Jesus: man of sorrows

As I've looked at grief and suffering in the Scriptures, these verses have really struck my heart:

'He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.' (Isaiah 53:3-4)

When we walk the path of sorrow, we can know that our Saviour leads us along the way, because He has been there. Jesus knew the pain of suffering. He bore our pain as well as His own. Think about it: the eternal Son took on flesh and submitted Himself to suffer and die. He 'became obedient to death - even death on a cross!' (Phil 2:8). We won't ever understand completely the depths of His suffering, but whenever we suffer, we can know that He understands our grief completely.

Jesus comes as Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23), but from His birth He was rejected, born in humble surroundings and soon forced to become a refugee to Egypt. He worked as a carpenter for 18 years, the 'unknown years' we know virtually nothing about. He led an ordinary human existence in those years and as a manual labourer, a tradesman, He would have known pain and tiredness. Yet, unlike us, He never allowed His own physical frailty to lead Him into sin. He never lost His temper, never said anything He later regretted. He was a man who suffered without sinning.

We like to make excuses for ourselves, don't we? When we're feeling ill or tired, we snap a little more easily, but we shrug it off. I do it all the time! Yet at those times when we're humanly at our weakest, God invites us to draw near, to say 'no' to the opportunity for sin, and 'yes' to deeper imitation of our perfect Saviour. He did it, and by His Spirit He gives us power to do it too.

Ecclesiastes: making sense of suffering

When I think about the pain of grief and suffering, I come to this conclusion: anything which wakes me up out of my apathy and loosens my grip on this world, and increases my longing for the next, is an act of God's mercy and grace in my life. I may not like it and it may not be comfortable, but, like a fire drill, it is essential to prepare me for my heavenly home.

I think this is the main thrust of the book of Ecclesiastes. Suffering, toil and grief on the earth remind the philosopher that everything on earth is, in a sense, 'meaningless': that is, it lacks an eternal value, and in the sweep of even human history many of our endeavours turn to dust just like our mortal flesh. Life is beautiful, precious and fragile; it is also frustrating, unfulfilling and painful. The life we experience as fallen beings is not the life we were designed and created for. We are terrified and unsatisfied with the concept of death because we were never meant to taste it. The futility of our lives and our world was not there in the beginning, and one day will be removed. Only in God's new creation can we really know true life, life to the full, life in abundance, life without limits.

So the main point of Ecclesiastes is the necessity of fearing God in a fallen, and frequently confusing and frustrating world (ESV study notes). The book is full of penetrating observations which spur the listener on to deeper thought and reflection.

'He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.' (Ecc 3:11)

Every human being wants to find out and understand all the ways of God in the world, but he cannot, because he is not God. Yet the faithful do not despair but cling to Him: 'fear God and keep His commandments (Ecc 12:13). This is true wisdom.

Rather than becoming embittered by what God has not granted, we should enjoy all the gifts He has given.

'There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance' (Ecc 3:1-4)

'In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.' (Ecc 7:14, ESV)

Let suffering do its work - let it teach you of your own mortality and fallenness. May it drive you to the feet of your Saviour, and make you cling to His love alone above all the securities this world can offer. May it open your eyes to see Him more clearly and understand something more of eternity.

Job: seeing Christ as the answer

Ultimately, Job's suffering is only given an answer with the meaningful suffering of Jesus Christ and His resurrection.

Job is brought to the point where he realises the 'otherness' of God. He understands something of the divine mystery, and he feels keenly the gap between him and his Creator.

'For He is not a man, as I am, that I might answer Him, that we should come to trial together. There is no arbiter between us.' (Job 9:32-33a)

Job needs a mediator, and so do we. The Bible clearly tells us that we find the mediator we need in Jesus Christ:

'For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus' (1 Tim 2:5).

It is a wonderful thing; Jesus makes the sacrifice once and for all for sins (Hebrews 10). He died for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn 2:2) and made the propitiation that no one else could. Think about it: if Job, even Job, with all his righteousness, had died on the cross, what would have happened? Would the sky have turned dark and rocks split open and the dead been raised? No. There would have been no atonement, and no resurrection. Only Jesus could fulfil this role uniquely as the mediator because He was both God and man, and in sinless perfection, He could bring us to His Father.

In a stunning glimpse of gospel-clarity, Job sees that resurrection is needed to solve the mystery of suffering: 'For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth.' (Job 19:25)

Only God has power of death (Job 38:17). Christ's victory over Satan will ultimately answer all the human frustrations of suffering and injustice. Redemption in Christ gives a final answer to Satan's accusations by justifying the ungodly (Rom 4:5).

