The Unflinching Poetry of Scripture

"Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? For my sighing comes instead of my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. For the thing I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, but trouble comes." -Job 3:23-26

"Why, O LORD, do you stand afar off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" -Psalm 10:1

One of the things I love about Scripture is its refusal to give pat answers to hard questions. Christianity does not offer a neat and tidy package of truth and technique that will make the whole world suddenly make sense and work right. Not any kind of biblical Christianity, anyway. The poetry of Scripture, which you might expect to be uniformly ebullient with care-free praise, is rather full of lament, the cries of holy men who know God and to whom God's ways still don't make sense. They know he's faithful. They know he's good. (He is, isn't he?) But their experience confirms none of it. They undergo loss, and they can't see any good coming out of it. They are on the run for their lives, and they've done nothing to deserve it. In the moment when they long for the comfort of God, their voice echoes in emptiness. If God is good, why's he so hard to find? Why does he hide himself in times of trouble?

The God of Christianity, the God of Scripture, the God who is, is breathtakingly free. This is in a sense the heart of what it means to be sovereign. None can stay his hand. He tames Leviathan and Behemoth; no one tames him. God is always faithful to his word, but he is free to fulfill it when and where he pleases (HT: VG), which is rarely convenient to humans. He will do what he will do. One day we may cry out to no avail. The next, when we are looking for anything else, God will suddenly break upon our souls with a vision of his friendly heart. Where was that yesterday? And as soon as it has come, the break in the clouds has sealed up again.

The longer I walk with God, the less I look to my experience to be my tutor in God's ways. The great knowers of God knew better. God is wild; he can't be predicted or pigeonholed. He must rather be trusted, trusted even with our doubt. God could have kept only the happy psalms in Scripture, but he handed down the laments as well. He's not embarrassed by our questions. Neither does he commend them. But he surely understands. In fact, today, Maundy Thursday, we remember that God himself, kneeling in a garden near Jerusalem, called out and was not given his heart's desire, that the cup of God's wrath on the sin of humanity would pass from him. He was strengthened but not delivered. The next day, even more horrifically, he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" In one of the magnificent paradoxes of all-time, God himself knows what it's like to feel, to be forsaken by God. He can sympathize. Whatever the reason for the desolations we experience, it's not because he doesn't understand, or because he doesn't love.

In the end, we can't know God for real without knowing him on the cross. If God became a man, died in our place, and rose from the dead, then no matter our experience, we know he's out there, and we know he's love. Sure, the things he does seem not to make sense. Sure, he hides himself in times of trouble. But he's good, and though we can't trust him to be predictable, we can trust him to be God. And if he's who he showed himself to be in Christ, that's very good news.