7 Complaining
7 
Complaining
I call to God,
and the LORD will save me.
Evening and morning and at noon
I utter my complaint and moan,
and he hears my voice.
Complaining is not an activity that we admire or enjoy (unless we are of an unusually cantankerous bent), nor do we think highly of people who are always complaining. To characterize someone as “a complainer” is not a compliment; on the contrary, it tags that person as a really pathetic specimen of humanity. What place then is there for complaint in an activity as holy as prayer?
Sometimes, of course, complaints are a form of public service. We rightly complain of something that has gone wrong for the sake of other people who come after us. If a highway intersection is so designed as to invite an accident, which perhaps we ourselves have only narrowly escaped, it is quite right to complain to the highway authority in hope that they will redesign this stretch of road in order to keep more fenders and lives intact.
But what of complaint focused only on self? In general we admire people like Disraeli, that nineteenth-century English prime minister whose constant maxim was “Never complain.” We tell ourselves with a small pat on the back, “Well, I’m not going to complain.” There is, however, a good deal of pride as well as a certain amount of self-pity involved in our contemplating these complaints that we decide not to make. Ancient Stoic philosophers, along with their modern counterparts sometimes found in the military or the Boy Scouts or a suburban kitchen, have taught that keeping a stiff upper lip and declining to complain when things go maddeningly and hurtfully wrong is a sort of virtue and a sign of strength. Maybe so, but it is commonly a mark of conceit and contempt as well. (“I’m not the complaining type—I’m made of stronger stuff than old so-and-so.”) Self-focused complaining is a vice, and self-focused noncomplaining is ordinarily a vice as well.
Yet we constantly find in the Bible that when bad things happen to good people, so that they feel totally at the end of their tether, they complain with great freedom and at considerable length to their God. And Scripture does not seem to regard these complaining prayers as anything other than wisdom. Particularly in the psalms we meet the sentiment: Things are out of hand, I’m isolated, I’m helpless, I feel hopeless, I’m hurting. Lord, do something! The phrase “How long?” appears in the psalms nearly twenty times. It is almost a technical phrase expressing this kind of complaint. The psalmist is saying in so many words, “Lord, I’m looking to you to do something about a situation that is beyond my control. Lord, how long?” He is asking: How long will I have to wait? How soon will you act?
BIBLICAL COMPLAINING
Biblical prayers of complaint come from a variety of situations. Following betrayal by a close friend, David prayed like this:
Give ear to my prayer, O God,
and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy!
Attend to me, and answer me;
I am restless in my complaint and I moan
because of the noise of the enemy,
because of the oppression of the wicked. . . .
But it is you, a man, my equal,
my companion, my familiar friend.
We used to take sweet counsel together;
within God’s house we walked in the throng. . . .
Evening and morning and at noon
I utter my complaint and moan,
and [God] hears my voice. (Ps 55:1-3, 13-14, 17)
Now look at Job. He was handed over to Satan for Satan to do to him whatever he liked—up to the point of taking his life, which God told Satan he must not do (Job 1). But God did give Satan permission to take everything else that belonged to Job, and this in effect Satan did. Job, a rich, prosperous, capable man, husband of one wife, father of many children, loses in rapid succession his wealth, his health and his children too. (Perhaps Satan leaves his wife intact because she was more likely to hinder Job than to help him. She, after all, was the one who told him to, “Curse God and die” [Job 2:9].) Job is left feeling that he has lost everything that mattered to him. And so he complains—to God.
If Job could have looked behind the scenes, as we can, and known of the private exchanges between God and Satan, he might have been even more horrified than he was. But that was something he did not know at any stage. All he knew was that, for no reason that he could imagine, the God he served was exposing him to hell on earth. Through the eyes of his book, we watch Job’s friends come and sit with him in silence—for a whole week. Finally, Job breaks the silence, and the friends begin to talk. They are full of sympathy for Job, but they can only ring changes on the thought that he is a sinner now provoking God by refusing to admit it: a gratuitous guilt trip for Job that only makes him feel worse. Eventually, Job, spiritually exhausted by the horrific events and goaded by the platitudes his friends offer, begins to pour out torrents of complaint.
I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint.
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
let me know why you contend against me.
Does it seem good to you to oppress,
to despise the work of your hands
and favor the designs of the wicked? . . .
Your hands fashioned and made me;
and now you have destroyed me altogether.
Remember that you have made me like clay;
and will you return me to the dust? . . .
You clothed me with skin and flesh,
and knit me together with bones and sinews.
You have granted me life and steadfast love,
and your care has preserved my spirit. . . .
Why did you bring me out from the womb?
Would that I had died before any eye had seen me
and were as though I had not been,
carried from the womb to the grave.
Are not my days few?
Then cease, and leave me alone, that I may find a little cheer
before I go—and I shall not return—
to the land of darkness and deep shadow.