'He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them... He did this (offered sacrifice) once for all when He offered up Himself.' (Heb 7:25-27)

'For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.' (1 Cor 15:22)

We have only ever known this world to be full of suffering and death since Adam fell; Jesus offers the only solution to our fallen human condition. In sending Jesus, God wasn't pressing the 'pause' or even the 'stop' button on the world's suffering; He was entering into it Himself to deliver us eternally. The rest of our earthly life will continue to be marked with suffering as part of our mortality, but we can be made right before God through Jesus Christ and spend an eternity in His perfect new creation where there will be no more tears (Rev 21).

Jesus is not only our mediator, but our friend. He is acquainted with sorrow (Isa 53:3), and He gets how we feel, and He is not lacking in compassion for us:

'For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.' (Heb 4:15-16)

His nail-marked hands hold ours as we walk through life with all its shadows and pain. Each step takes us closer to seeing Him face to face in an eternity without suffering.

Job: finding the end of yourself

God seems to use suffering in our lives to make us see the limits of our own strength. Look at Job: he was a righteous and wealthy man. But the danger of this is that you can too easily trust in your own resources and character as a protection from trouble. Job discovered his righteousness did not bring him immunity from suffering, and this is the big theological problem of the book: Job's friends reason (and with good Scriptural foundation) that God is just and will bless the righteous, therefore Job must have sinned to bring about this calamity. The reader -and Job- knows this is not the case, and yet how could God still bring about this suffering?

In a good sense, Job's friends' knowledge of the truth (that God is good and will punish the wicked) gives reassurance in the topsy-turvy time of trial that the righteous will be blessed and the wicked will be cut off. But their understanding is limited, and their theology doesn't have room for innocent suffering, ultimately experienced in the cross of Jesus.

However, even though Job is right in speaking of himself as innocent before God, he still needs to acknowledge God's right to be God. God doesn't owe us anything. The things Job has lost were gifts in the first place. Even in our piety, we can't save ourselves; we need a mediator. Job needed to realise that his sacrifices weren't enough; he couldn't make his own atonement, let alone for others. His suffering drives him to realise his own neediness, as he says 'Do I have any power to help myself, now that success has been driven from me?' (Job 6:13).

When God does something we don't understand, the temptation is to give up on the divine plan and see God as a human adversary who doesn't do things logically or rationally (see the imagery in Job 16). In suffering, you are forced to see the 'otherness' of God. You understand more that you don't understand Him. God is just, but His justice is deeper than straightforward rewards and punishments in this life.

'My days have passed, my plans are shattered, and so are the desires of my heart' (Job 17:11).

Job reaches the end of himself, but then begins a journey to seeing the hope of resurrection.

Job: the voice of grief

This year one of my resolutions was to work through the topic of grief and how to deal with it from a biblical perspective. It's been a journey! And I started with Job because it's a pretty good place to start when thinking about the Old Testament stories of grief. He loses almost everything he has, from his children to his possessions to his health (see Job 1-2). But he finds his way to the place of praise: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:21)

It's hard to worship God through suffering - this is why Job is tested in this way. He does worship, but not without questioning, as the book continues. It's not an easy journey for him.

As you read through Job's speeches, you get a real sense of what I call the 'voice of grief'. These are words which reflect the sense you get when you're grieving that you'll never be happy again. Read Job 7:
'Has not man a hard service on earth,
and are not his days like the days of a hired hand?
Like a slave who longs for the shadow,
and like a hired hand who looks for his wages,
so I am allotted months of emptiness,
and nights of misery are apportioned to me.
When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I arise?’
But the night is long,
and I am full of tossing till the dawn.
My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt;
my skin hardens, then breaks out afresh.
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle
and come to their end without hope.

“Remember that my life is a breath;
my eye will never again see good.' (v1-7)

I love the way that Scripture gives us an honest depiction of gut-wrenching grief here. This sense of everything being empty, and a restless frustration, is perhaps a necessary part of the all-consuming stage of grief. However, these ideas can become lies the enemy uses to keep you in despair. When tragedy occurs, Satan sees an opportunity to bring people into bondage. Endings always bring new beginnings, but Satan strives to keep us out of the new place God has prepared by keeping us in the past. It's too easy, in your hurt, to question God and let this become a barrier. We can start to think God isn't good and can't be trusted. But James 1:17 affirms that God is good and He can't be anything else. We don't have answers -we know 'in part' (1 Cor 13:12)- and trust will always require us to accept unanswered questions. (See Joyce Meyer's teaching 'Overcoming Grief' here).

