Grieving Over What Grieves God

Getting God’s heart:

The aim of all true Christians is to become more and more Christlike. We want to increasingly think like our Lord, act like our Lord, and speak like our Lord. That means we must press on to know the mind and heart of God. We primarily do this by reading Scripture, praying, and so on.

We need to learn to love what God loves, hate what God hates, and grieve over what God grieves over. I have written about such matters before, including this piece with a number of key scriptural references: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2016/10/26/grieving-godly-grief/

Here I want to focus on just one biblical passage. In Jeremiah 8:18-22 through to 9:1-3, we read about how Jeremiah grieves for his people:

My joy is gone; grief is upon me;
    my heart is sick within me.
Behold, the cry of the daughter of my people
    from the length and breadth of the land:
“Is the Lord not in Zion?
    Is her King not in her?”
“Why have they provoked me to anger with their carved images
    and with their foreign idols?”
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
    and we are not saved.”
For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded;
    I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
    Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of the daughter of my people
    not been restored?
Oh that my head were waters,
    and my eyes a fountain of tears,
that I might weep day and night
    for the slain of the daughter of my people!
Oh that I had in the desert
    a travelers’ lodging place,
that I might leave my people
    and go away from them!
For they are all adulterers,
    a company of treacherous men.
They bend their tongue like a bow;
    falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land;
for they proceed from evil to evil,
    and they do not know me, declares the Lord.

Jeremiah of course is known as the “weeping prophet” – and for good reason. He cared greatly about the people of Israel, and so often he had to bring them strong words of rebuke, divine wrath and judgment. But he could also give them words of hope, comfort and restoration.

One thing many have noted about the book of Jeremiah is how at times it is actually difficult to tell who is speaking: Is it Yahweh or the prophet? Because Jeremiah was so close to God and shared his heart for his people, sometimes it can be unclear just who is speaking in a particular passage.

We need that kind of closeness with God. Yes, we are not inspired as Jeremiah was, but still, our words should so reflect the thoughts and attitude of God that they can appear to come straight from the heart of God. With all that in mind, let me share a bit of commentary on this text.

In his expository commentary, Philip Graham Ryken says this:

The Weeping Prophet proposes a perpetual lamentation, an endless flow of tears for the people of God. And with his lamentation comes confusion. Jeremiah is a jumble of conflicting emotions and contradictory ideas.

 

Consider what the prophet says about his relationship with God. He had the strongest possible sense of God’s presence. He spoke to him directly, as a friend to a friend: “My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick within me” (8:18). But by the time he gets to the middle of the next verse he is starting to doubt whether God is really there for his people at all: “Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” (8:19b). God is supposed to be in Zion because he has chosen Zion for his dwelling place (Psalm 132:13). But where is he? God does not seem to be at home. In his grief, Jeremiah is at once close to God and far away from him. He senses both the presence and the absence of God.

He continues:

Jeremiah’s confusion about his own relationship to God was mirrored by his paradoxical relationship to God’s people. He announced his absolute solidarity with them: “For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded; I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me” (8:21). The prophet identified so strongly with the people of God that their sufferings became his sufferings.

 

Yet just a few verses later Jeremiah decides to abandon them completely:

 

Oh that I had in the desert
    a travelers’ lodging place,
that I might leave my people
    and go away from them!
For they are all adulterers,
    a company of treacherous men. (9:2; cf. Psalm 55:6-8)

 

The prophet seems not to want to stay with the people of God after all. He wants to purchase his own private Heartbreak Hotel, a resort property in the desert far away from his people and their problems.

 

Did Jeremiah love God’s people, or did he hate them? Is God present, or absent? It is all very confusing. But it is not surprising. These confusions and contradictions remind us that Jeremiah wrote from the very depths of despair. Despair troubles the soul and confuses the mind. In his grief, Jeremiah was not always sure what he thought or how he felt.

Ryken goes on to say this: “‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.’ The same might well be said of our own culture. Everything Jeremiah says about his culture is true in these post-Christian times.” He then writes:

Jeremiah’s example teaches that one of the chief duties of the Christian in declining times is lamentation. Jeremiah is a prophet for post-Christian times, and post-Christian times call for lamentation from God’s people.

 

Lamentation does not mean going around wringing one’s hands or living in the nostalgic past. We are not gloomy but joyful, because we know that “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever” (Psalm 125:1). We are full of hope because we know that our salvation is sure in Jesus Christ, who will bring all things in Heaven and on earth under his authority. But at the same time we lament the untruthfulness of our generation. We are moved to tears by the deceptions of our age and the judgment of the age to come. Even as we lament, we ask the Lord to impress us with a still greater sense of the sadness of sin.

 

Our Comforter in Sorrow

 

Lamentation is hard service. The life of Jeremiah teaches how costly it can be to have both a passion for God’s righteousness and a love for God’s people. if Jeremiah had not had a passion for God’s righteousness, he would not have been troubled by human sin. If he had not had a love for God’s people, he would not have been troubled by divine judgment. But because he had both a passion for righteousness and a love for the people of God, he suffered greatly in his soul. He speaks of his sorrow, his faintness of heart, his mourning, his horror, his tears, his weeping, his wailing, and his lamentation. So great was his love for God’s people that when they were crushed, he was crushed.

 

Some may think that these verses are very bitter. They are not bitter; they are bittersweet. They may be bitter because of sin and judgment, but they are sweet because of the consolation of the Holy Spirit.

 

In the midst of his great sorrow Jeremiah had a Comforter. True, there were times when he felt comfortless. On at least one occasion he lamented, “A comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit” (Lamentations 1:16b). Yet what the prophet says in Jeremiah 8 is amazing. There is no other claim like it in the Old Testament: “You who are my Comforter in sorrow,” he sighs (v. 18)….

 

Jeremiah did not suffer alone. He had a companion in grief, a friend in sorrow. He spoke to him directly, as a friend to a friend. We are bound to conclude from the title he uses that his friend was none other than the Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity.

Like Jeremiah, we need to weep for our lost generation. We need to have the tears of God. But also like Jeremiah, we can have the comfort and blessing of God at the same time. Lord please, raise up more Jeremiahs in our day. We certainly need them.

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