In the atmosphere of contemporary Western Christianity, when someone voices a lament with the intensity frequently found in the Psalms, it is not uncommon for them to be looked at aghast or derided for their deficient faith and concept of God, which has produced such a so-called absence of trust. “If you really knew who God was,” they might say (or one might tell themselves), “you wouldn’t feel this way.” Yet when we look to the Psalms themselves, it is indeed the biblical and thoroughly Hebrew concept of God which provides fertile ground for the most poignant and unsettling of complaints. That our concept of God results in a lament-less spirituality, while the Hebrew faith invariably gives rise to lament, should indict us of our own deficient concept of God.

Allow me to illustrate.

Verses 1-13 of Psalm 10 voices a gut-wrenching cry to God, including the charges that

• God is standing far off (v. 1)
• He is hiding (v. 1)
• He is not lifting a finger to help us (v. 12)
• He is forgetting the afflicted (v. 12)

These near blasphemous claims, to a Western Christian, would obviously arise from a lack of understanding concerning God’s sovereignty (he is in total control), omnipresence (he can’t technically be “far off”), and omniscience (he can’t forget). Yet, these complaints do arise from a concept of God, albeit, a somewhat different one. Verses 14-18 give the justification, the rationale so-to-speak, for verses 1-13.

• He sees, specifically trouble and grief (v. 14) – a corollary would be that he identifies such as trouble and grief, not as a “blessing in disguise”
• The purpose of his “seeing” is not an abstract omniscience, but “so that you might take it into your hands” – i.e., act on behalf of the afflicted
• He is the helper of orphans – he helps the helpless (v. 14)
• He is King (v. 16)
• He he hears the desires of the afflicted (v. 17)
• God hears in order “to vindicate the orphan and the oppressed” – he is a God of justice who vindicates the downtrodden (v. 18)

Interestingly, the notion that “God is King” (v. 16), which is essentially what the concept of “sovereignty” means (i.e., God is the “sovereign,” the king), does not produce an apathetic acquiescence to divine pre-determination as it so frequently does in Western Christianity. Rather, it undergirds a cry for God to change what he is doing–don’t sit there continuing to do nothing – get up, lift your hand to help us! The Western deterministic concept of God (God determines how every event unfolds) leads us not to lament in the face of suffering, but to “trust” God in all things, that is, accept everything that happens, good or bad, as a blessing from God. After all, since he is all-knowing, he knows better than our limited understanding. Yet the Hebrew concept of sovereignty (God is King), or divine omniscience (he sees and hears all things), does not produce an acceptance of everything that happens (including evil), but rather, a resistance of all we know to contradict God’s revealed nature. God is the helper of orphans, therefore I cannot reconcile myself with any event, circumstance or person that promotes evil, hatred and violence towards people God loves. While faith can stabilize us in perseverance towards God’s yet unfinished future, true biblical faith refuses to ignore the open wound of humanity in the name of any theological construct, but rather suffers under it. In anticipation of God’s faithfulness to his Word and revealed character, faith and hope rejects any conciliation with a world marred by sin and death. In such we lament – with a cry both loud and strong, bearing an inexplicable mourning as we await, with all the saints and the entire creation, the future of God’s faithfulness.

While the Psalms abound with such examples, one further illustration could be taken from Psalm 74. Here the lament includes:

• God has rejected us (v. 1)
• His anger smokes against us (v. 1)
• God has not remembered us (v. 2)
• Our land has become a perpetual ruin (v. 3)
• Our adversaries have roared in our midst (v. 4)
• God is holding back his hand (v. 11)
• God is keeping his hand in his bosom (v. 12)

In verses 12-17, the mood seems to completely change, recounting the history of God’s mighty acts:

• God is King (i.e., “sovereign”) (v. 12)
• He works salvation and deliverance for his people (v. 12)
• He divided the Red Sea to save his people (v. 13)
• He destroyed the enemies of his people (v. 14)
• He is the mighty creator (vv. 16-17)

This kind of belief in God – a confession of God’s mighty deeds – the Hebrew concept of God – does not reduce the lament. It does not invalidate the previous expression of sorrow. Neither does it produce a response of apathy like “well now this is true, we have nothing to worry about” (and nothing to care about either). Rather, verses 18 and following of the Psalm go back into lament, pleading with God to act and not forget those who are oppressed as targets of violence. In all, this pattern we see in the Psalms should tweak the way we neatly package God in theological terms bearing the prefix “omni” or any other prefix for that matter. The God of the Bible is the God Who Acts, specifically on behalf of his people. He is the God of Justice. When these dear beliefs are contradicted, we do not sink into the swamp of apathetic malaise which we can call “trust” if we are so inclined. Rather, we allow a cry to well up from the depths – a shattering protest and earnest appeal, mourning the absence of this God of Justice. All is not well, all is not okay, and in such we feel, and feel deeply. This pain of godforsakenness is not a wonderful place to be. However, I would much rather be there, than in the catatonia of a faith that shuts its eyes to trouble and misery and closes its ears to the cries of the afflicted, rattling off some theological platitude in the stead of sorrow. For in the agonizing depths of godforsakenness, the crucified Jesus is always present – suffering with us – our friend and companion in grief.

Related posts

• Confronting the Sin of Despair – Hope as a Theology of Resistance (4)
• Being a Prophetic Voice in Times of Disaster (6)
• A Thought on Suffering and Hebrews 12 (1)
• Will You Forget Me Forever? (1)
• Asking God the Right Question (0)

12: No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us…
16b: God is love, and  whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

13: By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

In verses twelve and sixteen love brings forth the abiding of God. In verse thirteen, the Spirit takes that role. In fact, in either verse, Spirit and love seem virtually interchangeable.  Paul adds an additional insight when he adds that “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5.5)

Altogether, we see that “the gift of God is the Holy Spirit. The gift of God is love. God communicates himself in the Holy Spirit as love.” The Holy Spirit is Love itself. “The basic and central meaning of what the Holy Spirit is and what he effects is ultimately not “knowledge” but love.”

What sets the Holy Spirit apart, that is, what makes the Spirit Holy, His set-apart-ness is love. This gives us a crucial window into the “wholly otherness of God.” God’s holiness, his transcendence is not abstractly manifest apophatically, but concretely in love and relationship.

Apophatic theology refers to a theological method in which God’s nature is expressed through negations. Because God is infinite and uncreated any actual description would be false. Examples include:

• Self-existence – God’s existence is un-derived
• Self-sufficiency – God’s existence is non-dependent
• Eternity understood as a-temporality (timelessness)
• Infinitude – without limits
• Simplicity – God is in-divisible
• Immutability – without change
• Immovability – without movement, unable to be moved
• Omnipresence – in-definable by any of our concepts of space and location

This passage indicates to us that God’s transcendence, specifically the holiness of the Spirit is not primarily to be found it negative descriptions of God, but in love. Love forms the foundation of a cataphatic theology, in which we can truly make affirmations about a God whose essential nature is relationship. His essential nature is not difference. Such would be impossible. Neither is the most we can say about God that which concerns difference. Such would make him utterly unknowable.

Certain theologians throughout history have only been confident about understanding God through the negations of all we know (matter, earth, time, space, even ourselves). Understanding God in the fellowship of the Spirit, the Spirit who is love (indeed the God who is love), we can be confident in affirmations about a God who has made himself known beyond the difference that exists between us.

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• Spirit and Flesh Part 2 (2)
• We’ve Been Unbabeled: When the Day of Pentecost Had Fully Come (Part 2) (1)
• The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God – IHOP Outpouring/IHOPU Awakening (2)
• The Ability to Love is Within Each of Us (1)