Ezra & Nehemiah: A need for fasting

It's hard to imagine what life was like for the people of Israel after they went into exile. Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonians with great violence and brutality, as recorded by Jeremiah in Lamentations. But empires come and empires go, and in 539 BC, the Persians defeated the Babylonians and absorbed the lands of Israel and Judah into their territory. The next year, Cyrus allowed the people of Judah to return home and rebuild the temple of the Lord. Around 458 BC, another group of Judean exiles returned under Ezra's leadership (ESV study Bible).

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah (often viewed as one book) give us a historical narrative about these returns to Palestine, but with important theological lessons about God's covenant faithfulness. The exile was not the end of the story for God's people, and the book of Ezra shows an amazing turnaround of these pagan rulers giving favour to God's people and actually commissioning them to re-start their religious community centred around the temple. The rebuilt temple was nowhere near as great in grandeur as the first, so it was a bittersweet reopening (see Ezra 3), but the fact remains that God had preserved for Himself a remnant. He had not wiped out the descendants of Abraham. He still had plans to prosper them (Jer 29).

It was a great challenge for this broken, battered community to live distinctively and faithfully to the Lord. They had been in exile for 70 years. As they come back to the Word of God and the Law of God, they have to come to terms with their own disobedience and figure out how to move forwards. Ezra's leadership is bold and strong as he urges the people to obey the commands of the Lord, even at great personal cost (such as the removal of foreign wives and children - see Ezra 9-10). What struck me looking at these narratives was the place of fasting in the post-exilic community, as an integral part of their repentance and turning back to the Lord.

Fasting is not something we talk about very often. It is not something we do very well, I'm guessing (if my own practise is anything to go by). In OT Law, it was only prescribed for the Day of Atonement (see Leviticus 16), which was fundamentally about purification from sin. The people were charged to 'afflict' themselves (v29) and 'do no work', which suggests that fasting and prayer was part of this holy day where their sins would be dealt with before God in the Holy of Holies. In the offerings and the goat sent into the wilderness, God gave His people a vivid picture of their sin being atoned for, which ultimately pointed to Jesus' death on the cross. So I'm not suggesting we should go back to OT Law and fast like we're trying to add something on to Christ's work- He said, 'It is finished'! (John 19:30) But it's interesting that during the exile and afterwards, fasting became something God's people did when they realised their need for God. You could look at Esther calling a fast before she was to appear before the King to try to stop the killing of the Jews (a situation of desperation, see Esther 4). You could look at the prayerful life of Daniel and how he fasted and prayed when he realised the 70 years of exile had passed and God had promised through Jeremiah that He would bring the people back (Daniel 9). In Ezra, he fasts and falls on his knees in intercessory prayer when he hears of the mixed marriages of the exiles (Ezra 9). Nehemiah fasts and prays over an extended time when he hears of the state of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1). Why did they fast? Because they were desperate. They were full of grief over sin (not always their own sin, but the sin of the nation, of their community). They wanted to humble themselves before God and pray, and abstaining from food was an important part of that. It showed repentance (you could also look at Nineveh in the book of Jonah for that).

Why don't we fast? Because we're not desperate. We want to see God move, but we're not desperate enough that we're willing to give up the things we rely on each day to get us through - this isn't just our three meals, but other things too like social media, our mobile phones. I read something on Revive our Hearts where the speaker made a point that you wouldn't congratulate someone on being very self-disciplined if they managed to eat three meals a day. Imagine it: 'Well done! You actually managed to eat breakfast, lunch AND dinner!' It's something we take for granted, unless we're ill. Well fasting is meant to show us that the same commitment we have towards feeding our bodies is the commitment we should have in prayer. We NEED God more than we need food to survive (Jesus told the devil 'Man shall not live by bread alone' in Matthew 4:4 when He was tempted to turn stones into bread during a 40-day fast).

I know it's easy with fasting to become legalistic. In fact, Jesus warned His disciples not to fast like the Pharisees, to make a song and dance about it, and do it for human praise and attention (Luke 18:12). But He did teach on fasting as though it was meant to be a regular part of life for His followers - 'when you fast...' (Matthew 6:17). He was questioned on why His disciples didn't fast, and He replied, 'But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.' (Mark 2:19) Until Jesus comes again, there is sin, there is suffering, there is wrong-doing in the world. There is desperation. So fasting is to be part of following Christ until that day when He puts everything right.

