Certain stretches of existence are damn near unbearable. Life has a way of kicking us in the teeth regularly, but sometimes the assaults feel more aggressive, unrelenting, and disheartening. In these seasons, hope is a stranger and God seems impossible to find. If you are anything like me, you may have wondered at such times: Where the hell is hope? Why can’t I find God anywhere? Can I press through another day? In these moments, I have felt hatred boiling in the recesses of my soul, hatred toward my life.
In my view, Christianity is worthless if it cannot speak the language of agony fluently. This is why so many churches feel plastic and unhelpful—they are not bilingual. They speak the language of joy, but cannot speak pain. If we based our assessment of Christianity on these churches alone, it would be easy to walk away from it all. However, when one looks to the Book, we see something very different.
Take the example of “steadfast” Job (James 5:11), who is commended by God for his rugged faith in the midst of unspeakable suffering (Job 42:7). Here we see bilingual faith. The book of Job is a linguistics of pain, a manual instructing us in the speech of sorrow and anguish. Stretching across 42 chapters, the book provides the longest biblical lament ever recorded.
Job is unflinching in his complaint: “I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11). On at least two occasions, Job looks at his life and “loathes” it (Job 7:16, 10:16). Job speaks his pain to God—creature to Creator. What a gracious invitation we find here—God welcomes us to converse honestly with him in our most bitter moments.
When the Word of God put on flesh, we discerned fluency in the language of suffering never seen before. The Man of Sorrows knew the dialect of forsakenness (Isaiah 53:3, Matt 27:46), the lament psalms found fulfillment in his life and death (Luke 24:44). The God of the cross is good news to us—news not only of salvation, forgiveness, and hope, but news of solidarity, realism, and fellowship in suffering.[1] The cross confirms God’s message to Job—I will meet you in your pain.
[1]Keith Campbell, “NT Lament in Current Research and its Implications for American Evangelicals,” JETS 57:4 (2014), 758.