(Job 10:1-3, 8-9, 11-12, 18-19)
Is this the same Job that God described to Satan as “my servant, . . . a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil” (Job 1:8). Yes, but this is Job distraught by grief and human pain, goaded to despair by his well-meaning friends, speaking his words of complaint to the safest possible source: God.
Thirteen chapters later, the scene is not much better. Again we hear Job’s complaint to God, but this time with a sense of longing and even hope:
Today also my complaint is bitter;
my hand is heavy on account of my groaning.
Oh, that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his seat! . . .
Behold, I go forward, but he is not there,
and backward, but I do not perceive him;
on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him;
he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him.
But he knows the way that I take;
when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold. . . .
But he is unchangeable, and who can turn him back? . . .
For he will complete what he appoints for me.
(Job 23:2-3, 8-10, 13-14)
Job wonders aloud in prayer, Why is God doing this to me? God doesn’t tell me, but I want to know. Those who have read the end of Job’s book will know that God did indeed meet with Job as Job had invited him to do. But explanations are lacking even then; God does not need to explain. Still, he responded to Job’s complaint—and Job was content.
Jeremiah was also a complainer, so much so that readers have long dubbed him “the Weeping Prophet.” Jeremiah’s long life spanned the optimistic days of godly king Josiah (640-609 B.C.), when boundaries became secure against a declining Assyria and the Hebrew people returned to worshiping the true God in his temple; the foreboding days of Jehoiakim (609-598), when Babylon threatened at Judah’s boundaries; the beginning of the Babylonian exile (597 and following); and the decisive deportation in 587 when Zedekiah, the last Jewish king, was carted off to Babylon, blinded and led like an animal in chains (2 Kings 25:6-7). Jeremiah was among the few people left amid the pitiful ruins of Judah after the rest of his nation had been forcefully removed some six hundred miles to the northeast. Eventually Jeremiah himself was forced into Egyptian exile, which is probably where he died.
God had given Jeremiah a tough assignment. While all was well in Judah under the reign of Josiah, God said to Jeremiah:
See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant. . . .
Behold I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you. (Jer 1:9-10, 18-19)
As God’s prophet Jeremiah knew long ahead of time the destruction that was to come—and that his own people would reject the warnings that he was assigned to give them. As would most of us in any similar setting, Jeremiah complained over and over to God. Because of the intimate tone of the various conversations between Jeremiah and God recorded in this long book, we sense that perhaps God expected or even invited these complaints. For example, in Jeremiah 12, we read:
Righteous are you, O LORD,
when I complain to you;
yet I plead my case before you.
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all who are treacherous thrive? . . .
You, O LORD, know me; you see me,
and test my heart toward you. (Jer 12:1, 3)
Jeremiah asks the age-old question: Why does a righteous God allow the bad guys to prosper and the good guys (like himself or ourselves) to suffer? And God is silent toward Jeremiah—at least on that subject. In chapter 20, Jeremiah picks up another line of complaint, this time making a verbal assault on God’s own relationship with him.
O LORD, you have deceived me,
and I was deceived;
you are stronger than I,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all the day;
everyone mocks me.
For whenever I speak, I cry out,
I shout, “Violence and destruction!”
For the word of the LORD has become for me
a reproach and derision all day long. (Jer 20:7-8)
Jeremiah complains of his assigned mission as if to say to God, “You’ve led me into something that you never enabled me to foresee. You’ve put me in a situation where I wouldn’t have gone if I’d been able to resist your pressure, but I couldn’t resist it. You forced me into this. And now I’ve become a joke, every word I speak brings derision. People laugh at me for saying these things.” Jeremiah was a godly man, practicing piety in the Old Testament way, doing his God-assigned job as prophet, yet from time to time making explicit complaints to God. And we see no specific rebuke to Job or Jeremiah or the psalmists for complaining. God did tell Job to stand up like a man (meaning not very high) and put his hand over his mouth while God talked to him for four chapters (38—41), but that was to tell him, not that he should not have complained, only that his complaint had reflected his ignorance about God’s wisdom. The complaints as such, it seems, were acceptable and were accepted. What are we to make of this?
THE DOWNSIDE OF HIKING
In chapter two of this book, we pictured the Christian life as hiking with the Lord, and this image will help us here. Hiking with the Lord sounds very upbeat, very adventurous, very romantic. From one standpoint the Christian life is like that: it is a richer, more joyful life than any other. But when you go hiking with someone who undertakes to lead you through country where you have never been before, again and again there are downs as well as ups. And you find yourself in places where you feel, Now if I’d been planning this, I wouldn’t have involved myself in what we’ve got here. For what is it that we have here? Mud, perhaps, or rock or shale or nettle beds or thorns or cactus. Or laurel branches. Let Carolyn speak to this.
