"How long, O Lord?"

"In the Bible, which we believe is God's Word, such that what we find in it is what God wished to be there, there is plenty of lament, protest, anger, and baffled questions. The point we should notice (possibly to our surprise) is that it is all hurled at God, not by his enemies but by those who loved and trusted him most. It seems, indeed, that it is precisely those who have the closest relationship with God who feel most at liberty to pour out their pain and protest to God--without dear of reproach. Lament is not only allowed in the Bible; it is modeled for us in abundance. God seems to want to give us as many words with which to fill in our complaint forms as to write our thank-you notes. Perhaps this is because whatever amount of lament the world causes us to express is a drop in the ocean compared to the grief in the heart of God himself at the totality of suffering that only God can comprehend....

I feel that the language of lament is seriously neglected in the church. Many Christians seem to feel that somehow it can't be right to complain to God in the context of corporate worship when we should all feel happy. There is an implicit pressure to stifle our real feelings because we are urged, by pious merchants of emotional denial, that we ought to have 'faith'(as if the moaning psalmists didn't). So we end up giving external voice to pretended emotions we do not really feel, while hiding the real emotions we are struggling with deep inside. Going to worship can become an exercise in pretence and concealment, neither of which can possibly be conducive for a real encounter with God. So, in reaction to some appalling disaster or tragedy, rather than cry out our true feelings to God, we prefer other ways of responding to it.   

 It's all part of God's curse on the earth.     

 It's God's judgment.     

 It's meant for a warning.     

 It's ultimately for our own good.     

 God is sovereign so that must make it all OK in the end.

But our suffering friends in the Bible didn't choose that way. They simply cry out in pain and protest against God-- precisely because they know God. Their protest is born out of the jarring contrast between what they know and what they see. It is because  they know God that they are so angry and upset. How can the God they know and love so much behave this way? They know that 'the Lord...has compassion on all he has made' (Psalm 145:9). Why then does he allow things to happen that seem to indicate the opposite? They know the God who says,' I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked' ( Ezekiel 33:11). How then can he watch the deaths of hundreds of thousands whom Jesus would tell us are not necessarily any more sinful than the rest of us? They know the God whom Jesus says is there when even a sparrow falls to earth ( Matthew 10:29-31); where is that God when the ocean swallows whole villages ( and churches)?

Such radically inexplicable disasters fill biblical believers with desperate, passionate concern for the very nature of God. So they cry out in vertigo above the chasm that seemed to gap between the God they know and the world they live in. If God is supposed to be like that, how can the world be like this?

For us who share the faith of these biblical believers, this is an agonizing emotion precisely because we too love God. In such moments we can even understand those who hate God, and our anger and pain could easily make is shake our fists with them. But we don't, because our whole lifetime of trust and love for God and gratitude for his limitless goodness and mercy toward us in Christ cannot be overthrown in the day of disaster. But the pain remains, and the pain is acute.

Lament is the voice of that pain, whether for oneself, for one's people, or simply for the mountain of suffering of humanity and creation itself. Lament is the voice of faith struggling to live with unanswered questions and unexplained suffering.

God not only understands and accepts such lament; God has even given us words in the Bible to express it! An overflowing abundance of such words. Why, then, are we so reluctant to give voice to what God allows in his Word, using the words of those who wrote them for us out of their own suffering faith?

  Therefore, I join the psalmist in lament. I voice my suffering, naming it and owning it. I cry out. I cry out for deliverance: 'Deliver me, O    

  God, from this suffering. Restore me, and make me whole.' I cry out for explanation, for I no more know in general why things have  

  gone awry with respect to God's desire than did the psalmist. 'Why is your desire, that each and every one of us should flourish here 

  on earth until full of years, being frustrated? It makes no sense.' To lament is to risk living with one's deepest questions unanswered. 

  (Nicholas Wolterstorff)

In the wake of something like the tsunami, then, I am not ashamed to feel and express my anger and lament. I am not embarrassed to shed tears watching the news or worshiping in church after such terrible tragedies have struck again. I tell the God I know and love and trust, but don't always understand, that I just can't get my head around the pain of seeing such unspeakable destruction and death. I will cry on behalf of the wretched of the earth, 'Why those poor people, Lord, yet again?' Haven't they suffered enough of this world's gross unfairness already?'