If we don't fast, it's like we're saying there's nothing to grieve over. Our culture doesn't do grief. We're told not to focus on the bad things. But biblically, we should! We should grieve over the sins of our nation. We should mourn the hypocrisies and failures of the Church. We should deeply feel the horror of our sin and in the midst of our gratitude to Christ for making our atonement, it's not always wrong to set aside special time to fast and pray for victory over habitual sin. I'm not saying 'fast and God will listen to you'. I'm just trying to recognise that Scripture tells us there IS a need for fasting, and I know I need to do it a lot more than I do at the moment.

Walking through grief

'But I know
That the silence
Has brought me to His voice'
(Selah, 'I will carry you')

I've been reading the book of Jeremiah, and what's really striking me is the way that this prophet faithfully witnessed for forty years when virtually no one listened, and went through the catastrophic events of the fall of Jerusalem. He walked through a long time of great sorrow. He wept for the state of his nation and his people. They were rebellious, yet he identified with them. He did not distance himself and shut off his emotions, even though that would have been easier, because he shared God's heart for His broken and faithless people.

Grief and sorrow are hard to bear. Recently I lost my nan, and last July I had a miscarriage. These two experiences of grief have been really different for me, but in both situations I have found it hard to grieve. I have not found myself to be particularly articulate about it, or to understand it, or to find much of anything tangible in it. That's why the lyric I quoted about silence for me really sums up the whole experience. Through miscarriage particularly, I felt a heavy silence. I had no words to talk about it and few to pray about it, but I did hear His voice in certain ways through that time, reassuring me of His presence even though I did not always feel that He was close by.

This verse really struck me today:

'Thus says the LORD: "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in all the earth."' Jeremiah 9:23-24

Grief decisively breaks through all of my so-called wisdom and all of my supposed strength. My riches -possessions, accomplishments- mean nothing when faced with death. But as I am stripped bare and faced with my own inadequacy, I am compelled towards God's sufficiency and grace. He is 'the LORD'. I know that my suffering is not meaningless, because He is a God of 'love, justice, and righteousness'. He doesn't always stop the path from being dark, but He gives me assurance that there will be light at the end.

The most valuable aspect of grief, for me, is that it rocks my world and fractures me away from thinking this is my home and my resting place. It reminds me, with a harsh jolt, that life is full of pain because we have been dislocated from our God through sin. And I get a tiny glimpse of the grief the Father's heart endures when He sees His children suffering through their own rebellion, and ultimately the suffering Christ had to endure to redeem us from this state of dislocation. I think generally, I am way too focused on the here and now. Most of my grief for my miscarried baby centred around the fact that I was never going to be able to do all the things I expected I was going to be able to do: experience a full term pregnancy, give birth to a healthy child, take the baby home, and so on into the future. That's a legitimate reason for grief. But the hope of the New Testament is in the new creation that Christ will bring when He returns, the world put right again, where suffering and death are no more and He wipes every tear from our eyes. My grief made me long for that new creation in a way that I probably should be longing for it all the time; I just don't think about it enough. I get too distracted in the busy-ness of everyday life. Grief forces me to stop.

The story behind Selah's song 'I will carry you' is movingly recorded in an interview with Angie Smith, available on Revive our Hearts.com. Her baby Audrey Caroline had abnormalities with her kidneys and heart, and only lived for 2.5 hours after she was born. When I come across stories like this, part of me shrinks away and doesn't want to hear about it. I'd rather lose myself in a novel or watching a romantic comedy. But Jeremiah has challenged me: is this a godly response to the suffering that is all around us in this broken world? No, it isn't. If we're ever going to get a glimpse of God's heart, it's going to be in sharing these stories of brokenness with the rock-solid hope of Christ, as Angie testifies.

Angie calls for women to break the silence and share their experiences of miscarriage and losing a baby, because too many women out there suffer in silence. Walking through grief is often lonely, and there are times when it just has to be you and God. But reaching out to others, sharing your grief and sorrow, is a necessary part of the healing process and why God has placed us in the loving community that is the Church. We are urged to 'Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn' (Romans 12:15), which beautifully and succinctly sums up the paradox of life in Christ here on earth. We have a bittersweet mix of joy and sadness in our lives, but we know that ultimately, our sadness is temporal; our joy is eternal.

'For his anger is but for a moment, and his favour is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.' Ps 30:5