John handed me last week A Sacred Sorrow by Michael Card(singer/songwriter and poet extraordinaire) and it has been amazing. The premise is that we as God's people have lost the "language of lament" and that our worship of God is therefore hindered as a result. Card gives portraits of Job, David , Jeremiah and Jesus in order to convince us that God is a God of loving-kindness, hesed in Hebrew, who desires not only to hear our lamenting cries in our suffering but desires to lament with us as well. I have been especially moved by the chapters on Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who cried out to his beloved city to repent, but they would not listen and so from a cave, he writes his Lamentations after watching Jerusalem fall into famine and destruction.
From chapter 18, Lamentations: the Destruction of Jeremiah
"It is good," continues Jeremiah, "to wait quietly for Him," "to hope in him," "to seek Him." A man may be left alone in silence, may have to bury his face in the dust or offer his cheek to the one who would strike him, but promises Jeremiah through his tears, "men are not cast off by the Lord forever." And why? Because so great is His hesed(loving-kindness).
"...But Jeremiah also has the assurance of the God who "looks down from heaven and sees." And what does He see? He sees the tears that have flowed in unceasing streams from the prophets tired eyes. Jeremiah wept and God saw. He cried and God heard. He is not the God who waves the magic wand and makes the Babylonians or the cancer go away. He is the God who sees and hears and enters into the suffering with His suffering people in the wilderness. This God, Jeremiah could have never known in the marble palaces of Jerusalem, only from the windy cave that now overlooks the ruined city.
4 comments:
That verse in Lamentations has become my life verse. "It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." I have it displayed in a windox box in my room and I have treasured it for 3 years now. I am glad that you, too, found encouragement from it. It's sometimes a painful yet sweet truth.
Hello from Chile! I am visiting your blog for the first time, linked from the WOTH magazine/e-mail today. GOD bless!
His Hesed is a Banner over the Ferguson Family....never-ceasing...never coming to an end....New EVERY Morning.
We love you guys!
I just saw that book a few days ago in Wade's office. Good stuff. I've been thinking about how healthy a book like that would be in a culture like ours that in general, doesn't really know much about suffering or lament. I think about the Puritans who just assumed that half of their children would die in infancy - living with the guarantee of that kind of sadness must have made spiritual life something totally different from what we know.
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