The Question That Will Not Go Away

Today's Scripture

Habakkuk 1:2-3 — "O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you 'Violence!' and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise."

Psalm 88:1-2 — "O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry!"

Mark 15:33-34 — "And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'"

The Big Idea

If God is good and God is strong, why is the world so full of things that break our hearts? That question is not an attack on the Bible from the outside. It lives inside the Bible — asked by a prophet, sung by a psalmist, and finally cried out by Jesus himself. Today we are not going to answer it. We are going to let it be as big as it really is.

Reflection

A prophet shouts at heaven

Habakkuk is a tiny book hiding near the end of the Old Testament. Most people have never read it. It begins with a prophet — a man whose whole job is to speak for God — shouting at God. "How long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?" (Habakkuk 1:2).

Habakkuk is watching his country rot. Violence wins. The courts fail. Good people get crushed while cruel people prosper, and heaven says nothing. So the prophet says the unsayable out loud. Habakkuk 1:13 — "Why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?"

Notice what he is doing. He is not asking whether God exists. He is asking something that hurts more: whether the God who exists is paying attention. Twenty-six centuries later, C.S. Lewis put the same problem into one tight paragraph:

"If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both. This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form." — C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Philosophers call this "the problem of evil," and they debate it in classrooms. But almost nobody meets it as philosophy first. We meet it as a phone call that splits life into before and after. A diagnosis. A war on the news. A prayer that came back marked no answer. Somewhere tonight, someone is typing into a search bar at 2 a.m.: why did God let this happen? Habakkuk got there first.

And here is the strange comfort of his little book: God did not fire his prophet for asking. The complaint was written down, kept, and bound into Scripture, because God wanted it there. Tim Keller, who spent decades pastoring grieving people in New York City, noticed what the angry question secretly assumes:

"If you have a God great enough and powerful enough to be mad at when horrendous evil happens, you have a God great enough to bring you through it." — Tim Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering

Erase God, and the anger has nowhere to go — and neither does the hope. Keep God, and the question burns. The Bible chooses the burn.

The psalm that ends in the dark

The book of Psalms is the Bible's prayer book, and tucked inside it is one psalm unlike all the others. Psalm 88 opens with faith — "O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you" (Psalm 88:1) — and then it goes down, and keeps going down. The writer feels near death. Friends have vanished. Prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling. And the psalm never turns. Its last line is the bleakest sentence in the whole songbook. Psalm 88:18 — "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness."

That is the end. No "but I will trust." No sunrise. Darkness gets the final word — in an inspired prayer that God chose to keep in his book. Why? Because some nights are actually like that, and God refuses to pretend otherwise. There would be days, the Holy Spirit knew, when the only honest prayer is one that does not yet know how it ends.

Look closely, though, and even Psalm 88 is holding on to something. The man in the dark is still talking to God — "I cry out day and night before you." He has not walked away. He aims his darkness at heaven, every single day. The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, after his twenty-five-year-old son died in a climbing accident, wrote a small raw book of grief and summed up that strange stubbornness in five words:

"Every lament is a love-song." — Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

Lament is an old word for telling God honestly that something is wrong. You do not lament to a God you have given up on. Charles Spurgeon — the most famous preacher of the 1800s, who battled depression all his life — knew the difference between daylight songs and midnight ones:

"Any man can sing in the day... Songs in the night come only from God; they are not in the power of man." — Charles Spurgeon, "Songs in the Night"

And Corrie ten Boom learned the same in the deepest dark of the twentieth century. She and her sister Betsie were sent to Ravensbrück, a Nazi concentration camp, for hiding Jews. Betsie died there. Her last message to Corrie — who repeated it around the world for the rest of her life — was this:

"There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

Notice she did not say the pit was shallow. She had measured it from the inside. She said that God's presence goes deeper.

Waiting at the watchpost

What did Habakkuk do after emptying his complaint? Something surprising: he stayed. Habakkuk 2:1 — "I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint."

A watchpost is where a guard stands through the night, scanning the dark for the first sign of morning. Habakkuk plants himself there. He has not gotten an explanation — in fact, God's reply troubles him more, not less. What he gets instead is a promise that justice is surely coming, and one sentence so important the New Testament quotes it three times. Habakkuk 2:4 — "the righteous shall live by his faith."

Then the book closes with one of the most defiant songs in Scripture. Habakkuk 3:17-18 — "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation." In a farming country, that list means: though we starve. The prophet stares at total loss and decides, in advance, where his joy will live anyway.

But notice the order. The song comes at the end of the book, not the beginning. Three chapters of complaint, argument, and waiting come first, and the song is not a replacement for them — it grows out of them. Scripture never asks you to skip to chapter three. Keller saw this as the strange genius of Christian hope:

"While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life's joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world's sorrows, tasting the coming joy." — Tim Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering

The question in Jesus' own mouth

Now watch where the question finally lands.

On a hill outside Jerusalem, at midday, the sky goes black. Mark 15:33-34 — "And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'"

The Son of God dies asking the question we were told was too dangerous to ask. He is quoting Psalm 22, a psalm of complaint — reaching for memorized words the way you do when your own words give out. Whatever else the cross means, it means this: "Where is God?" is a question God himself has cried, from inside human pain, with a human voice. He did not answer it from a safe distance. He took it into his own mouth.

This is why C.S. Lewis's story matters so much to this plan. He wrote The Problem of Pain as a confident young thinker; twenty years later, after watching his wife die of cancer, he wrote A Grief Observed in torn fragments. Same faith, same man — but the second book was written from inside the furnace. Christianity has room for both, because its Lord stood in the furnace too. John Stott, one of the most careful Christian teachers of the last century, confessed where that left him:

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

The Christian claim is not that God observes suffering. It is that he entered it — betrayed, beaten, executed, feeling forsaken — and came out the other side still holding us. Romans 8:32 — "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" That is the logic this whole plan will lean on. Whatever the answer to "why" turns out to be, the cross has already ruled one answer out forever: it cannot be that God does not care.

Over the next eleven days we will walk through Job, the prayers of complaint, Augustine on evil, the free will debate, the cross, and the day every tear is wiped away. None of it will shrink your question. The Bible's answers only work at full size.

Going Deeper

Pray Psalm 88 out loud today — the whole psalm, slowly, without softening it. If your life is in a bright season, pray it on behalf of someone whose life is not. Notice that you are doing nothing irreverent: this prayer has sat in God's book for three thousand years. Whoever wrote it has been keeping watch with the hurting ever since — and so has the God who kept it.