Momentary

Psalms 88:1–9

“LORD, You are the God who saves me; day and night I cry out to You. May my prayer come before You; turn Your ear to my cry. I am overwhelmed with troubles and my life draws near to death. I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like one without strength. I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You remember no more, who are cut off from your care. You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. Your wrath lies heavily on me; You have overwhelmed me with all Your waves. You have taken from me my closest friends and have made me repulsive to them. I am confined and cannot escape; my eyes are dim with grief. I call to You, LORD, every day; I spread out my hands to You.”

We understand God’s sovereignty and so we realise that our sufferings and challenges have been allowed by God for His purposes in our lives. Our eyes may be dimmed with grief (v. 9), that we lose perspective, but God is ultimately good and He has His ways that we may not grasp especially in emotionally troubled landscapes. At church, I had been amazed at a quote from 19th Century Russian existentialist philosopher and author Dostoyevsky on suffering and evil, “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.” He said not only to forgive, but even justify! That’s pretty huge, and it supports the idea that we can have faith that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil,pain, and suffering in our lives, in the world, He is, after all, the foundation and standard of objective moral values under the lens of which we evaluate our experience. Indeed the Apostle Paul wrote, “therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, yet our inner self is being renewed day by day. For our light and temporary affliction is producing for us an eternal glory that far outweighs our troubles. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (II Cor 4:16–18).” When people themselves who have endured so much of suffering and have been at the receiving end of evil trust God in spite of what they have experienced, with all the comforts of our world today, how much more us? That is not to minimise our hurts, fears, and frustrations (our capacities are different) but like the psalmist, we can cry out to God (v. 1) even amidst what appears to be meaningless hardships or even cycles upon cycles of trials that come upon our lives, we pray and express our heartfelt hurts to Him. We can trust, also, that He is making a new thing in us, deserving of His glory; He will right all wrongs eventually as promised, and in this life, we not only can endure, but with the LORD, overcome!