The Depth of Affliction

So far in this book, I’ve had more to say about our enemy, Satan, than I’ve said in my whole life thus far. I’ve known Christians who seem obsessed with Satan, attributing their inability to find a good parking space to his direct opposition. I’ve tended to the other extreme, acknowledging his existence but marginalizing the fact that we live our Christian lives in opposition to a terrible enemy.

In affliction, it becomes painfully clear that we have such an enemy to contend with. The troubles themselves can be attributed to many things. Financial troubles, for example, can be attributed to poor choices by ourselves or others, poor health, the world economy, or being born into a poor family. Broken relationships can be attributed to external conflicts, differences in upbringing or disposition, and past sins by ourselves or others.

But whatever the root cause of our troubles, they seem to energize Satan who torments us with lies, threats, and accusations. He points to our misery as proof that we are not loved by God. At times, our misery is so great that he seems to be telling the truth.

Those who are dearly loved by God sometimes find themselves in profound misery. The bitterness of our circumstances creates bitter misery. But in such times, we are no less loved by God than at any other time and no less loved than those enjoying happier circumstances. At every moment, God is zealously working for our good, motivated by the love that moved him to make Christ sin for us so that we could become the righteousness of God.

Even those who accept this can be surprised by the depth of the misery in which God’s dearly loved children sometimes find themselves. Satan will point to the depth of our misery as proof that God doesn’t love us. Granting that Christians sometimes suffer, he’ll point to the depth of our suffering and say, “but they don’t suffer like this.” This, too, is a lie designed to discourage and paralyze us.

The truth that comes from God makes it clear that God’s dearly loved children sometimes suffer terribly.

Elijah suffered terrible mental anguish while he was running from Israel’s king and queen, who wanted to kill him. Just a few days earlier, God had given Elijah the courage to confront the false prophets who supported them as they abused their power and led God’s people in the worship of false gods. Despite the dramatic intervention of God on that day, Elijah was filled with despair as he fled.

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he prayed that he might die, and said, "It is enough! Now, LORD, take my life, for I am no better than my fathers!” And there he went into a cave, and spent the night in that place; and behold, the word of the LORD came to him, and He said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah? [1 Kings 19:4, 9]

Elijah played a unique role in his generation, speaking for God as he confronted the leaders of a wayward nation. But as they sought his life, he showed that, in fact, he was just an ordinary man who was being used in extraordinary ways. He ran, he hid, and he lost hope. He lost his desire to live and prayed to die.

God’s people sometimes feel like this in times of great trial.

I’m not an Old Testament scholar and I haven’t studies the sociology of ancient cultures, but I have to believe that hiding in a cave is negative in all cultures and at all times. Elijah sat by a brook and prayed to die. Then, he went to a cave and sat down.

David seems to have spent a lot of time hiding in caves. One such occasion is mentioned in 1 Samuel 22:1, “David therefore departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam.” It was in this cave that David wrote Psalm 57, where he says he will hide in the shadow of God’s wings until his calamities have passed by.

Certainly the gloomiest of the Psalms is Psalm 88. This psalm was written by Heman the Ezrahite, a wise and respected man who lived at the same time as Solomon. In describing the wisdom of Solomon, 1 Kings 4:31 says that he was even wiser than Heman. Yet this good and wise man wrote this gloomiest of psalms, which begins: O LORD, God of my salvation, I have cried out day and night before You. Heman still has faith that God is the not only the God of salvation but the God of his salvation. But there is no other positive language in this psalm that speaks of a soul full of troubles in a man put by God in the lowest of pits, alone in darkness and terror.

Charles Spurgeon, commenting on this psalm, spoke of himself when he wrote that “he who now feebly expounds these words knows within himself more than he would care or dare to tell of the abysses of inward anguish.”

