The Question That Will Not Go Away

Today's Reading

Read Habakkuk 1:1-4 — the prophet's opening cry: "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?"

Read Habakkuk 1:13: "You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?"

Then read Psalm 88 — the only psalm that does not end in hope. It begins "O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you" and ends, sixteen verses later, "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness."

Finally read 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?'"

Reflection

Begin by sitting with what is actually in your Bible.

Habakkuk is a small book most Christians have never read. It opens with the prophet shouting at God for tolerating injustice, gets back an answer that shocks him further (God will use the Babylonians, who are worse than the people they're punishing), and then ends — twelve verses from the end of the book — with one of the most extraordinary statements of faith in all of Scripture: "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines... yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation" (3:17-18). But notice: the rejoicing comes only after the asking. The book gives us three chapters of complaint, demand, argument, and unsettled vision before it earns the closing song. There is no shortcut.

Psalm 88 is even more startling. It is the only psalm in the entire Psalter without a turn toward hope, without a "but you, O Lord," without resolution. It just ends in darkness. The Holy Spirit, the early church believed, inspired this psalm. He thought we needed it. There would be days, the inspired text suggests, when the only honest prayer is the one that does not yet know how it ends.

Then there is the cross. On Good Friday, Jesus does not recite a creed. He does not summon legions of angels. He prays Psalm 22:1 — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — the opening line of a psalm of complaint. The Son of God dies asking the question we have been told is irreverent to ask. Whatever else this scene means, it means that the question "where is God?" is not one God refuses to entertain. He took it into his own mouth.

C.S. Lewis is the patron saint of modern Christian writing on suffering, and the fact that he wrote two books on the subject — and changed his mind between them — is part of his gift to the church. The Problem of Pain, written in 1940 before his wife Joy was diagnosed with bone cancer, is a confident philosophical argument for why a good God permits suffering. "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." It is a brilliant book, and Lewis later admitted it had the unmistakable feel of an outsider talking about a city he had never lived in. A Grief Observed, written in raw fragments after Joy died, sounds like a different man entirely. "Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy... you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside."

Both books are by the same Christian. Both are in print. Both are needed. The first is the answer Christianity gives when it is reasoning. The second is the answer Christianity gives when it is bleeding. Neither cancels the other.

Tim Keller, who would later die of pancreatic cancer himself, wrote about suffering long before his diagnosis and then tested everything he had written against three years of his own decline. His most quoted line on the subject reads, in full: "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." Read it slowly. Atheism solves the problem of evil by removing the God we could be angry at — and at the same cost, removes any reason to think the suffering has meaning, will end, or will ever be answered. Christianity does not remove the God. It hands us a Bible that gives us permission to be furious with him, while insisting he is the only one large enough to absorb the fury and still be there afterward.

This plan will spend the next eleven days walking through the answers Scripture gives — about Job, about lament, about the cross, about the resurrection, about the new creation. Today, before any of that, the only point is to begin where the prophet, the psalmist, and Jesus himself begin: by giving the question its full weight. The Christian answer is not that the question is small. The Christian answer starts when the question has been allowed to be as big as it is.

Going Deeper

Pray Psalm 88 out loud. The whole thing. Do not soften it. Do not skip the last verse. If you are not currently in a season of darkness, pray it on behalf of someone you know who is. Notice that this is not a private indulgence — it is a prayer that has been in the church's mouth for three thousand years. Whoever wrote it has been keeping watch with you tonight.