Three summers back, while doing youth ministry, I (Carolyn) had an adventure with a highly capable young woman who had lived her entire seventeen years in rural Appalachia. Hannah invited me to hike with her to the bottom of a ravine in the back of their property. I should have noticed the twinkle of challenge in her eye, but I can’t think when I have ever refused a hike. So I laced up my hiking books and we struck out. What Hannah had neglected to tell me was that this “hike” had no marked trail, that we would slide on our backs under creeping laurel bushes, where we couldn’t see inches ahead, down the steep side of a canyon, that we would traverse a shale wall high above the stream below with only slippery inches of stone as finger grips, and that (as for finger grips) we’d hardly ever see where we were putting our hands. Did she mention that copperhead snakes lived there too? I was finally reduced to saying amid chuckles, “Hannah, if one of us gets snake-bit, I hope it is me and not you. There is no way I can get myself out of here without you!” We did get to the bottom and rested on mossy rocks along a sparkling stream; and we also climbed back out (equally challenging). Once back on top Hannah admitted that I’d done at least as well as the college football player she had once “guided” down there. And at least we had not gotten stuck in the ravine all night as did, on one occasion, her pastorfather, who barely climbed out in time to give his Sunday sermon!
Hiking through life with the Lord at our side is sometimes that kind of challenge. In the New Testament we hear a kind of drumbeat insistence that those who follow the Lord Jesus Christ will certainly be involved in troubles: they will experience downs as well as ups. In preaching, teaching and fellowship discussions, we fellow pilgrims are inclined to stress the joy and the glory of the Christian life, and it is a real delight to share with each other and with unbelievers our testimony to the constant provision we receive from the Lord who loves us. But in the New Testament the emphasis on joy is balanced by a whole series of passages about tribulation, affliction, suffering, even chastisement coming from the same Lord. Thus, as it were, a hike with Jesus means at times scrambling blind-eyed under creeping laurel and clinging to inch-wide rock, not daring to look below.
Here are three examples. First, in Mark 4:35-41 we read that after a long day of teaching near the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.” So the disciples got into the boat and pushed out and started rowing, while Jesus, who was exhausted, went to sleep. A storm came up and they woke him and said (screamed probably), “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Their situation was out of hand; they could no longer control the boat, and it was filling with water. Jesus, we know, stilled the storm, but the point is that they would not have been in that desperate situation if Jesus himself hadn’t said, “Let us go across the lake right now.” Being a disciple to Jesus will again and again get us into situations of trouble that otherwise we could and would have avoided. We must expect it.
Second, look at the narrative in the book of Acts as it tells Paul’s story of how the gospel came to Europe. In Acts 16, we learn that the Holy Spirit has restrained Paul and Silas from missioning in Asia Minor as planned, and so they had stayed on the high road west, which took them to Troas. That night Paul dreamed of a man of Macedonia saying, “Come over and help us”; they interpreted this as a call from God and crossed the Aegean Sea to Philippi, where they started preaching the gospel, and very soon Paul and Silas were in prison with their feet in the stocks. If they had not been following their Lord’s leading, they would not have been in Philippi to experience its prison; they wouldn’t even have been in Europe. They would have been missioning in Asia Minor, as they originally had intended. We know that they sang hymns and that there was an earthquake, which released them from their chains, and the jailer was converted. So this part of their hike with God ended in jubilation. But up to that point their experience in Europe had been rough. What about those hours when Paul and Silas were sitting in prison? What would have gone through their minds? They must have wondered whether it really was worth it to be the Lord’s agents spreading the Word and thereby getting themselves into this kind of trouble. They must have felt like complaining, even though they settled for singing hymns. For us, too, God’s service may mean trouble, trouble, trouble all the way. It seems we must expect that.
Finally, in Luke 21, a (deliberately?) enigmatic discourse about the future, Jesus tells his disciples, in a series of traumatic images, what their own future holds.
They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness. Settle it therefore in your minds not to meditate beforehand how to answer, for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be delivered up, even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends, and some of you they will put to death. You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. (Lk 21:12-17)
Be realistic, says the Lord Jesus. Trouble is coming for the whole world (vv. 6-11), but especially for you because you are my disciples. So Christians too, like Job and Jeremiah, will have something to complain about. We must expect that—and expect to have to pray accordingly.
A century ago E. M. Bounds penned, or quoted, two simple verses, which made coping with all such things sound easy and happy:
Trials must and will befall;
But with humble faith to see
love inscribed upon them all—
this is happiness to me.
Trials make the promise sweet,
Trials give new life to prayer;
Bring me to my Savior’s feet,
Lay me low, and keep me there.