Like Elijah, this psalmist seemed to look forward to his own death. “It is a sad case,” writes Spurgeon, “when our only hope lies in the direction of death, our only liberty of spirit amid the … horrors of corruption.” Spurgeon goes on to write about the depths of sorrow and sadness in which God’s children may sometimes be found:

How low the spirits of good and brave men will sometimes sink. Under the influence of certain disorders everything will wear a somber aspect, and the heart will dive into the profoundest depths of misery. It is all very well for those who are in robust health and full of spirits to blame those whose lives are sicklied over with the pale cast of melancholy, but the evil is as real as a gaping wound, and all the more hard to bear because it lies so much in the region of the soul that to the inexperienced it appears to be a mere matter of fancy and diseased imagination. Reader, never ridicule the nervous and hypochondriacal, their pain is real; though much of the evil lies in the imagination, it is not imaginary.

The inward assaults of Satan are no less dangerous and wearying than those he sends in our outward circumstances. Heartache can be more crippling than an amputated leg or a broken arm. Though our torments lie in the realm of the imagination, they are not imaginary. Nor are they of our own making.

Commenting on Psalm 40, Spurgeon writes:

In the grim gloom the soul is haunted with phantom fears, while horror peoples the place which is empty of human beings; the heart is worried with evil imaginations, and pierced with arrows of distress; grief takes hold of the spirit, and alarm conquers hope.

Godly people sometimes find themselves in deep sorrow. To those blessed with inexperience in such things, the psalm and Spurgeon’s commentary sounds exaggerated. “Those who know this bitterness by experience will sympathize,” writes Spurgeon, “but from others it would be idle to expect pity, nor would their pity be worth the having if it could be obtained.”

Few may sympathize with those who suffer so deeply. Few will, but one is enough, since that one is Christ himself. Spurgeon notes that “[i]t is an unspeakable consolation that our Lord Jesus knows this experience right well, having, with the exception of the sin of it, felt it all and more than all in Gethsemane when he was exceeding sorrowful even unto death.”

In your deepest of sufferings, you are not alone. Those used by God in great ways knew great anguish. Christ himself knew the feeling of being sorrowful even unto death. Our high priest is not one who is unable to understand and sympathize with our troubles. No, Christ himself was tempted in every way that we are. The only difference is, he faced it without sin. He did this for us.

In the depths of sorrow and misery, remember that Christ himself suffered the very same way. You are not alone in your misery.

Satan will point to the depth of your affliction as proof that God no longer loves you and maybe never did. But the Bible was written by godly men moved by the Holy Spirit. Psalm 88 was written by such a man. David Dickson, a Sixteenth Century Scottish pastor wrote this about Psalm 88:

Such as are most heartily afflicted in spirit, and do flee to God for reconciliation and consolation through Christ, have no reason to suspect themselves, that they are not esteemed of and loved as dear children, because they feel so much of God's wrath: for here is a saint who hath drunken of that cup (as deep as any who shall read this Psalm,) here is one so much loved and honored of God, as to be a penman of Holy Scripture, and a pattern of faith and patience unto others.

Rather than being a sign of God’s disfavor, extraordinary suffering may be evidence of the strength of God in the sufferer. Dickson writes of this, too, in his commentary on Psalm 88:

They are not all men of weak minds and shallow wit who are acquainted with trouble of spirit, and borne down with the sense of God's wrath; for here is Heman, one amongst the wisest of all Israel, (and inferior to none for wisdom, except to Solomon alone), under the heaviest exercise we can imagine possible for a saint. …When it pleaseth God to exercise a man of parts, of great gifts and graces, he can make his burden proportionable to his strength, and give him as much to do with the difficulties he puts him to, as a weaker man shall find in his exercise, as appeareth in the experience of Heman.

In other words, if God allows suffering to come in proportion to the strength he has given us, great suffering may be taken as a sign of great grace. To whom much has been committed, much will be required. These words should bring comfort to those who feel like God, in their trials, is asking a lot of them. It is a token that much has been committed to you.

It is another evidence that you are not alone.