What does the Bible say about suffering?
Turning off the kitten videos and finding God in lament
I preached on Lamentations a couple of weeks ago, a book that rocked my world, and continues to rock my world. Essentially Lamentations is the prophet Jeremiah weeping in sorrow over Israel (Judah) finally losing the Promised Land. We’re talking the worst brutality on earth. We’re talking people eating their own children brutality (Lamentations 4:10). Taking place from 605-586 B.C., God brought in the Babylonians to destroy the land and take the Israelites into exile in Babylon (remember Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? All that happened in exile in Babylon). The devastation of the Promised Land wasn’t a random happening, it was all a part of the covenant (think ‘marriage covenant’) God had made with Moses in ~1400 B.C. It was very clear (Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28, et al.), gruesomely clear, that if Israel worshiped idols that this is what would happen to the land.
Most of the 900 years between the Mosaic covenant and Lamentations’ destruction of Jerusalem was filled with the exact thing God told the Israelites not to do: idol worship. God would bring prophets to rebuke and warn the Israelites to stop worshiping idols, sometimes they would stop for a short period, but they’d always dive back in, usually worse than when they started. As the centuries progressed, the warnings became more and more pronounced: God will take the Promised Land away if you continue this.
They continued.
God took the Promised Land away.
Swiftly, violently, and brutally, just as was forewarned in 1400 B.C. Idol worship is no joke to God, and He will do what He says He will do.
Now, to Jeremiah’s lament:
Yes the people of God were guilty and this was all a part of the covenant / deal they agreed to with God and were fully knowledgeable of. But for all intents and purposes, Jeremiah was not guilty. I’m not saying he was sinless, but the man definitely had a pure love for God, did not worship idols, was repentant and walked in righteousness, yet he still had to endure this pain. This incredible, intense pain. Worst of all, Jeremiah knew how things were supposed to be, this was the Promised Land for crying out loud! And the devastation he experienced and surveyed was definitely not how it was supposed to be.
Contemporary Christianity is almost completely void of lament. We dress everything up with smiles and daises and kittens, create churches around smile/daisy/kitten theology and write best selling books about smile/daisy/kitten theology. This is not the theology of the Bible or of real life. I hit on this point hard in my sermon, which you can watch here:
Video:
Audio only:
Since preaching the sermon a few weeks ago, one particular passage hasn’t left me:
Lamentations 3:24
I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”
The word “portion” here is a word that refers to a “portion of land,” like when the Promised Land was divided by portion to the 12 tribes of Israel, and then further divided by portion among individual families within those tribes. What has hit me is this wasn’t just any old land. This was The Promised Land. The land God promised to Abraham way back in ~2200 B.C. (Genesis 12:1-3, 15:17-19), the land that was the carrot on the stick for the Israelites after they fled from Egyptian slavery, the prize they marched toward during 40 years of wilderness wandering. The land that was always supposed to be a land flowing with milk and honey for them.
This land was their portion.
This land was it.
This land defined their identity.
It defined how they measured their satisfaction with God.
It was the pinnacle.
And now it was gone. And every dream and drop of milk or honey that went along with it was gone. Powdered to bits and trampled on in the blood, mud and dung…gone.
Have you ever been there?
Have you ever been there?
What do we do in these moments? Where do we turn?
Typically we turn to the most recent cute kitten video that comes across our feed.
We block it out.
We stuff it.
We bury it under the rug.
We watch another 4 hours of football or play another video game or look at porn or smoke pot or read the newspaper or have another drink or watch Netflix or update our fantasy football team or go shopping or scroll through our phone or we listen to smiley Christian music and just fake it.
Jeremiah lamented.
And in his lament, he declares something so profound, so counter-cultural, so earth-shattering and life changing:
The Promised Land IS NOT MY PORTION.
The LORD is my portion.
What is your Promised Land?
Mine has certainly morphed over the years and seasons of life. Right now it is a book deal. It is a new church building. It is funding for the types of urban ministry we want to do. It is making people happy and wanting to be liked. It is sexual temptation / the desire to be worshiped (adored). In confession and transparency, all of these things serve as my portion: what I feed off of for life and where I stake my identity, value, peace and joy.
Whether guilty like the Israelites or innocent like Jeremiah, your Promised Land will fail you. It can be taken away. It likely will be taken away.
So what will your portion be?
The Promised Land, or the Lord?
The Lord will fill you in a dry and weary land.
The Lord will bring you rest in the midst of a war and a storm.
The Lord will bring you hope, purpose and salvation in the midst of utter desolation and despair that has no glimmer of resolution on the horizon of this lifetime.
The Lord can never be taken from you and will go with you wherever you are.
In a book about hell on earth, I leave you with six of the most life-changing verses in all of Scripture:
Lamentations 3:21-26
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD’S great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”
The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
Jeremiah understood God’s cosmic, master plan of redemption. A plan so much bigger and greater than your life, my life, or Jeremiah’s life. Jeremiah understood that nothing could thwart God’s plan of redemption. Jeremiah understood that knowing this was truly all he needed.
And I promise you Jeremiah did more with this knowledge than hear it in a sermon or blog post and catalog it on his intellectual shelf. This is not portion. I promise you Jeremiah fed on this every single day, every single moment. I promise you he turned off Netflix and lit a candle and sat before God with this truth every day as a regular rhythm and practice and let it soak into his inmost being.
I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”
The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
He is:
Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
Host of the The Flip Side Podcast
Join an online men's small group led by Noah and team at BeyondTheBattle.net
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This was my biggest frustration when I was a worship minister. I believe the songs we sing in our churches give our congregations, give all of us, the words to speak back to God. It was easy to find songs giving responses in the good/comfortable times, but there are almost no songs willing to stare into the caverns of darkness and proclaim: “Through it all, He is good.”
Looking forward to listening to the message, but your post reminded me of this song by Jeremy Camp called “Give me Jesus” that has this simplicity of heart to God that I so often lack but need. Sometimes/often almost everything in life seems to work together to get me looking everywhere but Jesus, and it’s convicting to the core when the Spirit leads me to realize (again) that I’ve all too easily settled for being unlike Jesus in all the ways that matter. Thankfully, God doesn’t rest until the Spirit strips away everything so that Christ can be all. It’s that hope/possibility of having a pure and genuine heart set on God that makes Jesus’ invitation to take up the cross and follow, and his call to hate and lose our life to find his, both a challenge and a promise, not a burden.
Paul in prison facing death, after all that God did thru his ministry, has this pure heart that hungers to be found in Christ and gain him, that knowing Christ and his sufferings and his power is worth losing everything else. If the goal of this journey is to become like Jesus in his death, then there’s a real suffering in this world that we’re all called to. There will be lament on this path, but in spite of all the troubles, trials, failures and sins, how blessed is it to still desire with all your heart to press on to know Christ. Church culture here seems to want to just fix suffering and pray people out of it as if somehow suffering is not what we’re called to, when God may want us to know Christ in it and thru it.
“Through Christ we have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. More than that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that sufferings produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope…”
Why not. . . enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_SwjzlMGhw
thanks Alan!