We might dismiss these lines as shallow and superficial, infused with too much nineteenth-century prettiness, but look at the author. E. M. Bounds (1835-1913), best known for his writings on prayer. He gave up a law career to serve as a minister of the gospel. He was an army chaplain in the American Civil War—on the losing side. He was imprisoned in Nashville, then returned to the South to endure the hardships of rebuilding in what had become both a material and a spiritual desolation. Getting to the point of singing his hymn honestly and joyfully, for us as evidently for him, is not at all easy. Lived out, these poetic lines are not necessarily shallow and complacent. Given the harsh turns in most of our lives, it is far from easy to get to the place where we can say these calm words from the heart and then live by them. We New Testament Christians, even without enduring anything like the Civil War, have much to complain about, as did Job and Jeremiah and the psalmists, and with them E. M. Bounds. Realism compels us to face this. It is the grueling part of the hike.
THE CATEGORY OF COMPLAINT
Let us now pull some threads together and summarize and contextualize what we have seen so far. Complaint is a kind of speech that blends lamentation (raging, glooming and despairing over what is bad, frustrating and hurtful) with supplication (begging and pleading that someone will do something about it). Wisely or foolishly, the Northern European-influenced culture that shaped us, and many of our readers with us, has historically embraced the stiff-upper-lip ideal of human behavior, and habitually looks down on people who voice personal complaints in public as morally inferior weaklings. Western Christianity has followed suit, stressing how faith gives strength to quietly endure pain and grief and the frustrations of isolation and desolation, and the many malfunctions of body and mind that come our way.
So it does. But the idea that full humanness involves the habitual stifling of strong emotion so that reason may rule in unbroken calm belongs to the legacy of Platonism in post-Renaissance Western culture rather than to any form of biblical Christianity. Plato thought we must corral and damp down our emotions so that they will not disrupt the smooth working of our minds, and as advice to fallen and disintegrated human beings like ourselves there is much wisdom in that. But Plato regarded the disjunction between the soul’s energy of thought and the distracting urges of emotional surges, in other words, between the workings of the mind and of the body, as ultimate. This is not the Christian view, though many, having been reared on it at home, in school and in church, think it is. The Bible indeed teaches self-control, but the Platonic ideal of calm stoical strength should not be thought definitive for the people of God.
Scripture, in which the mind of God, the world’s Creator, is made plain, conceives the life of the human individual not as a body-and-soul duality, nor as a mind-and-emotions tug-of-war, but as a unity. Central to that unity is the heart, as we have said, understanding the word to mean the central core of the personal self as the physical heart is the central organ of the physical body. Out of the heart flow the thoughts, desires, motivations, emotions, dreams, attitudes, plans, hopes, reactions, relational outgoings, and everything else that enters into both the conscious and the unconscious or unrecognized aspects of every person’s living. The personal self (soul, spirit) is unitary in itself and uses the physical body, via which it lives, to express itself. The human individual could be described as either an embodied soul or an ensouled body. Such is each man and woman in God’s world.
Now, the creational ideal was that each individual should be irradiated by the light of God’s revelation (his general revelation, as most scholars today call it), that this revelation should be recognized for what it is, and that it should evoke a wholehearted commitment—that is, a harnessing and deploying of all a person’s powers—to communion—that is, fellowship, interactive togetherness—expressed in responsive worship and thanksgiving and in obedient service of the Creator. So if we say that mankind was made to praise and pray, we will not be wrong. This was the formula for life in the image of God, the pure quality of life that Adam and Eve forfeited and that only ever reappeared in the earthly life of God’s incarnate Son. Part of our legacy from Adam is that within the unitary human being, now subject to death and all that that means, the personal self has disintegrated to a degree, so that throughout history intellect and emotion have appeared as Plato saw them, that is, as two distinct energies constantly pulling against each other. But from the moment of our regeneration in Christ, through the implanting of a new, unifying, Godward energy (the new creation of 2 Cor 5:17 and Gal 6:15, the new heart of Ezek 36:26), and through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to sustain and channel this dual energy, God is at work reintegrating us: putting us back together, that is, as the thinking-and-feeling creatures, praising and praying, that we were always meant to be. Regenerate people feel through their minds and think through their feelings. They are self-aware in a God-conscious and God-centered way that is beyond the understanding of those who do not actually share this life quality.
All this has been said in order now to make the point that complaints such as we have been examining are integral to this new, regenerate life of communion and prayer and fellowship and worship and seeking God’s honor and praise. The almost lurid intensity with which psalmists and others describe the sad situations out of which they pray is not just ancient Eastern imaginations going strong, though it is that, but essentially it is the God-centered feeling intellect and the God-centered thoughtful emotion of regenerate hearts contemplating the distance between God’s best and the way things have now turned out. We see this on a grand scale in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the fall of Jerusalem. The complainers in each situation are regenerate children of God (regeneration was an Old Testament fact, though the theology of it was not made known until Christ came) and their complaints are fundamentally prayers for deliverance from evil and for the fulfillment of promises of protection, provision and relational enrichment that God himself gave. The plea embedded in their complaints is that joyful fellowship with God may be restored and present pain become a thing of the past. Feeling with their minds and thinking with their feelings, their emotions of distress are as vivid and intense as are their perceptions of current disaster due to God’s nonintervention. In terms of direction and intention, their lament and complaints to God are acts of petition and promise-claiming, in a very strong form.
