"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
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