Learning to Lament

“Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God’s goodness.” Mark Vroegop, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy

Approximately one third of the book of Psalms is laments. Perhaps that’s why it’s often cited as the most loved book of the Bible. The heart cry of the writers feels real, close to the human condition. Despite the connection we have with lament psalms, lamenting is not something we intentionally do. We do not practice lament. 

Lament is the conscious mourning over the brokenness of the world. The loss of a beloved child, a devastating diagnosis, the unwarranted attack by a friend, such heartbreaking situations are made all the more confusing for those who have faith in the God who promises blessing and steadfast love. In moments of deep uncertainty, confusion, and fear, the believer asks, “Why? Must it be so? Can it not be otherwise? God, you have promised to be near, yet you seem so very far away.” But instead of locking these questions within, lament frees them, putting them out in the air before God in honest, heartfelt expressions of woe. Through the process of addressing God, making complaint, and laying out a request, the sufferer is brought to a place of assurance that God has not forgotten. He remains faithful to his steadfast love.

That process describes the usual composition of biblical laments and offers that practicing lament will bring the same outcome. But Psalm 44 demonstrates that it isn’t always so. The writer ends without assurance that God has heard his cry. We don’t know why he lacks certainty, but he does.

I would suggest that one of the reasons might be due to temperament. Perhaps his was a soul that was weighted toward sadness. I cannot say that with confidence about him, but I can say that there are people more disposed to sorrow than others and perhaps he was one of them.

Too many Christians are uncomfortable with such people. They feel the downheartedness of the mourner needs to be corrected, and in an effort to cheer, offer easy answers with selected Bible verses, implying that if the mourner would just believe the Word of God, light would break in on his darkness. It can take time, however, for light to dawn. People need to be given time to grieve, to question, to mourn. Our job is to be ready to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). Patience is required, not haste.

In truth, learning to lament will bring us closer to Jesus. He had compassion — a deep gut reaction — when he saw that the “crowds were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). He wept at Lazarus’s tomb and was “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” when he found Lazarus’s sister and those with her weeping (John 11:33-35). He mourned over the inevitable downfall of Jerusalem saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!” (Luke 19:42).

In lament, God gives us space to grieve, mourn, question, and plead. Though his promise of steadfast love can cause confusion when circumstances make us feel he has abandoned us, it is also the basis upon which we lament. 

He has promised and he will be faithful. 

Living Wisely

“We are food for worms lads. Believe it or not everyone in this room is going to stop breathing, turn cold and die . . .” These words, spoken by the character played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, are biblically sound! Our lives are framed by conception and death. No matter how great the advances of medicine have been or will be, death has not, and will not, be overcome by human effort. 

The brevity or our lives, poignantly portrayed by Moses in Psalm 90, can be something over which we lament. The reason for our frailty is due to our own foolishness. Humanity was warned that transgressing the command of God would prove fatal. Disbelieving, unconvinced, deceived into thinking otherwise, we ate and found out that when God speaks, he speaks truth.

But God acted to ransom us from our folly by making a way for us to once again be in fellowship with him. As a result, though our bodies might be dead because of sin, the Spirit brings life because of God-given righteousness (Romans 8:10-11). This offers a hopeful perspective on the ephemerality of our days. We need not lament. Rather, we can rejoice, for constraint prods us to action. Os Guinness asserts, “Brevity of life is like the frame of a picture, or a sports field for a game, or a term for a student. It gives the framework and focus that gives you the intensity and the motivation.” Knowing that we have only so many days we press into God for the needed grace to live them well. This is the nature of the cry that emanates from Moses’ meditation on our mortality, “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12).

The final petitions of Psalm 90 can shape our prayer as we ask God for the desired wisdom. First, we ask him to have pity on us. And he does have pity on us. As another psalm says,“he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalms 103:14). Then we lean into his covenant faithfulness, his “steadfast love,” asking that he get hold of us sooner rather than later that “we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” Next, we petition that his “work” and “glorious power” be made evident and comprehensible to us. Lastly, having been awed by who he is and what he has done, we beseech that his “beauty . . . be upon us, and establish the work of our hands.” 

Praying for a humble acceptance of the brevity of our lives will lead to the wisdom needed to live our lives with meaning. We abandon the false standards of what constitutes significance and enter into what God is doing in the world. It is his plan for his creation, and our part in that plan, that will allow us to say at the end of our days, “I am satisfied. I am fulfilled. Life has been extraordinary!”

Life in the Vine

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” (Romans 8:11)

Stop and consider that statement. 

A person united to Jesus by faith has the same Spirit dwelling in her that raised Jesus from the dead! And the presence of the Holy Spirit in that person brings resurrection life to his “mortal” body. 

There are two ways that we experience this life: in the “the redemption of our bodies” and our being “conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:23, 29). On the day that we stand before Jesus’ throne of judgment we will put off our mortality and perishability and be possesed of a body like unto Jesus’ glorious body (1 Corinthians 15:51-53; Philippians 3:21). We can have confidence, therefore, that the salvation won for us will be complete with the restoration of our material selves, and knowing this, “we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25).