So complaint will be, or at least should be, a recurring element in the praying of the born again. The presence of complaint prayers in God’s prayer book (for that is what the Psalter really is) shows that, so far from being irreverent, prayers of this kind, describing the distress of oneself and others in the freest and most forthright, forceful language imaginable, are entirely in order. Ignoring in our prayers situations that are not “just fine” would by contrast be barren unrealism. For this world is a battleground on which Satan and his hosts strive desperately to obstruct and spoil God’s work in every way they can; the book of Revelation reveals that in this war all sorts of bad and destructive things will happen to Christians, churches and the larger human community; thus there will always be things to pray about in complaint terms as part of one’s regular petitions. Using cursing psalms as complaint prayers against Satan and his forces might be a good way to begin. Non-Christians may find the idea of Christians taking complaints to their God pathetic, but complaint prayers are among those that we were made and are now redeemed to offer. Telling it like it is and piling on the agony of our feelings about it is not merely safe, because of who God is (the hurting of the child engages the Father’s helpfulness, not his hostility), nor is it merely a solace, because of who we are (for humans always find it a relief, a refreshment even, to tell their deepest troubles to someone who sympathizes), it honors God by submitting to his ordering of events thus far, however painful, and it is sanctifying in its Christlike honesty and adherence to God’s ongoing purpose. What Christ uttered in Gethsemane, after all, was essentially a prayer of complaint.
The remainder of this chapter will look at three areas: the range of the believer’s complaining, the rationale of the believer’s complaining, and the response of God to the believer’s complaining.
THE RANGE OF OUR COMPLAINT
What circumstances may rightly prompt a complaint to God? Most of us are quick to gripe (mentally if not aloud). What constitutes just cause for complaining prayer? As always, Scripture provides a sure and solid guide. There we find at least four major circumstances that over and over elicit prayers of complaint: opposition, deprivation, isolation and depression. If we page through the Psalter, we find frequent reference to all of these.
Let us begin with opposition. Psalm after psalm speaks about “my enemies,” “the people who set themselves against me,” by reason of the writer’s life and loyalty in God’s service. This kind of opposition to God’s people because they were the people of God has been reproduced over and over in Marxist countries in our era. It remains a reality in Muslim countries today with particular violence appearing along the boundaries where Islam and Christianity meet. It would be naive, self-congratulating and untrue to say that all of Christian-Muslim violence proceeds in only one direction. Sadly, people from Christian nations also perpetuate religious violence. But “enemies” do sometimes go after a follower of Jesus just because that person is a Christian believer.
Moreover, Christians in comfortable settings, far from bullets and bombs, may encounter personal betrayal by someone they trusted. You thought they would stand by you and thereby sustain you, but no, they have quietly melted away; they have let you down, and so you are left in much more painful isolation than ever you anticipated—and it is bitter. This kind of betrayal happens in the workplace, in friendships, in families and even in the church. Psalm 13 illustrates:
How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? (Ps 13:1-2)
Psalm 55 pictures this kind of hurt, as if someone were standing high above you on a wall dropping stones on your unprotected head.
Give ear to my prayer, O God,
and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy!
Attend to me, and answer me;
I am restless in my complaint and I moan
because of the noise of the enemy,
because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they drop trouble upon me,
and in anger they bear a grudge against me. (Ps 55:1-3)
Psalm 55 goes on with words quoted earlier in the chapter where David grieves that the person who now taunts him is his former friend. David’s “enemy” in this prayer is not a Muslim or a communist, a Canaanite pagan or an Assyrian warrior. This “enemy” is a God follower, a friend, who has gone over to the other side. So David pours out his deep hurt in complaint prayer. Are we faced with betrayal in marriage, alienation from a brother or sister in our church, unfair competition from a work colleague or outright persecution in a Christ-hating environment? If so, David gives us words for our complaining prayer, plus a word of comfort for our aching hearts:
Cast your burden on the LORD,
and he will sustain you;
He will never permit
the righteous to be moved. (Ps 55:22)
Deprivation is also a matter for complaint. Job had lost his health, his wealth and his family. Several of the psalmists found themselves physically ill, and they too cried to God about that. Take Psalm 6, for instance.
O LORD, rebuke me, not in your anger,
nor discipline me in your wrath.
Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing;
heal me, O LORD, for my bones are troubled.
My soul also is greatly troubled.
But you, O LORD—how long?
Turn, O LORD, deliver my life;
save me for the sake of your steadfast love. . . .
I am weary with my moaning;
every night I flood my bed with tears;
I drench my couch with my weeping.
My eye wastes away because of grief. (Ps 6:1-4, 6-7)
Psalm 38 is another complaint prayer written by a man who is sick and sad. This time it seems that God himself has deprived David of physical health and spiritual well-being. Here we see the possibility of God using deprivation as a form of discipline and eventually correction, for sin—a divine routine to which we must all be open.
O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger,
nor discipline me in your wrath!
For your arrows have sunk into me,
and your hand has come down on me.
There is no soundness in my flesh
because of your indignation;
there is no health in my bones
because of my sin. . . .
My wounds stink and fester
because of my foolishness,
I am utterly bowed down and prostrate; . . .
For my sides are filled with burning,
and there is no soundness in my flesh.
I am feeble and crushed. (Ps 38:1-3, 5-8)
The three psalms below are among the many prayers of complaint in the face of isolation. In David’s Psalm 39, we see that David has chosen to isolate himself from God’s enemies, but he also senses that he is isolated from God, as if God is physically beating him one stroke after another. So David complains; he pleads for relief, and in so doing he acknowledges God as the source of all true hope.
I said, “I will guard my ways,
that I may not sin with my tongue;
I will guard my mouth with a muzzle,
so long as the wicked are in my presence.” . . .
O LORD, make me know my end
and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting I am! . . .
And now, O LORD, for what do I wait?
My hope is in you. . . .
Remove your stroke from me;
I am spent by the hostility of your hand.
When you discipline a man
with rebukes for sin,
you consume like a moth what is dear to him;
surely all mankind is a mere breath! (Ps 39:1, 4, 7, 10-11)
Other psalms wail about isolation: loss of health, of goods and also of companionship. We see this particularly in two psalms of lament surrounding the ruin of Jerusalem. Here the psalmist Asaph expresses his pain and isolation as he contemplates Jerusalem laid waste. He also acknowledges the part that sin had in triggering these circumstances, and so he prays for (and believes in) God’s salvation.
We do not see our signs;
there is no longer any prophet,
and there is none among us who knows how long.
How long, O God, is the foe to scoff? (Ps 74:9-10)
O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
they have defiled your holy temple;
they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.
They have given the bodies of your servants
to the birds of the heavens for food,
the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth.
They have poured out their blood like water
all around Jerusalem,
and there was no one to bury them. . . .
Do not remember against us our former iniquities;
let your compassion come speedily to meet us,
for we are brought very low.
Help us, O God of our salvation,
for the glory of your name;
deliver us, and atone for our sins,
for your name’s sake! (Ps 79:1-3, 8-9)
Depression is part of the range of complaint illustrated in Scripture. Depression is our state of self when we feel that the pressure is intolerable and its accompanying physical and mental symptoms shade all of reality. We cannot see any way out, so that any hope we once had is swallowed in despair. Psalm 88 delineates in vivid and poignant language what depression does to the human soul.
O LORD God of my salvation;
I cry out day and night before you. . . .
You have put me in the depths of the pit,
in the regions dark and deep.
Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves.
Selah
You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a horror to them. . . .
Every day I call upon you, O LORD.
I spread out my hands to you. . . .
I, O LORD, cry to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you. . . .
You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness. (Ps 88:1, 6-9, 13, 18)
The psalm ends as it begins—in darkness. One translation of its final phrase is “darkness has become my only companion.” For those who have battled depression, this prayer has a stark reality that we would rather not remember. But it is prayer, an honest prayer of complaint that makes no pretense of prettiness. This is a voicing of the psalmist’s present reality, and we would be foolish to turn our back on it and suppose that it will never become ours. The good news is that God invites us to pour out our hearts to him—even from our darkness—and he never lets go of us once we are in his grip.
THE RATIONALE OF OUR COMPLAINTS
Are believers entitled to look to their God to restore the situation that called forth their complaints? Have they any warrant for expecting him to do that? Yes, and yes. The warrant for hope here lies in the filial relationship between us and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in love has adopted us into his family and become our heavenly Father for time and eternity.
An adoptive parent, such as are both the present writers, is truly a parent and can make a point of telling the child: “You are special to me; I chose you.” That in effect is what our God says to each believer, corresponding to what he said to Israel corporately long ago (see Deut 7:6-16). Now, it is the way of parents to care when their children come to them in distress. It is natural for children in a healthy family to run to a parent when they feel swamped and panicky (J. I. remembers his young son running to him because a playmate had produced a knife), and it is natural then for the parent to do something about it. As we learned in the last chapter from the parable of the unjust judge, God’s providential plan may involve waiting time for us that we had not envisioned, and Paul’s account of his thorn in the flesh showed us that sometimes God’s answer to our complaint is to strengthen us to carry on rather than change the situation. But it is guaranteed that the moment will come—whether in this world or, as with the martyrs, in the next—when we are found testifying that we went to our God in our distress, and he delivered us. Because he is a faithful Father, we knew he would, and he did.
