If we are honest, we know that sometimes our greatest pain comes from dealing with the consequences of unfaithfulness and sin—whether our own or that of someone close to us. And when we find ourselves there—and we will—Lamentations is our handbook.

As we wrap up our four-week series, Redeeming Trauma, we need to pay attention to the first chapter of the book of Lamentations, which guides in how to think about extreme suffering which may be part of God’s faithful discipline. The book of Lamentations is a testimony to the sovereign faithfulness of God in judgment and the enduring mercies of God in the face of extreme suffering.
Lamentations is a gift because it reveals in shocking language that sin does not deliver on its promises. Sin’s pleasure is only for a moment. Charles Swindoll writes, “[Lamentations] is a mute reminder that sin, in spite of all its allurement and excitement, carries with it heavy weights of sorrow, grief, misery, barrenness, and pain. It is the other side of the “eat, drink, and be merry coin.”
Jeremiah’s lament over the destruction of Jerusalem leads us on the painful path to God’s mercy. We, like Jeremiah, live with the temporary consequences of living in a sinful world. How do we deal with sin’s harm in us, among us, and around us? There are times we must see difficult circumstances as God’s discipline or training rather than the dealings of blind fate (Hebrews 12:5–11).
The three weeks we spent in Psalm 22 brought us near to the heart of God. They brought us near to the heart of the suffering Savior, who understands all our suffering—and can heal what hurts and restore what sin ruins. However, my role as a preacher and shepherd also requires me to warn us of the judgment that will come if we refuse to repent.
When we finally get serious about turning away from our sin and following God, the way might be difficult for a long time as the Holy Spirit exposes sin in our hearts. This is the reason we are ending this brief series by looking at the relationship of sin to extreme suffering.
Not All Personal Suffering Is Caused by Personal Sin
Please understand me! I am not saying that all personal suffering results from personal sin. If you’ve been a reader of this blog for any length of time, then you know that is not what I teach because that is not what Scripture teaches. We do not want to be like Job’s friends, who were called miserable counselors because their knee-jerk reaction to suffering was to blame the sufferer (Job 16:2).
However, we also don’t want to swing the pendulum to the other unbiblical extreme, which says, “Because God is loving and gracious and forgiving, he will prevent us from reaping what we have sown.” Extreme suffering can get complicated. Even if we are not the cause of it, we typically complicate it with our sinful response. So, suffering is often a muddy mixture.
Sometimes, God uses the natural consequences of our sin to humble us, and soften our hearts, so that we will be repent—and be restored to joyful obedience and peaceful fellowship with him. God is faithful to discipline those who belong to Him, and merciful to forgive and restore us when we repent.
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According to Hebrews, it is by faith that we understand. And of course, if Christianity is actually true, that understanding requires knowledge of the invisible. By faith we know who God is, the truth that He created all things in the beginning and will judge all things in the future, and even present unseen realities like our union with Christ, our nature as Image of God, and the moral order. These invisible realities and their interconnections are at the heart of Christianity. Faith, therefore, is necessary for grasping the Christian vision of the world: it is by faith that we understand reality as it really is.

The things I love deeply are also the things that irk me most easily. And most profoundly. This makes sense: when we love, we care. (Likewise, indifference breeds apathy.) For nerds like me, this applies especially to books.
Let me first say that I love Luc Ferry’s little gem A Brief History of Thought. It’s a gem because it succinctly if simplistically traces through the whole history of the Western intellectual tradition by articulating four major epochs; and it does this by charting the ligaments between metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. So, so helpful.
But as this is the internet, we must race past vague, general praise toward concrete, specific, detailed, brash criticism.
Allow me, dear reader, to explain what irks me about Ferry’s book. Ferry thinks of philosophy as an attempt to construct a theory of salvation without recourse to divine revelation. In religious traditions, the divine brings salvation to humanity. In philosophical traditions, humanity seeks salvation on its own. In the introduction, Ferry puts it this way: “Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far as our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.” (p. 6) I happen to think this is an unhelpful way to differentiate religion and philosophy, but what really irks me is that word ‘blind’…
Ferry is, of course, not alone in insinuating that religious faith is an agent of blindness, that to have faith is to shut oneself off from some aspect of reality, that faith requires persistent belief without evidence or even in the fact of evidence to the contrary. Both outside the church and, more troublingly, inside, Christians are often told that the claims they are meant to hold most dear, the claims they ought to order their lives around, are either irrational or, at best, a-rational. Anyway, the central, credal claims of Christians throughout history aren’t subject to the sort of careful, reasoned investigation that, in the physical universe known to humanity, only humans can undertake. We must simply believe.