The verse above also speaks to the life-giving Spirit conforming us “to the image of his Son.” Because we are now those “who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit,” we are, as those who “who live according to the Spirit,” to “set [our] minds on the things of the Spirit” (Romans 8:4,5). It is by the Spirit that we are enabled to “put to death the deeds of the body.” In this way we are being conformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus. Even our trials allow us to participate in his suffering, drawing upon the power of the Holy Spirit to join with Paul in considering “that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:17,18).

I believe Paul’s teaching relates closely to Jesus’ vine and branches metaphor of John 15. He intends fruit to be born from his life flowing into us. We should not, therefore, underestimate the potential for transformation that can take place as we abide in him and his words abide in us. Increasing faith, hope, godliness and holiness will mark our lives as we abide in the Vine. As we set our minds on things of the Spirit, we are renewed and our desires are reshaped so that more and more we desire what God desires. Abiding in Christ, times of suffering are understood as times of pruning (John 15:2) that, “for those who love God,” are being worked “together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28), chief of which is his choosing and appointing us to “go and bear fruit and that [our] fruit should abide” (John 15:16)

Let’s purpose and pray that resurrection life will bear abiding fruit to the glory of God.

Palm Sunday

I went to a theologically liberal seminary. Early on in my time there I was part of a conversation in which I raised the atoning work of Christ. An older fellow, whom I did not know, chimed in with, “Well, that all depends on what you mean by atonement.” I was taken aback. I was unaware that that was a question. From my reading, the Bible seemed pretty clear as to what is meant by atonement. That conversation comes back to me when I consider Palm Sunday. 

Entering Jerusalem, Jesus is approaching the culmination of his earthly ministry. From the moment he was conceived in the womb of the virgin, this week has been the goal. He was given the name Jesus and his name defined his mission, and his mission’s denouement is upon him. With ‘eyes wide open’ he moves toward the holy city, self-aware of who he is and what he has been sent to do. It is love incarnate. To make it anything less by recasting Jesus passion as something other than a wrath-bearing, substitutionary sacrifice, is to drain it of all significance. Palm Sunday is no longer a deliberate act of grace by God in the flesh, but a misguided display of self-importance by a woefully deceived cipher of a man. The fellow at the seminary who suggested that atonement could be redefined fulfilled the hopes of plotting Jews: that Jesus would be discovered to be just another loser with visions of grandeur (see Acts 5:33-38).

But as Jesus repeatedly warned, and the gospel accounts clearly record, his passion, undertaken as the promised redeemer, was designed to meet the need of those he came to save. His central role in procuring that salvation is fully attested in the events of Palm Sunday: his symbolic mount connects him to the prophesied king of peace: the accolades of the crowd are received by him as fitting praise; the spiritual blindness of Jerusalem will result in its destruction. Even the evil of those who seek to destroy him plays into the eternal plan of God. 

Our King of peace has come, “righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9) And to “all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12-13)

Jesus came to save sinners, and it is sinners that he saves. 

The Reset of the Divine-Human Relationship

Following the order of Luke’s Gospel, the second wilderness temptation of Jesus involves authority. Satan “showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, ‘To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.’” But there was a condition, an if: “If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus had only to allow Satan to be his king, his object of veneration, and he could have all the authority that the world had to offer. But Jesus responded, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’” 

All three of Jesus’ rejoinders in these temptations are taken from Deuteronomy and signal a strong connection with what Jesus is undergoing in the wilderness and God’s testing of Israel in their own wilderness journey  This particular rebuke is from Moses’s warning that Israel, when they enter the Promised Land, should not “go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you.” Alas, Israel failed. Their history is overwhelmingly marked by idolatry. Jesus, however, held true in his devotion to the Father and Father’s will, succeeding when the Israel did not. As such, he was the true Israel.

I also think this second temptation addresses the foundational rebellion of Adam when he made the decision to come out from under God’s authority by transgressing the command to not eat of the forbidden tree. In this defiant act, Adam attempted a coup. He had been made to serve as regent in God’s creation, but he wanted to be king. What is ironic is that Adam had already been given more than enough authority. He was to exercise dominion over the earth! But when told he could be like God, the allure of independent authority and personal glory captured his imagination. And so he ate. His decision was fatal.

In the second temptation, Jesus, our champion, enters into battle with our foe. He withstands the temptation and comes out the victor and, as our representative, resets the divine-human relationship. We, by our faith-union with him, are brought back under God’s authority and perfectly worship and serve him. We know by experience, however, that the perfection we have in Christ is not manifested in our Christian walk. The process of sanctification is one that involves a progressive awakening to and ability to walk in righteousness and holiness. To this end, God uses temptations to test the “genuineness” of our faith so that it “may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 1:7) In each temptation, therefore, we are being tested to see if we will be content to be regents and not kings, to live under the authority of the one to whom “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given.” 

Amazingly, the weapons that our champion brought to the fight are also ours: the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth of the Word of God, the confidence that the challenge we find ourselves in is something orchestrated by God, and his promise that he will never leave us nor forsake us. By faith in Christ we can share in his victory — no matter the temptation.