GOD’S RESPONSE TO OUR COMPLAINTS
How does God respond to the believer’s complaint? Our answer begins by flagging the fact that our heavenly Father shapes everything that happens to us for our nurture. We must never lose sight of this basic New Testament truth. The writer to the Hebrews hammers away at it in chapter 12 of that letter. This unknown author is writing, so it seems, to Jews who have become Christians, whose former friends resent this and are persecuting them in one way and another (see Heb 10:32-34) in the hope of breaking their spirit and bringing them back to the synagogue. Now in chapter 12 the writer says, “Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?” Then comes a saying from their Jewish wisdom literature as phrased in Proverbs 3:11-12: “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the LORD, / nor be weary when reproved by him. / For the LORD disciplines the one he loves, / and he chastises every son whom he receives.” “My son?” This term includes, of course, men and women, sons and daughters together; it is the inclusive masculine, as grammarians say. “It is for discipline that you have to endure,” explains the writer. “God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (Heb 12:7-8). The purpose of this discipline is our holiness (v. 10), that is God’s work of remaking us in character and attitude so that we bear the moral and spiritual image of Jesus our Savior. Suffering—meaning strain and pain, physical, mental and spiritual—is part of God’s universal nurturing discipline, and his usual answer to complaint prayers about it is not to remove it but to teach us how to handle it. So now, within that frame of reference, let us look at two basic ways in which God responds to our prayers of complaint—and be encouraged.
First, observe how God sustains us in our weakness and keeps us going despite our pain. The classic New Testament passage on this is Paul’s account in 2 Corinthians 12 of how the Lord Jesus responded to his complaint about his thorn.
We have referred to this before, but now is the time to look at it more fully. “To keep me from being too elated by the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh” (2 Cor 12:7). Paul would not have said “in the flesh” if it had not been physical, and he would not have said “a thorn” if it had not been painful. It was then a painful physical condition of some kind. Paul describes it as “a messenger of Satan to harass me” (v. 7). What does that mean? It means that God has allowed Satan to inflict it, just as he once allowed Satan to inflict distress on Job. And now Satan encourages brooding on the pain in order to arouse in Paul’s heart negative and self-pitying notions about the apparent lack of goodness and wisdom in his heavenly Father and the likely diminution of his ministry if the thorn remained. Satan’s message at this point was a huge depressant, for, as Paul showed very fully in the second part of chapter 11, his ministry was very much his life. What to do? Well, Paul knew that Jesus was the great healer, and he had been used himself as Jesus’ agent in healing, as the book of Acts records (see Acts 14:3, 8-10; 19:11-12). So now Paul asks the Lord Jesus to heal him: a perfectly appropriate thing for him to do. Paul says:
Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities, for when I am weak then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:8-10)
In other words, Jesus Christ, speaking from the throne, said to him, “No, Paul, I’m not going to heal your thorn in the flesh. But my grace is going to keep your ministry going, even though your thorn remains. For your life will become a large-scale demonstration that my power, which sustains your ministry, is made perfect in your human weakness.” Thus the Lord Jesus dealt with Paul’s complaint.
Paul could then truthfully say, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” This is his testimony! The Lord was keeping him going, despite disability. And so it was to the end of Paul’s ministry; you never hear about the thorn in the flesh again. Paul lived with it, lived with the ongoing pain, but he did not complain further about it. The story of his thorn (whatever it was) is a wonderful demonstration that the Lord does sustain us and keep us going in our weakness, even when we feel that we are under pressure that must make us crumple.
Second, observe what God shows us in his wisdom, to keep us trusting despite the circumstances. Look for this in the last chapter of the book of Job. Job, goaded by his friends, has said all kinds of wild things in his distress, coming back again and again to the thought that he wishes he could talk face to face with God and make sure that God at least understood his complaint. Job has never been told that it was God demonstrating to Satan that Job would honor him by faithfulness, in spite of what Satan might do. We know that; Job doesn’t.
Now, however, comes Job 38:1 where we read, “Then the LORD answered Job”—yes, answered him in the sense of responding to him regarding the things Job had been speaking (praying, complaining) about. But “the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind”—an emblem of his immeasurable and inscrutable power—and his answer was not the explanation Job had cried out for. The Lord said: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; / I will question you, and you make it known to me. / Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God then batters Job with a series of questions making the point that God knows what he is doing throughout his world in relation to all that happens. All events, circumstances and realities are under God’s control and always have been. God asks Job over and over: What do you know about all of this? Are you able to measure my wisdom in managing creation? And, within the created order, the animal kingdom in particular? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you control the wild donkey? The ostrich? The horse? The hawk? Behemoth (probably the hippopotamus)? Leviathan (probably the crocodile)? And so it goes on for four chapters (38—41) with a total of some four dozen questions, all rubbing in God’s point.