1. Seeing the Invisible
The Scriptures paint a different picture of faith’s relationship to sight.
In the letter we know as 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul connects faith in God to Christians’ ability to suffer well. He writes:
For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. … Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believe, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. … So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. … So we are always of good courage. … [F]or we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor. 4:6-10, 13-14, 16-18; 5:6a, 7)
Notice that Paul runs headlong into a connection between faith and knowledge: we believe by faith, and so speak, because we know we will be raised. This connection between faith and knowing, which is not unique to Paul, eliminates the idea that faith is opposed to knowing, and therefore to reasonable belief. Notice that Paul includes the faith-sight contrast in this very context. In whatever sense faith is opposed to sight, faith simply is not opposed to knowledge.
We can go further.
The author of Hebrews toys with the idea of knowing by faith through seeing the unseen as well. Moses is said to have endured the wrath of Pharaoh “as seeing him [that is, God] who is invisible”. (11:23) Moses looked to his unseen future reward. (11:22)
Hebrews goes beyond Paul: “By faith we understand”, it says. (11:3) The things understood are themselves invisible: the creation of the world by the Word, the promises of God fulfilled, Jesus seated at the right hand of God. This goes further than mere knowledge because understanding requires knowledge but is more than knowledge. Understanding is knowledge organized and applied. To understand is to systematize what you know and be able to utilize that knowledge in the right circumstances.
2. Understanding by Faith
In the context of religion—or, more broadly, any perspective on the whole of reality—understanding involves not just knowledge of certain religious facts, but the systematization of those facts.
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If we do not accept the symbolic truth of the Exodus account, then the propositional truths in the Bible diminish in potency. If the Bible student does not understand that the Exodus is the redemptive story of the Old Testament, then how can the Bible student understand the significance of redemptive story of Christ in the New Testament? If the Bible student cannot understand the typology of Moses, how can the Bible student appreciate the greater Moses? If the Bible student does not understand the narrative of the Exodus, there is little chance to understanding the Book of Hebrews.

Revelation is generally divided into two categories, general and special. Special revelation is revelation revealed through the writers of the Bible; general being the revealed truth of God through nature.
Within special revelation, a distinction should be made between propositional truth and narrative truth. Propositional truth is akin to the didactic truths written by Paul in his Epistles. Reformed people and evangelicals broadly are drawn to propositional statements in the Bible. They lend themselves to tweets, bumper stickers, catch phrases. John 3:16 is the paradigmatic example. However, large swaths of Scripture are not written propositionally.
RC Sproul called a certain hermeneutic relating to this appeal to catch phrase Christianity “lucky dipping.” In his example of lucky dipping, a Bible student opens the Bible and reads “Then he went off and hanged himself.” (Matthew 27:5) The hypothetical Bible student then flips to another page of Scripture and reads “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:37) Adopting a “lucky dipping” hermeneutic is not advisable. To understand Scripture, it is necessary to understand the metanarrative of the Bible.
In the history of special revelation, Paul and his didactic style comes at the end of special revelation as a kind of capstone to Moses, the prophets, and the writers of the New Testament. To be sure, there are didactic texts in the Old Testament and in the Gospels, but the point is that the most distilled didactic teaching is with Paul because he has the benefit of looking back at the Messianic fulfillments of Christ in his death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost.
Accordingly, Christians are left with what to do about narrative. For most of the church, the approach appears to be to ignore it. However, ignoring the metanarrative of Scripture comes at a cost of distorting the propositional truth that the church embraces today and reducing the Christian faith to the affirmation of particular propositional truths instead of an embodied reliance on the person of Christ.
In George Sayour’s article Jordan Peterson and Christianity critiquing Peterson, we have examples of both of the failings described above with the loss of narrative truth. He states, “It is Jung’s archetypes that forms the basis for Peterson’s insights (some of them very good) and classes on Genesis and Exodus.  This spiritualizing of the text yet denying its historicity is nothing knew [sic] either.  Furthermore, he has consistently held out that the Bible is true even if it is not true historically.”