I am not waiting for an answer, but I will not spare God the question. For am I not also made in God's image? Has God not planted a pale reflection of his own infinite compassion and mercy in the tiny finite cage of my heart too? If there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, are there not also tears in heaven over thousands swept to their death?

So for the moment, I grieve and lament, I weep and I feel intense anger, and I do not hesitate to tell God about it and to file my questions before his throne. The same is true when I hear news of some dear loved one who has been stricken with some inexplicable and incurable illness. Whether on a grand scale of massive loss of human life or the intensified intimacy of the suffering of somebody personally known and deeply loved, the response is often the same: you have to pour out your true feelings before God, feelings that include anger, disbelief, incomprehension, and the sheer pain of too many contradictions. 

Only then can I come back to praise God with integrity. Praise does not eliminate or override all such emotions. Rather, it is the safe framework of total acknowledgment of God and utter dependence on him within which they can be given their full expression. 

However, I express all this protest within the framework of a faith that has hope and a future built into it. For the present state of creations is not its final state, according to the Bible. And in the resurrection of Christ we have the first-fruits of a new creation in which the old things will have passed away. I cannot claim to understand this great biblical hope terribly well either, but I draw enormous comfort from the earthiness of the Bible's vision of the ultimate destiny of creation--to which we will turn in the next chapter. So my cry against the disasters of the present is not just a candle in the dark or spitting into the wind. It is much more akin to that agonized longing of the psalmists: 'How long, O Lord, how long?' They were certain that God would do something, but they were consumed with the longing that he should do it, sooner rather than later.

   The cry [of lament] occurs within the context of the yet of enduring faith and ongoing praise, for in raising Christ form the dead, we 

   we have God's word and deed that he will be victorious in the struggle against all that frustrates his desire. Thus, divine sovereignty

   is not sacrificed but reconceived. If lament is indeed a legitimate component of the Christian life, then divine sovereignty is not to be

   understood as everything happening just as God wants it to happen, or happening in such a way that God regards what he does not

   like as an acceptable trade-off for the good thereby achieved. Divine sovereignty consists in God's winning the battle against all

   that has gone awry with respect to God's will. (Nicholas Wolterstorff)"

- Christopher J. H. Wright

from: http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Dont-Understand-Reflections/dp/0310275466/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351139895&sr=8-1&keywords=the+God+I+don%27t+understand

"What, then, is the devil or Satan?"

"First of all, he (or it) is not God . Nor even just some other god. The Bible makes it very clear that we are not to fall into any kind of dualism--a good god (who made the world all nice and friendly), and an evil god (who messed it all up). Some kinds of popular folk Christianity do slide in that direction and give to Satan far more assumed power and far more obsessive attention than is warranted by the Bible. And such dualism is the meat and drink of a large amount of quasi-religious fiction, which sadly many Christians read with more frequency and more faith than their Bibles.  (I, Adriel, tend to mistrust or be wary of any teacher or person who spends much more time reading other people's writings than they spend reading the Bible. As Christians we are to check everything and compare everything to God's Word and the more we read the Bible, the more we will have the discernment to tell what is true and what is false [Hebrews 5:11-14 and 1 John 4:1-6]. It is the only completely authoritative writing on what we are to believe, and how we are to live as believers. In saying that I would hope you hold anything I write or post up to the Bible as well). 

  But Satan is not God, never has been and never will be. That means that, although the Bible clearly portrays Satan as powerful indeed, he is not omnipotent . Likewise, although Satan is said in the Bible to command hosts of other fallen angels (demons) who do his dirty work, he is not omnipresent . Satan cannot be everywhere at once (as only God can be and is). And although the Bible shows Satan to be very clever, subtle, and deceitful, he is not omniscient . He does not know everything and does not have sovereign knowledge of the future in the way God has in carrying forward his plans for creation and history.

  As an angel among other fallen angels, even as their prince, the devil is a created being. That means that he is subject to God's authority and ultimate control. Like everything else in creation, Satan is limited, dependent, contingent--and ultimately destructible. We should take Satan seriously, but we should not dignify him with greater reality and power than is proper for a creature.

  But is the devil personal? Is Satan a person like us? Is he a person like God?

