Suffering is Never Simplistic

Articles

May 17

A couple months ago, I posted a series of articles with resources on suffering. See here, here, and here. I recently had the opportunity to study biblical counseling and suffering for a sermon, and I wanted to share what I learned here.

The question posed to me was this: how do we counsel suffering brothers and sisters in Christ?

To start, let’s dive into a book all about horrific suffering: Lamentations.

You know the famous words from Lamentations 3:22–23 from the hymn Great is Thy Faithfulness.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.[1]

But, I wonder, have you ever heard the context of those words?

Jeremiah the prophet wrote the book of Lamentations around 586 B.C., after the end of the kingdom of Judah. Judah had been invaded, ransacked, and utterly destroyed by the Babylonians. The city of Jerusalem sat in ruins, and her people had been dragged off into exile as punishment for their sins (Lam 1:3, 5). By this time, Jeremiah had been prophesying to Judah for over 30 years,[2] warning of this impending judgment, calling the people to repentance. The people refused. And thus the destruction was catastrophic.

Jeremiah has no qualms about attributing the destruction ultimately to God. He writes in chapter 2:

the Lord has swallowed up without mercy (2:2)
He has cut down in fierce anger (2:3)
He has burned like a flaming fire (2:3)
He has bent His bow like an enemy (2:4)
He has poured out His fury like fire (2:4)
He has multiplied mourning and lamentation (2:5)
He has laid waste (2:6)
He has scorned His altar and disowned His sanctuary (2:7)

In response to such devastation, Jeremiah weeps (2:11) and laments:

Look, O Lord, and see! With whom have you dealt thus? Should women eat the fruit of their womb, the children of their tender care? Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord? In the dust of the streets lie the young and the old; my young women and my young men have fallen by the sword; you have killed them in the day of your anger, slaughtering without pity.
— Lamentations 2:20–22

This is Jeremiah’s world: judgment, cannibalism, devastation, desecration, destruction, death, slaughter. He says, “The LORD has done what he purposed; he has carried out his word” (2:17). “…[T]he Lord has trodden as in a winepress / the virgin daughter of Judah” (Lam 1:15). Under such a trial, Jeremiah writes in chapter 3:

I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones; he has made my paths crooked. He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver; I have become the laughingstock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.”

I wonder if these passages make you a bit uncomfortable.

In our health, wealth, prosperity, because-I’m-happy culture, meditating on suffering and sorrow seems awkward, socially inappropriate, almost taboo. We post the good things of life—weddings, cute dogs & babies, good tacos. We don’t post when that marriage ends because of adultery, when that baby dies, when that food leads to a heart attack. We’re a culture that hides death in the morgue, sickness in the hospital, and every blemish behind a filter.

Even when we Christians do acknowledge suffering, we’re eager to rush to the happy ending. We would rather celebrate than weep. “We’re Easter-resurrection people!” we say, forgetting that we are also a Good Friday-crucifixion people. “We’re a people of abundant life!” we say, forgetting that death was defeated only by the death of Christ. We live for the mountaintops of joy and triumph, but are loathe to admit that most of life is spent walking through the valleys of the shadow of death. Have you ever noticed that almost all of the worship songs we sing are about overcoming, triumph, confidence, joy? Yet about a third of the psalms, God’s hymn book, are filled with sorrow, trial, despair. Surely there’s an imbalance in our Christian culture.

But these verses don’t only make us uncomfortable because they grate against our culture. They also make us theologically uncomfortable. After all, Jeremiah is talking about God—the perfect, righteous, holy, unimpeachable, loving, gracious God! And Jeremiah is saying scandalous—almost blasphemous—things. Go back to chapter 3:

He has driven me into darkness (3:2)
He turns His hand against me again and again the whole day long (3:3)
He has made my flesh and my skin waste away (3:4)
He has broken my bones (3:4)
He has walled me about (3:7)
He shuts out my prayer (3:8)
He tore me to pieces (3:11)
He has made me desolate (3:11)
He bent His bow and shot me (3:12)
He has filled me with bitterness (3:15)
He has made my teeth grind on gravel (3:16)

Jeremiah pins all of his suffering on God! “Because of God I have forgotten what happiness is” (3:17). “Because of God, my hope has perished from the Lord” (3:18). Clearly, he is a man utterly crushed by his suffering.

As we read Jeremiah’s lament, we’re shocked. This is Jeremiah the prophet! He’s a man who has proclaimed the Word of the Lord! And yet this lament, these scandalous sayings, are holy Scripture. If God really is good, how can Jeremiah say such things?

What would you say to Jeremiah? What counsel would you give him? Would you give him a few pithy truths? Would you quote Romans 8:28 and Genesis 50:20 to him? I don’t think you would. Can you imagine stepping over the dead bodies in the street, then waltzing up to him and saying, “Oh, Jeremiah. Don’t you know that everything happens for a reason?” That’s insanity. Intuitively, we understand that quoting a few truths, no matter how glorious, doesn’t make the suffering go away.

So again, I ask, how would you counsel Jeremiah? What would you say? They aren’t easy questions—and that’s exactly my point. Suffering is complex. Slapping Truth Band-Aids on the gaping wounds of the human heart just doesn’t work. This global pandemic should be evidence enough of that:

If your niece is being daily abused at home because her dad can’t go to work, how do you just fix that?
If your mom just filed for divorce because her husband can’t find a job, how do you just fix that?
If your friend is hopeless and suicidal because of the COVID-19 news cycle, how do you just fix that?
If you live alone and ache for fellowship, but can’t go to church because they’ve shut down for the quarantine, how do you just fix that?

Now, I love Romans 8:28 and Genesis 50:20 as much as the next guy. But the Bible never treats suffering simplistically; suffering in real life is agonizing, complex, messy. The pains and sufferings of the human heart are not healed with trite truths or pithy Bible verses. Don’t misunderstand me; truth is always relevant to suffering. But our counseling tool box ought to be more than two verses deep and a few truths wide. Counseling suffering people must be full-orbed love—compassionate, intelligent, holistic, grace-saturated, Christ-exalting love.

Hopefully you agree with me. “But, Keith,” you ask, “if counseling suffering people is so complicated, where do we even start?” I argue this: by giving a suffering person what they most need.

I’ll try to delve into that in the next post.