There is very little justice in the world. But that’s old news. People have felt from time immemorial that they were not being treated fairly. Just about everybody thinks that they deserve a better deal than they’re getting. There is very little justice in the world. But that’s old news.
Now you can either get frustrated with that, or you can shrug it off. You can either become a bitter and cynical person, who gripes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; or you can accept reality and go on. But what you cannot do, what is unacceptable, is to stuff down inside forever the feelings that go along with injustice. If you think the world is replete with injustice, you can grumble about it or you can decide to work for something better; but the one thing you cannot do is hold all that resentment in. Feelings have to go somewhere.
So do not ask whether bad things are going to happen to good people. They will. Do not even bother with why bad things happen to good people. They just do. The laws of nature are very seldom suspended for anybody. My father-in-law, who was a pastor in Britain during the war, liked to laugh about the ladies from across the street who always wanted to crowd into his bomb shelter when there was an air raid. They had their own shelter, but they thought they might be safer close to the pastor! Well, not really. Bad things happen to all kinds of good people.
But when they happens to you, or to someone close to you, what will you do with that? How will you speak and where will you take your complaint?
We Christians have a stock answer. We know the correct answer to that. We say, “Take it to the Lord in prayer.” We say, “What a fellowship, what a joy divine, safe and secure from all alarms.” Our response is, “I must tell Jesus all of my trials, I cannot bear these burdens alone.” Loud and clear, when bad things happen, pray and pray some more. Pray.
But what if, to be honest about it, that doesn’t help? What if prayer makes no difference? Your prayer bounces off the ceiling, like talking to the air. What if prayer feels like my phone call the other day: I was talking happily to one of you, just gabbing on about things, and after about five minutes I realized that I was getting no response. “Hello .. hello ...” Nothing. Not even a dial tone. Cut off. I haven’t figured out yet whether it was a bad phone connection or you just had had enough! But cut off! What if heaven itself cuts you off. The ultimate cutoff is to pray and feel no response, no answer, not even a presence.
There is no more anguished cry in the whole of Scripture than the 22nd Psalm. Its shriek of abandonment echoes across the centuries and sends cold chills up the spine. If ever there was a soul in torment, this is it This is not just the winter of discontent; this is a blizzard of despair.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.
I remember that as a boy I would get in trouble with my father. I would plead and beg. I would clamor to get out of being punished; I thought that punishment was a bad thing happening to a rather good little boy. And I would be angry that my father just wouldn’t hear me.
Behind this Psalm something bad, awesomely bad, has happened to a good person. It is bad because it erodes the spirit, it eats at the soul, it cracks open his relationship with God. This is horrifying! When bad things happen to good people and they cannot even get God to hear them? What shall we say about that?
I
First, when bad things happen to good people, prayers of anguish are not one of the bad things. Prayers of anguish are a good thing. Let’s make it clear that it is not wrong to pray with complaints. God will receive the prayer of complaint. God is big enough to handle this kind of prayer.
I’m struck with how many times the Psalmist comes through in this prayer with his worries and his woes. How up and down he is! He complains, and then he remembers God’s goodness. He complains again, and then he remembers how God brought him up as a child. Then right back to complaining once again, before he cries out in sheer desperation. Three times in one psalm he lapses into extravagant descriptions of his plight. Three times he cries out in the dark night of his soul. He just keeps at it. He voices his heart. He won’t shy away from his hurts.
That’s the first lesson some of us need to learn. That what we feel, we feel, and God can take it. God can handle it. God is big enough. Don’t edit your prayers. Don’t protect God from your gripes and your grumbling. God wants your honesty.
Several years ago someone told me about his wife’s final illness. She knew she was going to die. Her heart had cried out for healing, but it wasn’t coming. One afternoon she asked her husband to read her the psalms. He asked, “Which ones? Is there a favorite psalm?” She said, “Read them all. Just start at the beginning and read them all.”. Well, he did, the first psalm, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked”. The great eighth psalm, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!”. On he went; the nineteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-first. But then, my friend says, he hesitated. He looked at the next psalm, this one, the twenty-second, and he decided to skip it. Too grim, too heavy. How much more lovely to read the twenty-third, everyone’s favorite, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” But he was interrupted by the patient on the bed. “You skipped one. Don’t skip it. Read it.” The cry of complaint; she knew she needed it.
What a great instinct! We do need to air our grievances before God. We do need to get out the bitter with the sweet. If you feel it, say it, say it to God. God is big enough to handle it, your heart needs to let go of it. When bad things happen to good people, cry out, scream it out, pray fiercely. Insist that God hear. God wants your honesty.
II
But now, let’s also learn that God has given us some reserves to go on when it feels as though He is not listening. When bad things happen to good people, they find that God has given them experiences and memories to keep them going.
I asked you to read this Psalm with me in a particular way. I read the downers, you read the uppers. I read the words of despair, you read the words of memory and of hope. Several times we went back and forth, up and down, the Psalmist first feeling so bad and so alone, but then, as you read them, these passages when he remembers. He remembers that God was there for the people of Israel in the past. He remembers that God brought him safely through his childhood. He remembers that God rescued him from other dangers. And so every time he goes down, there is something planted deep down in his memory that brings him back up. Every time he is tempted to give up on God, he thinks of a moment when God didn’t give up on him. “Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down. Sometimes I’m almost to the ground, oh, yes, Lord.”
You see, our problem is that we live in the here and now. We live in this moment. We want things to be the way we want them, now. Right now. We don’t remember what God has done in the past, and so we don’t trust him for the future.