  We must be careful in answering this question. It seems to me that there are dangers in either a simple yes or no. On the one hand, the Bible clearly speaks about the devil in many ways that we normally associate with persons. He is an active agent, with powers of intelligence, intentionality, and communication. That is, the Bible portrays the devil as acting, thinking, and speaking in ways that are just like the way we do such things and are certainly greater than any ordinary animal does. When the devil is around in the Bible, it is clear that the Bible is talking about more than just some abstract evil atmosphere or tendency or a merely metaphorical personification of evil desires within ourselves--individually or collectively. The Bible warns us that, in the devil, we confront an objective intelligent reality with relentless evil intent. And the Gospels reinforce this assessment in their description of the battle Jesus had with the devil throughout his ministry. The devil, says the Bible, is very real, very powerful, and acts in many ways just like the persons we know ourselves to be. 

  But on the other hand, there is one thing that the Bible says about us as human persons that it never says about the devil, or about angels in general, at all. God made us human beings in God's own image. Indeed, this is what constitutes our personhood. What makes human beings uniquely to be persons, in distinction from the rest of the nonhuman animal world, is not the possession of a soul, but that human beings are created in the image of God. The human species is the only species of which this is true. We were created to be like God, to reflect God and his character, and to exercise God's authority within creation. 

  Even as sinners, human beings are still created in God's image. Though it is spoiled and defaced, it cannot  be eradicated altogether, for to be human is to be the image of God. So even among unregenerate sinners there are God-like qualities, such as loving relationships, appreciation of goodness and beauty, fundamental awareness of justice, respect for life, and feelings of compassion and gentleness. All these are dimensions of human personhood, for all of them reflect the transcendent person of God."

 pgs 36-37

- Christopher J. H. Wright

from: http://www.amazon.com/God-Dont-Understand-Reflections-Questions/dp/0310275466/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350927173&sr=1-1&keywords=the+god+i+don%27t+understand

The Importance of Honesty

There are a lot of instances in life where honesty is (or should be) valued higher than feelings of offense or disagreement. It's a little late in the night for me to go into all of them, but I wanted to encourage one area. I've been taught by those who led me to Christ, and those who continue to guide me by the example of their own individual relationships with God, that it is okay to question Him. There are many times in life that merit honest questions. And I believe in the only God who is big enough to handle all of our questions, who doesn't get offended when we go to Him in all forms of emotion with our wonderings about Him. Other people might get offended by our questions (mostly because they aren't in a place where they can be honest enough about their own), but I don't think that if we are truly desiring an answer, if we are asking in humility instead of pride, that God/Jesus would turn us away for asking. We don't always get an answer, or the answers don't always come in the timing that we think we want or need, but that doesn't mean that we are wrong to ask. 

 I just started reading a book by Christopher J. H. Wright called "The God I Don't Understand," and in his introduction he does a really good job of showing the reader how they can find people questioning God in the Bible, the book that God has given us so that we might know Him. I thought I'd share the section in encouragement of those who do question, who have always wanted to question, but have been told it's not right or a myriad of other things that I don't believe are true. 

"In Good Company

Then, as I went on thinking about the contours of my own lack of understanding in some of these areas, I found myself in reassuringly good company. 

 The Bible provides us with many examples of people who stood before God in confusing, grief, anxiety, or fear and addressed their questions to him. It would be well worth doing a comprehensive survey of all the questions we find in the Bible. Many are rhetorical, of course--merely a way of making a strong affirmation. But many of the questions in the Bible seem to arise out of a profound longing to understand the ways of God when he speaks or acts or when he declares his intention to do so, in ways that transcend our comprehension.

  Abraham is bold enough to become the first person in the Bible to initiate a conversation with God by asking him questions, questions about the justice of his intentions regarding Sodom and Gomorrah. 'Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?' he asks (Genesis 18:25).

  Sarah's question, locked in the reality of barrenness and muttered in bitter laughter, was addressed indirectly to God, even though ironically she did not know he was on the other side of the tent door, listening (Genesis 18:12). 

  Hagar may or may not have been talking to the God of the family that had just expelled her when she turned away in despair, 'I cannot watch the boy die' (Genesis 21:16), but it was that God who intervened to help her, as he had done before when Hagar became the first person in the Bible to give God a name--a remarkably perceptive and comforting one at that (Genesis 16:13). 

  Moses, more than once, questions God, sometimes about his intentions regarding the Israelites and sometimes about his own exclusions from the promised land--something that Moses seems never to have understood, nor have those who have reflected on that divine decision in all the centuries since (Deuteronomy 3:23-28). 

