second thing we learn from Lamentations is that God hates sin.  Sin is the cause of suffering and death in this world.  Suffering is not always “evenly” distributed according to our ideas of fairness—the wicked often prosper, and little children suffer and die.  But ultimately we all suffer death and pain because we all as the human race sinned in Adam.  Sin makes us all worthy of punishment, and we all would suffer the wrath of God forever, if not for God’s own intervention.

And that brings us to my third point.  There is no easy answer to the problem of evil—but God has given us his answer in Jesus Christ.

Bart Ehrman, a famous New Testament scholar, used to call himself an evangelical Christian: he went to Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and later studied at Princeton Seminary while pastoring evangelical churches.  He now no longer believes in the God of the Bible, and calls himself an agnostic.  He’s recently written a book called, “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer.”  Philosophically and emotionally, Ehrman struggles with the question of theodicy: how God can be both good and omnipotent, given the existence of suffering and evil in the world.

Dr. Ehrman is a world-renown expert on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and he has written definitive works on Greek textual criticism.  But Ehrman didn’t lose his faith because of variants in the New Testament texts—he lost it because of the issue of suffering, sin and pain.  He feels that the Bible gives several different answers to this question—some of which I’ve suggested here—and he finds all of these explanations unsatisfactory in some way.

Let me suggest finally that Lamentations, and other laments in the Bible, point us forward to an answer to the questions of evil and God’s justice.  That answer is this: I don’t know the ultimate answer to the problem of evil; but I trust the God who does.  I trust the God who made himself a man, looked evil straight in the eye and said, “Do your worst,” taking all the pain, suffering, death and misery upon himself.  Murders, tortures, rapes, the anguish of losing a child, the pain of rejection—Jesus experienced all this.  Even if I can’t truly fathom how a loving God can permit evil to exist, I can trust that he has experienced it all.  When the prophet says, “Our griefs he himself bore”—that is profound: he didn’t destroy our griefs, he took them upon himself.  God’s justice, his faithfulness to his promises, his love, and his sovereignty—are all proven at the cross.

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After the destruction of the temple, the people of Israel had to discover new ways to conceive of YHWH’s presence with them—especially through Scripture and prayer, rather than through worship in a special location.  You could say that this catastrophe drove Israel out into the world and forced them to rely on YHWH in different ways from how they had previously.

We as the church, experiencing suffering and persecution to varying degrees, are pressed to rely on YHWH God in a difficult and hostile world.  We experience exile and wandering.  Jesus is Lord of this world, but his rule has not yet been extended “from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth,” as the Psalmist says.  Lamentations gives us permission, and even requires us, to call upon our God, who sustains us in our exile.  We call upon him in faith, every day, praising him for who he is and what he has done for us, but also in times of desperation, when there seems to be no hope, and all we have to cling to is his promise.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” JSOT 36 (1986): 57-71.