You know the old saying that God answers prayer in three way?. You know this one. It’s an old truism. That God answers prayer with ”Yes” or “No” or “Wait.” Well, I heard the other day a little take-off on the idea of waiting. What if prayer was like those voice mail menus you get on the telephone. “You have reached heaven’s prayer center. Your call is important to us. If you are calling to praise the Lord, press 1. If you are calling to confess your sins, press 2. If you are calling to intercede for a sick friend, press 3. If you are calling to ask for something for yourself, press 4.” All right, let’s press 4. “If your call is for a spiritual gift, press 1. If your call is for guidance, press 2. If your request is for patience, press 911.” Well, you get the point. Sometimes God says wait. Sometimes God says wait and clarify what you really need. Wait and see what God will do. Wait and remember what God has already done. When bad things happen to good people, good people draw on their reserves to get them through.
A friend of mine lost his wife after a long bout with cancer; it was a terrible, devastating time. And not long thereafter, great God, why we cannot begin to say, his adult daughter also contracted cancer and died. Now my friend was a man of prayer. But who really could pray coherently in a time like that? Who could get out anything but cries of pain and despair? Later, however, my friend told some of us that in those dark hours there came flooding back into his mind Scripture verses he had learned a long time earlier, verses which he thought he had forgotten .. but now, in the moment of need, they were a resource, they were a presence and a power. Memory. We need to touch our memories of the goodness and the love of God, because when bad things happen to good people, we may be so caught up in the grip of the moment that we don’t see the God who has already been there for us. But if we can remember, we can go on.
III
Finally, let’s recognize that spiritual torment is like many other forms of sickness. You may have to hit rock bottom before you can start back up. You may have to deteriorate to a frightening extent before you can begin to heal. And it may be that sometimes God appears not to hear us, God stays at a distance from us, in order to force us to know how much we need Him.
Did you notice, as we read this Psalm together, that the Psalmist seems to get a little more desperate, a little more frantic, with each speech? The more he cries out, the more he deteriorates. If I were doing a psychological profile on this man, I would say that he is falling off the deep edge. He began by complaining to God that God seems very far away. But then his next word is much worse:
But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me
Now, keep going. Just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does. As one of our three-year-olds said, It gets worser. First the Psalmist felt unheard by God; then he felt scorned and mocked by everybody; and now his anxiety gets so bad that he has physical symptoms. Sounds like depression to me:
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws ... My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones.
Do you know what that feels like? How the load gets so heavy that you just feel all poured out and wasted? Exhausted, drained, your get-up-and-go has already got-up-and-gone? Despair is physically draining. And, in fact, if you’ve been hit by a load of bad stuff, you will get so tired that you will be vulnerable to almost anything.
But the point is that sometimes we have to hit rock bottom before we can start back up. Like the alcoholic or the drug user who has to get so needy, in so much trouble, before he will admit that he needs help ... in much the same way, God answers us with silence until we find out how much we need Him. I am persuaded that God’s silence is a part of His strategy to reach us. God may in fact send us to the edge of hell ... that’s what hell is, you know, separation from God; hell has very little to do with licking flames and demons with pitchforks .. God may send us to the edge of hell, the edge of separation, because He sees that we are so convinced that we can do for ourselves. We have never admitted that we need Him. When bad things happen to good people, it may be that it is precisely because they are good, and they have trusted so much in their own goodness, that they need to find out who is in charge. When bad things happen to good people, God is waiting for them to get off their goodness kicks and to come to Him in sheer faith.
Conclusion
But our reading of this Psalm would not be complete if we did not see that finally, in God’s own time and for God’s own purposes, God hears the cries of the desperate. God listens to the prayers of the anguished; in His own time, for His own purposes, He brings relief.
Finally the Psalmist is able to say,
For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hid his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.
God brings relief. He hears our cries. How do I know? Where is my evidence?
I know because of someone else who spoke this Psalm, and spoke it in the most terrible moment in human history. I know because of a bad thing that happened to a good person. He hung on a Cross, the best of us done in by the worst of us. Talk about bad things happening to good people! Nothing surpasses this: that the son of God, who knew no sin, was made to die a criminal’s death! What did he pray? What prayer came from his heart? This very psalm, these pointed words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Even Jesus Christ suffered the estrangement, distance from God, just as we do! Jesus Christ, at the very side of the Father, knew the awesome, terrible, complete, and utter loneliness of not being heard by God.
But ... but ... three days later he saw the travail of his soul and was satisfied. Three days later, God heard His cry and brought him to life. Three days later, His anguish was heard and was turned into victory. God heard His cries and brought Him through. Hallelujah!!
Whenever I read the 22nd Psalm, a little scenario plays out in my mind. I think of Jesus, speaking that word from the cross. And then I can hear, in the sound stage of my mind, my own father singing the solo from the cantata, “The Seven Last Words”. “God my father, God my father, oh, why hast thou forsaken me?” I not only can hear my father’s voice singing that music; I can see the tear in his eye as he would think about the sufferings of Christ. But I remember something else too. I remember that as a boy I would get in trouble with my father. I would plead and beg. I would clamor to get out of being punished; I thought that punishment was a bad thing happening to a rather good little boy. And I would be angry that my father just wouldn’t hear me. But at the end of the day there was always his quiet climb up the stairs to my room, where he would talk with me and kneel and pray for me. And I would know, at the end of the day, that indeed I had been heard. And I was satisfied.
When bad things happen to good people, if they will go ahead and complain; if they will draw on their memories, and if they will wait, they will be satisfied with the Father’s presence.