What God is saying to Job essentially is, “Look, you see how much wisdom I have at my command when it comes to creating and managing my world. You see some of the wonderful creatures that I have made. You couldn’t handle them, but I can and I do. Every action of theirs is under my control. Now, if I govern the natural order in my providence in this way, can’t you believe that the same wisdom is operating in your case? Can’t you believe that I know what I’m doing when I expose you to what you have been through?” That is God’s counter-question to Job about the questions Job has been raising. And Job has an answer to it, which is a great answer, all the greater for its brevity. “Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? / I lay my hand on my mouth” (Job 40:4). Job’s hand on his mouth is a wordless gesture of humility. Job will not say any more; rightly, he feels small, for compared with God, so he is.
Let us be clear: it can be spiritually healthy to feel small, as the bigness and complexity of things that God has created sometimes makes us do, and deliberately to fill our mind with thoughts of the greatness of God’s wisdom, power, and love. Have you ever stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon? It is impossible to do so without a powerful rearrangement of your sense of size. In that awesome setting, you simply feel tiny. That feeling is a this-world counterpart of what God is teaching Job as he takes him to the zoo (so to speak) and talks to him about the wonders of the world’s animals and birds, all of which he himself invented and controls. Small—the sense of being in every way limited—is healthy in the presence of God. It seems clear that when Job realized that and turned back from agonizing self-dramatizing to simple, humble, patient trust in his God through thick and thin, he found peace.
And so we live, passing through life’s ups and downs. Nobody’s Christian existence is wine and roses all the way. Some of us experience horrible losses, even bordering on the losses of Job: belongings lost, health lost, human respectability lost, friends lost and (perhaps most painful) spouse and/or children lost. These losses are not beyond the bounds of possibility for any of us and are actuality for some of us. At such times the only strategy is to pray out our complaints to God, following the Scripture models. But through divine blessings, even as we complain, we will realize our own smallness before almighty God, creator and ruler of the universe, and our own lack of understanding compared with his own omniscient and benevolent wisdom. And so our complaint prayers are not mere self-centered whining that life has not treated us right. Instead, our complaints are those of dependent children, running in fear and in hurt to our almighty Father, who rules all things. God, if he chooses, will relieve our pain. And if, for nurture’s sake, he chooses not to do so, even then we are to snuggle and nestle into his arms, knowing that Father God loves us, hears our complaints and will love us now and forever. Two stanzas, the first and the last, from one of John Newton’s homespun hymns thus say all that finally needs saying:
Be gone, unbelief! My Savior is near,
And for my relief will surely appear.
By faith let me wrestle, and he will perform;
With Christ in the vessel I smile at the storm.
Since all that I meet will turn to my good,
The bitter is sweet, the medicine food;
Though painful at present, ‘twill cease before long,
And then, O how pleasant the conqueror’s song!
One last thought, as a postscript to the truth that Newton tells. C. S. Lewis’s last novel is titled Till We Have Faces. Many (including himself) have regarded it as his best, though the very subtlety and skill of the storytelling makes it an elusive piece of reading (you have been warned!). In the long first part, the ugly queen of a pre-Christian pagan kingdom writes her life story as a complaint against the gods.
I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the very beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge.
Secure in what later will appear as self-centered and self-righteous self-ignorance, she tells how this god robbed her of her beautiful sister, and what came after. Then in the brief second part, she tells of a visionary experience through which she began to see how unsuspected possessiveness had corrupted her love for her sister and for another person too, and to realize how much real unreality there had been in her life thus far. Her cherished feeling of injured innocence dissolves away.
I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. . . . How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
The true self-knowledge, indeed the real selfhood, that is needed for true, close fellowship with God (so Lewis is indicating) in many cases only comes through the experiences of pain, loss, grief and hurting that initially move us to complain.
I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.
The last page of Till We Have Faces tells us that the queen was found dead, with the final sentence of her manuscript unfinished. Already, so the wording intimates, she is facing death with equanimity. She now has her face; she is ready to meet her god. (An equivalent Christian story would, of course, spell “god” with a capital G.)
Lewis’s understanding of how the God who rarely explains himself to us yet works to turn believers into increasingly real persons is, we think, the proper footnote to Newton’s simple spiritual song of peace and hope. Beyond the darkness of our complaints light will shine on us at last. As the children’s chorus prompts us to put it, we will count our blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise us what the Lord has done.