  Naomi, in the bitter grief of having buried her husband and two childless sons (a kind of triple widowhood), is a boiling conflict of emotions, as she trusts God and prays to him, yet accuses him of treating her like an enemy (Ruth 1:13b); she lays full responsibility for all the bitterness, emptiness, and affliction in her life on the Lord himself (Ruth 1:20-21). 

  David cannot fathom the generosity of God in relation to himself and his household and can only ask, 'Who am I?' (2 Samuel 7:18).

  Elijah cannot understand how God could save life only later to destroy it, and he protests (successfully) against such inconsistency (1 Kings 17:30-21). Later he laments something similar in his own case (1 Kings 19:4, 10).

  Job's whole book is a question hurled at God in the wake of his loss and suffering. God answers Job, but does he answer the question?

  Jeremiah struggles to understand what God is saying through him when the words of other prophets and the external circumstances all point in the opposite direction. His anguish often takes the form of grieving and sometimes angry questions (Jeremiah 12:1-3, 15:15-18; 20:7-18). 

  Habakkuk cannot understand the sovereign justice of God in international affairs (Habakkuk 1:12-17). It does not stop him trusting God with teeth-gritting joy (Habakkuk 3:16-19). 

  The book of Psalms is full of anguished questions: 'Why?' 'When?' 'How long?' It would probably be possible to tackle most of the questions in this book through careful and creative exegesis of the book of Psalms alone. Here, above all, is the book of faith, trust, love, joy, praise, and hope--coexisting with a pervasive and painful deficit of understanding. 

  This is why it is a word from the Psalms that formed the most profound question at the most crucial moment in history--the cry of abandonment on the lips of Jesus as he entered into the depths of his suffering on the cross: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Psalm 22:1; see Matthew 27:46). We must hear Jesus' question, and discern the answer, in the light of the whole rest of the psalm, as undoubtedly Jesus did. But it still remains a question that points us to the heart of the mystery of the atonement itself. To me it is a profoundly moving thought that the word that introduces our most tormenting questions--'Why...?'--was uttered by Jesus on the very cross that was God's answer to the question that the whole creation poses. 

  Then, another thing began to impinge on my consciousness. Have you noticed how many Christian hymns and songs express the most profound aspects of our faith through asking questions (where we can never give an adequate answer), or through openly affirming that there are things we cannot understand but nevertheless receive with joy and thanks?

  And can it be, that I should gain

  An interest in the Saviour's blood?

  Died he for me, who caused His pain--

  For me, who Him to death pursued?

  Amazing love! How can it be

  That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

                                               -Charles Wesley

  'Tis mystery all! The Immortal dies:

  Who can explore His strange design?

  In vain the first-born seraph tries

  To sound the depths of love divine.

                                                -Charles Wesley

  Why should I gain from his reward?

  I cannot give an answer;

  But this I know with all my heart

  His wounds have paid my ransom.

                                              -Stewart Townend

  I cannot tell why he whom angels worship

  Should set his love upon the sons of men,

  Or why as shepherd he should seek the wanderers,

  To bring them back, they know not how or when. 

  But this I know, that he was born of Mary

  When Bethlehem's manger was his only home, 

  And the he lived at Nazareth and laboured;

  And so the Saviour, Saviour of the world, has come. 

                                             -William Fullerton

  I know not why God's wondrous grace to me he hath made known, 

  Nor why, with mercy, Christ in love redeemed me for his own. 

  But I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able

  To keep that which I've committed unto him against that day. 

                                               -Daniel W. Whittle

  Perhaps this is the special feature and gift of poetry, but it is also a profound recognition that faith seeks understanding, and faith builds on understanding where it is granted, but faith does not finally depend on understanding. This is not to say, of course, that faith is intrinsically irrational (quite the contrary), but that faith takes us into realms where explanation fails us -- for the present." pgs 19-22

- Christopher J. H. Wright 

from: http://www.amazon.com/God-Dont-Understand-Reflections-Questions/dp/0310275466/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350882041&sr=1-1&keywords=the+god+i+don%27t+understand

Ah, C. S. Lewis, you've done it again.

I don't know why I haven't read his "Weight of Glory" until now, but I'm glad that I found a copy of it on my bookshelf. Thank you, Lord.

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open this inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret that hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he had remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we truly desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, the news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson's remark that the élan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death--as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will
delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics."

- C. S. Lewis pgs 29-32                   

from:http://www.amazon.com/The-Weight-Glory-C-Lewis/dp/0060653205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349894608&sr=8-1&keywords=the+weight+of+glory