With Broken Heart and Bitter Grief

A reason to groan

    I’ve been reading through Ezekiel lately. It’s a tough book. Full of fire and brimstone. Little hope. Little cheer. Best to digest it in small chunks to keep it from being too depressing.

    Chapter 21. God’s word comes to Ezekiel, declaring disaster for Jerusalem. Judgment is coming. The sword of the Lord will cut off both the righteous and the wicked (verse 3). It will be brutal. Many will suffer. And it will be perfectly just. So shouldn’t Ezekiel simply accept it? Shouldn’t he respond with, “Your will be done. Blessed be the name of the Lord”?

    The evangelically correct would declare that Ezekiel should keep a stiff upper lip and accept God’s pronouncement as fully deserved. But what does God say? “Therefore groan, son of man! Groan before them with broken heart and bitter grief” (Ezekiel 21:6). No stoic acceptance of the tragedy to come.

    I love this God who can take the necessary and right steps to correct and punish His people and yet feel the pain of their suffering. Like a loving Father. I was reading Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, a few weeks ago. God chose him to convey His message of judgment. In the book of Lamentations, Jeremiah expresses his deep pain and anguish over God’s actions. I’m not sure that the evangelically correct would choose such a man. They’d want someone who would relate to God’s righteous will, rather than to the people’s suffering.

Compassion for sinners

   Kind of like the attitude of many American Christians today toward those in our culture who choose to defy God in their lifestyles. Homosexuals, transgendered, drug addicts. Let them suffer. They deserve it. Have no compassion. Bring on the judgment.

    The people in Jeremiah’s day were blatantly rebelling against God, too. God declared His judgment. Jeremiah wept. Maybe God chose Jeremiah because he best expressed His heart. Maybe God Himself was feeling that same deep pain and anguish even for those who defiled His name. Maybe we as Christians need to give up our desire for judgment, and groan with broken heart and bitter grief for those who are suffering even as they reject God’s teaching.

Job's example

    I struggle in church when we sing, “Blessed be Your Name” with smiling faces. “You give and take away. . . . Blessed be Your name.” It’s not the words, which are scriptural, that bother me. It’s the evangelically-correct attitude. Smile as if there’s no pain in the taking away. Smile as if God doesn’t expect me to feel any sense of loss. Smile in denial of the broken heart and bitter grief. No groaning allowed.

    Where do these words come from? Job 1:21. Job has just lost everything at once, including his seven children. Do you think he was smiling and carefree as he uttered them? Far from it. He “rent his robe, and shaved his head, and fell upon the ground” (v. 20, RSV). He was hurting deeply and expressing it freely, even as he worshipped God (same verse). In case there’s any doubt about his emotional state, he spends chapter 3 cursing the day he was born and asking why we have to suffer. He ends it by saying, “I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil” (3:26).

    Is this the proper attitude of a follower of the God of the Bible? What does God say? At the beginning of the book He describes Job as His servant, blameless and upright (1:8). In the end He tells Job’s friends, “My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (42:8).

    Of course we shouldn’t remain stuck in our brokenness and grief. At some point we’ll need to move on, to accept God’s comfort and healing, to experience His grace in seeing us through and bringing a smile back to our faces, to comfort others as He has comforted us (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). But first, when the pain is raw, when it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, we need to follow God’s instructions to Ezekiel and groan with broken heart and bitter grief.