Sayour makes several fair observations critiquing Dr. Peterson’s understanding of the Trinity, the natures of Christ, and the historicity of Genesis and Exodus. However, one problem with Sayour’s article is that, while the historicity of Genesis and Exodus should be affirmed as a matter of orthodoxy, it does not then follow that Peterson’s assertions of the symbolic truth of Genesis and Exodus should be denied. Sayour does not say in the article definitively whether he denies the symbolic truth of the Genesis and Exodus account that Dr. Peterson discusses; however, he also does not affirm the truth of the symbology of Genesis and Exodus. Symbology which Dr. Peterson extensively discusses in his Biblical lectures.
Both aspects, the propositional and the symbolic truth, should be affirmed. The reason why millions of viewers watch Peterson in his Genesis and Exodus lectures is because he has gleaned behind where the church has left truth in the field. Peterson takes the Bible seriously and expounds on truths about the Bible in the same way Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers illuminated important truths. Where intellectuals have spoken truthfully, the church should affirm those statements – especially in those areas where the church has failed to maintain a consistent witness.
Perhaps the church is tempered in engagement of the narrative by a desire to avoid the type of modernist liberalism that the forebearers in the faith fought (e.g., Machen). Symbolism in Scripture is subjective. The church today dislikes subjectivism in part because it lives in postmodern subjectivism culture. So for conservative Christians, best to play it safe and say nothing about narrative which is subjective. However, even during the throes of fights with modernists, Reformed theologians did not distance themselves from understanding special revelation symbolically. The best example is Geerhardus Vos in his book Biblical Theology. The discipline of Biblical theology (better styled, the history of special revelation) engages the narrative in Scripture from the ontological perspective and maps the process of God revealing himself to a people he ultimately redeems.
If we do not accept the symbolic truth of the Exodus account, then the propositional truths in the Bible diminish in potency. If the Bible student does not understand that the Exodus is the redemptive story of the Old Testament, then how can the Bible student understand the significance of redemptive story of Christ in the New Testament? If the Bible student cannot understand the typology of Moses, how can the Bible student appreciate the greater Moses? If the Bible student does not understand the narrative of the Exodus, there is little chance to understanding the Book of Hebrews.
Note that the symbolic truth and the propositional truths in Scripture are not conflicting, but rather complimentary. Moses was a real man who lived in history, and simultaneously Moses is a picture of Jesus Christ. These truths are not inconsistent.
As for the second cost of ignoring narrative truth which reduces truth to abstract disembodied affirmations, Sayour states “To the Christian, Jesus Christ is not an example of one who attained the Logos through his suffering and obedience, but rather He IS the Divine Logos from the beginning of all time.” First, it is true that Jesus always existed and was never created; however, Jesus is also perfected through suffering (Hebrews 2:10). Does this perfection mean that he was not morally pure and righteous from before all time? No, it means that in order to fulfill his role as High Priest, Jesus had to suffer to identify with the people which he was saving and also to atone for the people he was saving (Hebrews 2:17).
If the church does not understand the centrality of the suffering obedience of Christ, it will not understand the imitation of Christ. Christians must connect the narrative of their suffering with the ultimate suffering of Christ. If the church fails to comprehend these matters, it will be left as an empty shell-like figure of orthodox shibboleths and catch phrases. The call of the Christian is to suffer for Christ’s sake; not to act as the keeper of dead truths.
Perhaps this misunderstanding explains why today the church in America has diminished influence on culture and politics. The disembodied affirmations lead to perspectives like ‘Christianity is simply the formula of justification and saving souls. When the barbarians make me recite that Jesus is not Lord or affirm a salvation of works, then God is interested in my cultural engagement.’ However, holding to the full truth of Scripture – both narrative and didactic – leads to a life of obedience and ultimately suffering mirroring that of Christ Jesus. Christ’s claim on the Christian life is without limit. By grappling with the narrative of the Bible, Christians will be transformed and will find that their suffering in Christ has meaning. Dr. Peterson frequently observes the relationship between suffering and meaning, and if Dr. Peterson added the words “in Christ” to his comments, he would have a fuller description of that relationship.
All speakers have wheat and chaff in their statements, and Christians should diligently search the Scriptures to discern speakers’ truth claims. That said, Dr. Peterson has recovered the redemptive narrative that the church has forgotten or neglected. This redemptive narrative, when combined with orthodox systematic theology, has the potential for breathing fresh life into enduring truth.
John Westercamp a member of Southside Reformed Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana