It was nice that John Piper mentioned the way that titles change because, as I said during the question and answer session, rather than speaking about “Longing for Wholeness: Chronic Suffering and Christian Hope” — which is what you have as the title — I think I, after the work I did this summer on the Psalms of Lament, I would’ve called this “Breathing Lessons.” One of those breathing lessons is given as the epigraph right below the title with regard to the outline that you have:

Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
     in whose heart are the highways of Zion.

Now, you might think about that for a moment. How do God’s highways end up in our heart? It’s by our meditating on his word. It says, “Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways of Zion.” Then it says:

As they go through the Valley of Baca
     they make it a place of springs (Psalm 84:6).

I’m not going to work from a full manuscript because it seems to me that many of you may be right on the threshold of despair. Disability is a kind of chronic suffering and whether or not it is part of what we know with what John termed “the fellowship of suffering” earlier in terms of our own disability or whether or not it is the disability of someone we love, it can be really, really, really difficult. So what I want to do is I want first of all to try to get us all on board together where we can talk about the different kinds of disability there are, what real disability is, and all that sort of stuff. Then we’ll get the theological picture in place and finally, I’ll give you some of the breathing lessons from these psalms so you can kind of follow along on your outline. I won’t always tell you exactly where we are, but it should be pretty clear as you look it over.

Two Great Lessons in Disability

Two of the lessons that it is most important for Christians to learn is that they must not deny disability. They must not deny disability, and yet there are many writers out there, Christians and otherwise, who want to say that in fact there really is no disability and that no matter how anyone is, that’s just fine and that’s to be celebrated. That is not the biblical view. The biblical view is that there is real disability. I’m going to give you just a couple of passages with regard to each of these so that you can think about this. I’ll sometimes mention a few more so that you could write them down if you want, but scripture recognizes real disability and one passage it does so is Leviticus 19:14. Leviticus 19:14 reads:

You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

Starting to get the picture? There are certain things you would do if you wanted to mistreat the deaf. There are different things that you do if you want to mistreat the blind. In other words, because of their disabilities, real disabilities, their lack of certain abilities, the deaf and the blind are unable to keep specific bad things from happening to them. Because of their real disabilities, the deaf and the blind are unable to keep specific bad things from happening to them and in fact different things with regard to the deaf and the blind. And by the way, this passage in Leviticus is important because it’s not part of the ceremonial law. Really all the way through Scripture, it is clear that God cares for those who are disabled. Nancy did a really nice job dealing with the ceremonial law. We could say even more about why we don’t take that to apply now, why it’s appropriate among other things for me to be speaking to you.

But what we find is that all the way through the scriptures, when we’re not talking about the ceremonial law, which is in a special way supposed to symbolize holiness and wholeness, it is very clear about the care that should be paid to the disabled. There are other passages in the Old Testament that make clear that disability is a real thing. Deuteronomy 27:18 would be one passage, Job 29:15 would be another. A third would be Isaiah 59:9–10.

The Ministry of the Lord’s Anointed

Here are two from the New Testament. Think how these two go together. I’m reading now from Luke 4:18–19, and then I’m going to combine that with Luke 7:18–22. Here’s Luke 4:18–19:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Now, here is Luke 7:18–22:

The disciples of John reported all these things to him. And John, calling two of his disciples to him, sent them to the Lord, saying, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” And when the men had come to him, they said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?’ ” In that hour he healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many who were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.”

Here all the effects of the fall, from disease and demon possession through blindness and lameness and deafness, even to death itself — all of those things are being overcome by our Lord. And so those are taken to be real disabilities because they are that which he will overcome, which his good news proclaims. Even when the concepts of blindness and deafness are functioning metaphorically in Scripture, they involve inabilities that it would at least be better not to have, and quite often it’s much stronger than that.

For instance, in 2 Peter 1:9, Peter tells us that whoever lacks these qualities — the qualities he’s been talking about — is “so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.” So even when blind, this is used metaphorically in the scriptures, it suggests that there’s a real disability that’s involved with it.

More Than a Social Construction

Consequently, disability is not just, as even some Christians would have it, a social construction. There are Christians and many, many others who are not Christian who want to say disability is just a social construction. Krista was actually, when she talked about these various kinds of voices that she can hear with regard to the ways that she shouldn’t think as well of herself as in fact our Lord wants her to think of herself, she, at that point, would be kind of picking up on the social construction of disability, but as she understood her business is to speak about that, the truth of God and to realize that there are real disabilities. They are not mere social constructions.

They are in fact quite often very, very difficult things. There is a social construction of disability as in fact Nancy Eiesland talks about in her book, The Disabled God, that involves able-bodied people singling out those who are disabled for differential treatment. She talks about the way in which there can be a set of stigmatizing values and arrangements that have historically operated against the disabled. No doubt that happens, but even if that were completely gone, still, there would be real disability. Disability is not something that human beings have just constructed. It is in fact part of the way that the world now is because of sin. So in fact, disability is a real thing. It is not something that, in fact, we are supposed to make light of.

Pervasive Disability

Now what does it mean to be disabled? We are disabled to the degree that we cannot properly fulfill the creation mandate as it’s found in Genesis 1:28. Now you realize that that means every one of us is disabled. We are disabled to the degree that we cannot properly fulfill the creation mandate in Genesis 1:28. God speaks to Adam and Eve. He tells them, in fact, to fill the earth and to subdue it in the right sense, not in a bad way. Insofar as something has gone wrong with us in such a way that we are not able either to understand that command and the other commands that God gives and all of his purposes as they’re given to us in Scripture, insofar as we’re not capable of understanding his commands and his purposes and then able to will and to act to perform them, to that degree, we are disabled. We are not what human beings are supposed to be. And of course, that’s going to be true of every one of us because we’re all disabled in various ways.

So disability needs to be thought of in terms of what God originally intended as he created Adam and Eve before sin came into the world and what only his Son, since that sin, has exhibited. Real disability is abnormal. It involves chronic suffering, even if it is not felt to involve such. Kathy Black is another one of the Christian writers who writes on disability but who in fact, doesn’t bring herself to echo the very way that Scripture talks about it. In her book, A Healing Homiletic Preaching and Disability, she wants to suggest that in fact there may be no suffering involved in disability. And so she says this at one point:

Deaf parents are often elated when their child is born deaf. Language and communication flows so much easier. The deaf child will grow up in the rich deaf culture, fluent in sign language, which will be the foundation for learning other languages such as English.

And then this is her conclusion with regard to this:

Life is good and except for discrimination by the outside world, there is virtually no suffering connected with being deaf.

If that last sentence were true, there would be no reason for our God to promise that the deaf will hear in the Eschaton as part of all sorrow and sign fleeing away. So we take disability seriously. We don’t try to close our eyes to it. We may very well be able to say if it weren’t for the disabilities that we’ve rubbed shoulders with either our own disabilities or the disabilities of others, our lives would be a lot less rich. That’s certainly true in my case with regard to my disability. But that doesn’t mean that I deny that it’s a real disability. It doesn’t mean that I deny that there’s an abnormality to the way that I walk. It doesn’t mean that I try to forget what in fact God made human beings to be and only allowed that to be distorted because sin came into the world.

Three Categories of Disability

Now, I’m going to just mention two kinds of disability in one degree of it. We could say it’s more or less three categories of disability because I want to be sure that we’ve got all of you on board here. My disability is one kind of thing. My disability is the kind that leaves normal, mature personhood more or less intact. It is possible for me, in fact, to understand what has happened to me and for me to study the Scriptures and to understand what it is that God would have me learn from this. So I’ve got a kind of disability that in fact allows me still to fulfill the creation mandate. It seems to me that Krista has the same thing.

One of the most magnificent things I’ve seen was her standing up here and by heart — and that’s tremendously important because she has God’s word written in her heart — she gets up and recites Scripture. I can see, I’m watching you, Krista. You’ve got papers in front of you. You’re turning the pages over, but she’s not looking down when she’s repeating all the Scriptures. And in fact, my guess is that my wife would probably say that there’s more chance that Krista is a normal mature person than I am. You see there’s one kind of disability that doesn’t affect normal mature personhood and normal mature personhood means that you’re overall able to fulfill God’s creation mandate. All of us are going to fulfill it incompletely given the fact that we are all touched by sin, but with many of us, our disabilities don’t affect that.

Now then, there is a degree of disability that may stifle our ability to exercise normal, mature personhood. When my body becomes unpredictable because of my paraplegia, I end up experiencing that degree of disability. And what more or less happens then is that my body becomes unpredictable enough that I might say, “Well, gee, I don’t know if I should really accept a chance to speak at thus in such a place because I can’t be sure that I’ll be in the kind of shape where I can do it when it happens.” So you see that in fact isn’t the end of mature normal personhood, but what it means is that it becomes kind of chancey whether or not you can exercise that.

And if you think of it, some people with epilepsy have exactly that happen with them where in fact maybe they can’t drive or there can be other things there they can’t do. There are mental conditions that can cause people in fact to find that they just can’t be sure that the next time that they’re supposed to do something that all of their normal functioning will be there. So you’ve got the kind of disability that leaves normal mature personhood intact and functioning. You’ve got a degree of disability that stifles our ability to exercise normal, mature personhood. And then there’s another kind and that is the kind of disability that stifles normal, mature personhood and keeps it from coming about at all.

Now, we could show by the way, that all three of these categories of personhood are talked about in Scripture; that Scripture in fact understands all three of these kinds or categories of disability. And the point would be that some of you are here today where in fact you fit one of these categories. Some of you would say, “I fit this one.” Some of you would say, “In fact, I am here because I am somehow closely related to someone who in fact doesn’t even have the chance to exercise normal, mature personhood.” We need to talk about all three categories. In order for us to deal with disability adequately. We need to recognize that the kind of disability that one of us has isn’t necessarily the kind that others have, and we need to be open to the way that God speaks to all of us with all of those categories of disability.

Speaking to Caregivers

There’s one more set of people we need to include here above and beyond just the people who are disabled and that is the caregivers because in fact, that can be an entirely different kind of suffering and it can at least stifle the exercise of normal, mature personhood in the sense that one can be so involved in helping someone who perhaps is not capable of normal, mature personhood that all sorts of things that would normally make up life and that would allow someone to say, “Yes, I’ll meet with you Friday evening to do this or that,” just drop by the wayside because of the amount of care they’re giving. And in fact my experience over the years is that quite often it is harder for the caregivers to stand beside someone who is disabled than it is for the disabled person himself or herself. We need to be aware of the way that disability then affects those that we are around.

My wife is just remarkable in the number of things that she is willing to do that I can’t do. And it means that there are all sorts of other things she doesn’t have the chance to do because she feels she needs to be there in order to do those things for me. So when we talk about this fellowship of disability, we need to be aware of the different categories of disability and we also need to be aware that there’s a group of people who are central to this fellowship who are not themselves disabled, but who are the caregivers for those who are disabled. We need to see what ultimately Scripture has to say about that whole group.

The Theological Orientation of Disability

Now I turn to theological orientation. Once we’ve got these in place, we need to think about theological orientation. The first point that I would make is this, and once again this is something that non-Christians and even many Christians who are not adequately biblical, do not believe. They think that God is in some way limited, but Scripture says that God’s will is the ultimate explanation for any disability. And here’s the reason, because his will is the ultimate explanation for everything. God’s will is the ultimate explanation of any disability because in fact, his will is the ultimate explanation for everything. Let me just give you a few verses that start to point this way.

Isaiah 45:7 says:

I form light and create darkness;
     I make well-being and create calamity;
     I am the Lord, who does all these things.

The word for “calamity” there is the word that shows up in the Hebrew 500 times, and about 400 times it is just translated as “evil.” So the claim there is that God is the creator of everything, Isaiah 45:7. More specifically in Scripture, we find that he is the cause of all natural processes. He is the cause of all natural processes. Psalm 104:14 makes this clear because it makes clear that he makes the plants grow. It says:

You cause the grass to grow for the livestock
     and plants for man to cultivate,
that he may bring forth food from the earth . . .

So in fact, God causes everything in the plant world to grow. In fact, as it said later in Psalm 104, “Every living creature looks to God for its food.” Now, sometimes people will say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re quoting the Psalms. They’re poetry. So why do I have reason to think that this really is literally true?” And the answer goes something like this. Deep poetry is trying to get at truths that are too deep to be articulated in plain prose. Deep poetry is trying to get at truths, to have people resonate with truths that are so deep that they just can’t be stated in plain prose. So we really have a very strong reason to go to the Psalms to understand the way that God relates to the world. So here’s Psalm 104:27–29 says:

These all look to you,
     to give them their food in due season.
When you give it to them, they gather it up;
     when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
     when you take away their breath, they die
     and return to their dust.

So God in fact is the supplier, both of the goods that creatures enjoy and also withholds from them those goods to their peril and to their suffering. God is the cause of all natural processes according to Scripture. Psalm 104 and lots of other psalms make that clear.

Governing All Human Activity

His purposes govern every human activity also. They govern every human activity. Proverbs 21:1 says:

The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
     he turns it wherever he will.

You need to get clear what this picture is. There’s this stream of water that is gushing out. God more or less puts his hand in front of that and can turn the way that that stream goes, any way that he wants it to go. And the reason the king is mentioned is because of all people on earth, kings are most free and sovereign to do what they want. So if their hearts are in the Lord’s hands, so are everyone else’s. Proverbs 19:21 says:

Many are the plans in the mind of a man,
     but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.

So God’s purposes govern every human activity and his purpose is indeed the ultimate explanation for all of the world’s events. His purpose is indeed the ultimate explanation for all of the world’s events. Isaiah 46:8–11 says:

Remember this and stand firm,
     recall it to mind, you transgressors,
     remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
     I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
     and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
     and I will accomplish all my purpose,’
calling a bird of prey from the east,
     the man of my counsel from a far country.
I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass;
     I have purposed, and I will do it.

So in fact, God’s purpose is the ultimate explanation for all of the world’s events. What I’ve been trying to get you to see so far is that scripture takes God’s will to be the ultimate explanation of all disability even though disability is a bad thing because his will is the ultimate explanation of everything.

Who Made Man’s Mouth?

Secondly, I want you to realize or think about the fact we will only acknowledge this about God if we recognize that he has willed all human suffering. Now the golden verse with regard to this has already been mentioned three times today. I want to give you the context of Exodus 4:10–15. This is where God has met Moses and is commissioning Moses to go to Pharaoh and to speak to Pharaoh in such a way that, in fact, finally, God’s people will be delivered. And here’s the whole context:

But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.”

So he’s saying, “Look Lord, I’m just not equipped to do this. I can’t do this. You’re telling me to do this. You’re commissioning me to do this, but in fact you’re not thinking about the fact that I am not equipped to do this.” To which you get this verse that we’ve heard three times today:

Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” But he said, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else.” Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, “Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart. You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth and will teach you both what to do (Exodus 4:11–15).

Do you see that three out of the four terms (muteness, blindness, deafness), God is in fact saying, “I am the cause of disabilities. Moses is saying, “Look, and I want to back away. Let’s have somebody else do it.” God gets angry with him. He says, “Okay, so Aaron speaks well, we’ll let Aaron do the speaking, but still, what both of you say will come from what I say to you.” So God is behind the whole process and when he mentions these disabilities, it’s just part of his way to make clear to Moses, “Look Moses, maybe you’re slow of speech, but do you think that caught me by surprise? Do you think that I didn’t know that? Do you think that I didn’t make you that way? No, I not only made you that way, I make people who are mute the way they are. I make people who are blind the way they are. I make people who are deaf the way they are. I, in fact, do all these things.”

A Tragedy in Our Thinking

Now, many Christians resist this recognition that God has willed all human suffering and ultimately that is one of the greatest tragedies that can happen because it means that we think when things go wrong that we have fallen out of God’s hand. Kathy Black in her book A Healing Homiletic says this:

Devastations, sufferings, frustrations and disabilities happen in this world. God does not cause them, but God is present in their midst to uphold us and transform us.

In context, that claim that “God does not cause them” means that Black doesn’t think that God’s will is the ultimate explanation for everything that happens in our world, and particularly, she doesn’t think that his will is the cause of our suffering. But any plain reading of Scripture tells us otherwise. Now, the way to really do this is something like this. It’s not for somebody just to give you a few verses, although you might look at Ruth 1:13–21, where Naomi attributes all of her problems to God. You might look again as has already been mentioned, Job 1:20–22, and what he says in Job 2:10, and the verse right at the end of the whole book where once again the author makes clear that God was the cause of all that happened to Job. You might look at those kinds of proof texts, but here’s the way that you really know that God ultimately is the cause of everything including human suffering.

What you do is you read through the whole of Scripture and you just note every time that one of God’s people attributes all suffering to him or where God, speaking through his people, attributes all suffering to himself. More or less what it comes to is this: Scripture is God’s speech acts. Now, that’s going to be an odd phrase for most of you. We accomplish things by speaking. We’ve been trying to do that today as each of us have talked, whether or not we’re giving one of these talks, or we were being asked questions, the idea was, “Okay, here’s one speech act. That’s the question and I want so-and-so to answer it,” and that sort of thing. What happens is that we act by speaking.

We act by speaking and the way that you understand who someone is and what is true of the person is by listening to as much of the person speaking as you can and finding out what they emphasize, either by where they put it in what they say, or by the fact that they repeat it again and again. You could watch this stuff politically the last few weeks, did you get as sick as I did of watching all the interviews on television of the various people who were spinning in various ways for the two presidential candidates?

Quite often somebody like David Axelrod would be asked a question and because he thought something was really important, he would say, “Listen.” And then after that he’d say something that he took to be really important, or you’d just hear things repeated again and again and again and again. Now, Scripture, as I said during the question and answer session, is supposed to become our primary language. It is God speaking to us. All language affects us. The language that we are deliberately supposed to put in place to affect us most are God’s words and Scripture, and every word of Scripture is in some sense or another God’s word.

If you read your way through the Scriptures, you’ll find that again and again and again and again. When something happens to someone, God is taken to be the cause of it. When something bad happens to someone, not just the good, but when bad things happen that God is taken somehow to be the ultimate explanation for that. We mustn’t forget that because if we do, then we think when things get really, really tough, that stuff has fallen out of God’s hands and that he’s helpless to remedy things. That ultimately leads to despair.

Why Human Suffering?

So why does God will human suffering? Why does he will human suffering? There are a variety of reasons. Some of them come out in fact in Genesis 3 and they have to do with God’s pronouncing sentence on Adam and Eve and the serpent after the serpent tempted Adam and Eve to break the command that God had made to Adam. This is something that’s really worth doing carefully. Read through the second chapter of Genesis from the fourth verse to the end of the chapter. It’s a kind of more careful telling of exactly what God was doing with Adam and Eve, and you get this story of God creating Adam from the ground and breathing into him the breath of life. It’s interesting that the first thing that God says to Adam is, “Of all the trees in the garden you may eat but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you may not eat, for the day that you eat thereof, you will surely die.”

God, I would say called Adam into mature normal personhood by speaking his first words to Adam as a command. He is saying, “No matter how much you want to do otherwise, step back from your desires and remember what I have commanded you. I have given you freedom with every tree in the garden but one. With that one, don’t eat of it because the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” Now after Adam and Eve allow the serpent to tempt them and they eat of the tree, then we get the curses in Genesis 3, and interestingly enough, those curses are not just announcing what’s going to happen now because they’re sin in the world. They are actually God’s passing sentence on human beings.

What’s the purpose of his passing sentence? One is punishment. Now, I want to be really careful here because Nancy got the picture right basically on punishment, but I want to put just a little nuance on it here. When Adam and Eve sinned, God in fact pronounced a sentence on them. The woman was in fact going to suffer pain in childbearing, pain and danger in childbearing. The man in fact was going to have the ground return to him thorns and thistles so that it would be hard to work it. That actually is punishment for their having sinned. I think we have pretty decent reason to think that Adam and Eve trusted God after their sin in the light of the promise that God made to Eve about her offspring, and so we have reason to think that they are saints in the Old Testament. But you remember that Nancy said that that doesn’t mean that we don’t die, right?

So the punishment is still there. Now here’s the difference between punishment for those of us who were sheltered under Christ’s blood and work and the kind of punishment that holds for those who are not. In our case, the punishment is always chastisement. Hebrews 12 says that God chastises those he loves. That is punishment. It’s hard, but in fact it is punishment that doesn’t involve God’s wrath. It doesn’t involve his giving us what we deserve because if in fact we have trusted in the work of Christ, he has stood in our place and he has suffered God’s wrath and we will not. But in this world, those of us who are descended from Adam and Eve and who continue to sin, we still are chastised. We still are chastised because that makes clear among other things the heinousness of sin and even of our own sin. One of the purposes of God’s passing sentence in Genesis 3 is that things will happen in this world that will make us realize just how heinous sin is and how heinous our sin is.

Bearing the Name of Death

A great French theologian has wonderful things to say about that. He says that in the Bible, death is the reverse of life. It is not the reverse of existence. Death is the reverse of life; it is not the reverse of existence. To die does not mean to cease to be, but in biblical terms it means cut “off from the land of the living.” And then with a kind of speech act says “this is important.” And what he says is this:

Such an idea of being cut off from the land of the living, such an idea of death can indeed broaden and diversify. If dying were ceasing to be, nothing more could be said about it than beyond the simple statement. But since dying is still existing, other changes in existence will by extension be able to bear the name of death. In all the experiences of pain, discomfort, discord and separation, we can recognize a kind of funeral procession.

We recognize that when we deal with disability. We are all sinners and thus God has willed that we all suffer the wages of sin. If we indeed have sheltered under Christ’s work, we will not finally be separated from God. His eternal wrath will not rest on us, but in this life we will still suffer the wages of sin. None of us is exempted from the physical death that came into the world because of Adam’s sin. We are all part of this funeral procession that started because Adam and Eve would not listen to God and obey his commands. And in fact, all disability is part of it too.

So one of the purposes of God’s passing sentence with the curses in Genesis 3 is in fact punishment to make clear to us just how serious human sin is.

The Counter Purpose of Mercy

But here’s a wonderful counter purpose. It’s mercy, and I’m just going to read you a few verses from Psalm 119 that make clear how suffering and affliction are mercy. Here is the longest psalm that we have with someone who is celebrating the way that God has spoken to him again and again and right in the middle of it, he says this:

You have dealt well with your servant,
     O Lord, according to your word (Psalm 119:65).

Before I was afflicted I went astray,
     but now I keep your word (Psalm 119:67).

How many of us know that? Boy, I know that in spades. I was just a bad kid.

Before I was afflicted I went astray,
     but now I keep your word You are good and do good;
     teach me your statutes.
The insolent smear me with lies,
     but with my whole heart I keep your precepts;
their heart is unfeeling like fat,
     but I delight in your law (Psalm 119:67–70).

Now at that point, it’s worth looking up from the text and wondering, why do the insolate come up right here? And why do we get this claim about the fact that their heart is unfeeling like fat? Part of the business of good reading is to learn the kind of rhythm of knowing when to look up and to ask some questions. Here’s at least my answer — suffering and affliction burns fat off the heart so that the heart is no longer unfeeling. It makes the heart tender so that in fact God can be felt as he touches our heart with our afflictions. The insolent don’t have that happen, and so their hearts are unfeeling like fat. But the psalmist by having been afflicted delights in God’s law, no wonder he has said, “You are good and do good in having visited me with affliction,” and he immediately goes on:

It is good for me that I was afflicted,
     that I might learn your statutes (Psalm 119:71).

The affliction made him pay attention. Ask what God said. Listen to what God said.

The law of your mouth is better to me
     than thousands of gold and silver pieces (Psalm 119:72).

Don’t some of us know that if we have been disabled or if we have been dealing with disabled people? Before that, we may very well have been just really concerned to make money and to get to a certain place in society, but suddenly in the midst of the affliction we began to realize that those things weren’t important, that the only important thing was being right with God, hearing his word, spending day after day in his presence. And finally, the psalmist in Psalm 119:75 says:

I know, O Lord . . . that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.

God was being faithful to the psalmist. The specific mercy of chronic disability so far as I can see it, whether or not we are disabled or we are dealing with people who are disabled, is that it removes sins’ blinders, and it prompts us to focus and to reset ourselves again and again. It removes sins’ blinders including just the sinfulness of insensitivity of having a fat heart. It removes sins’ blinders, and it prompts us to focus and reset ourselves again and again.

Crossed by the Mercy of God

Have you ever been looking forward to doing something and maybe going and buying a new car and the week before you planned to go out and do it, you suddenly found out that there was a chance that you had something really wrong with you, that maybe you had cancer or you had a really bad heart condition? What happened to the luster of car shopping next week? It just drops away, doesn’t it? It doesn’t mean that you don’t still need a new car. Maybe you do need a new car, but in fact suddenly what seems so important no longer seems important again. That’s what for me chronic disability has done. When I get up in the mornings, I have to think of my Lord because it is just too painful and too hard if I don’t, and I would not trade that for being able to run.

Now, for God’s saints, suffering always results in their ultimate good. We’re told that in Romans 8:28. Ultimately, what will happen is this, the good will defeat all of any disabilities constituent evils. Now, I’ve got to explain that. Here’s the way it goes. There are some goods that cannot exist without certain evils, such as the good of my getting up in the morning and my immediately thinking of God and saying, “Lord, help me not to damage myself as I’m trying to walk down the hall and maybe not be able to walk again. Help me as in fact I head to the bathroom.” Because for me, as for some of the rest of us, that’s a much different thing than it is for the rest of you. I say, “Help me to get to school and not to embarrass myself with regard to the things that could go wrong.” As that happens, all of those goods, all of that dependence depend on the evil that prompts me to issue those prayers, right?

So in fact, there are some goods that cannot exist separate of certain evils that they in some way overcome. Courage is a good that exists to overcome fear in the right situations. You wouldn’t need courage if there was a world where there was no danger of any sort. Ultimately, I think the picture that we find at places like Romans 8:18–25 and second Corinthians 4:16–18. Romans 8:18 has Paul saying:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Second Corinthians 4:16–18 says:

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 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. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

The picture there, if I understand it correctly, is not just that when we get to the Eschaton, when we get to what most people call “heaven,” God is going to swamp us with so many goods that we just forget the evils we suffered. No, we will there see how God was working good through the evil and through evil that we deserved because of our sin, and we will see and appreciate our Savior much, much more than we can now for what he did for us that accounts for our being there and our being able to spend all of everlasting life understanding how God has made right what humans said wrong. So for God’s saints, suffering always results in their ultimate good. That ultimate good will defeat all of any disabilities, constituent evils. Whatever is bothering you about a disability, in the Eschaton, you will see that God was using that as a constituent part of giving you a greater good than you otherwise could have had.

Beyond Finding Out

Yet the specific reason why God has visited someone with some particular disability may for now be beyond our finding out. In this life, we may not find this out. Ecclesiastes 8:16–17 says this:

When I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one’s eyes see sleep, then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out.

Talbot paraphrase:

If even the wisest person you know tells you that he understands all of God’s works of providence, he’s talking through his hat.

We aren’t going to know all of this. And indeed, I think we can go one step further. The reason why God has visited some state with some particular disability may in fact involve no more than his exercising his sovereignty. It was just that he chose to do this. Everything that is good about me through God and Christ, God could have brought about in some other way. God is not limited with regard to means, and so in fact, one way that God expresses his glory is just sovereignly to say, “I will give you this particular piece of suffering, this particular affliction, this particular disability.” But the thing we need to keep in mind is that, in fact, when he does that, we can rest assured that he is lovingly bringing us specific goods through that bit of suffering, even if we didn’t have to have that bit of suffering.

In this life, disability reminds us of the depths of human being. It tells us just how significant we are that our suffering can be so deep, and it reminds us of the value of normalcy. It’s designed to make us long for sinless wholeness. In the Eschaton, we will realize our Father’s great design encompassing his love for us in having visited us with the specific disabilities we now know and we will find ourselves saying something like this: Not so much, “Why God did you do that,” but, “God in your sovereignty you did that. I would not trade not having that disability, not having that suffering, I would not trade, give that away in order, not now to have the blessings that you have brought me through it.”

Breathing Lessons from the Psalms

Now, I want to end up here by talking about practice. It will take us about five minutes. Often in the heat of the battle of disability, everything seems hopeless. But we are to do everything we can to hold on to faith and hope as in fact, the breathing lessons that we find in the Psalms make clearer. As I mentioned during the question and answer session, the Psalms are often called the prayer book of the Bible. We are supposed to breathe. We’re supposed to pray our way through them. If you read the Psalms of Lament, which are central to the Psalms, by different counts, there are up to 60 of them. So in other words, there are more Psalms of Lament than there are any other kind of Psalm. If you read through the Psalms of Lament, there are at least three crucial lessons that you can learn that in fact, by learning them, you learn to breathe again.

Job complained that God wouldn’t release him from suffering, and it was so bad that he couldn’t even catch his breath. If we pray our way through the Psalms of Lament, God helps us to get our breath again. Here are the three lessons that I’ve gotten. These will be in my book, which is called When The Stars Disappear because I want to deal with profound suffering more than anything else.

Keeping It Personal

The first lesson is this: When we pray to God about our suffering, we are to keep it personal. The psalmist never complained to others about God. They always addressed their complaints to him. That is tremendously important. They never complained to others about God. They always addressed their complaints to him. In other words, no psalmist complains about God by referring to God in the third person. All of their complaints about God address him personally in the second person as you. That’s really, really significant. They always assumed that God existed, that he was righteous, that he helped the righteous and punished wickedness, that they were his people to whom he had made specific promises, that he had kept and would continue to keep those promises, and that the appearance that he was not rewarding righteousness or keeping his promises warranted their protests. When it appeared that God was not rewarding righteousness or keeping his promises it warranted their protests.

In other words, sincere and deliberate complaining to God is an act of faith. More specifically, when we as God saints complain to him, we are appealing to the special personal relationship that we have with him, and then showing him the respect of taking him to be a righteous, faithful person who will act accordingly.

Do you complain to people if you don’t trust them? You complain to people who you think will listen to you and they’re likely to do something different. So the first important lesson is that you’re supposed to keep it personal. You’re supposed to address God as you, but then you complain to him.

Being Honest

The second lesson is to be honest, The psalmists modeled transparency, expressing their complaints to God as frankly as they could. Their laments and complaints arose out of their sense of dissonance or discomfort or distress. There was something about their situations that was clashing with the way that they, as believers, felt that things should be. Something was ringing untrue, whether it involved the psalmist’s internal world or external opposition, whether it involved the disintegration of the psalmist internal world or external opposition, repression by enemies or evil doers, or a sense of God’s distance or disfavor.” It is that sense that something was ringing untrue that prompted them to post complaints like these:

Why, O Lord, do you stand far away?
     Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? (Psalm 10:1).

For you are the God in whom I take refuge;
     why have you rejected me? (Psalm 43:2).

How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever?
     Will your jealousy burn like fire? (Psalm 79:5).

The psalmists were extremely sensitive to shame. We’ve heard about shame today with regard to the way that it affects us with disability. The psalmists were extremely sensitive to shame, and they often implored God to deliver them from it. At times, they were even willing to risk theological incorrectness in order to voice their true feelings. They were even willing to risk theological incorrectness in order to voice their true feelings.

So in Psalm 44, the Psalmist says, “Wake up, oh Lord, why do you sleep? Get up. Don’t reject us forever.” One of the later Psalms, I think it’s 121, says, “God never sleeps or slumbers.” The psalmist knew he didn’t sleep. The psalmist was expressing to him, “This is the way it feels, God, and I’ve got to get this out.” Complaining and protesting involves exhaling. Spiritually, it involves exhaling what it would be spiritually dangerous for us to hold in. So the first thing we have to do is complain and protest. The psalmists dared such transparency because they knew that God knew what was festering in their hearts.

They knew that they would gain nothing by trying to deny the truth. So they said what they felt and thus they coach us that no matter what, we must keep talking to God, keep addressing him, and keep protesting to him about how bad things seem. In short, we keep breathing out our distress. If adequately venting their feelings required the use of hyperbole, simile, or metaphor, then they used it. Often, and this should strike many of us, in attempting to express the depth of their suffering, they complained about being near death, whether by drowning or by sinking in the mire or by having been cast into the depths of the earth, the grave, or the pit. Isn’t that often the way that caregivers feel? Those images conveyed their sense of being pressed or pursued to the point of exhaustion.

Those images conveyed the sense that they felt their ends were imminent. Ultimately, the experiences that they were having outran words, and yet they still needed to be put into words. So the first two lessons are keep it personal, and in addition to keeping it personal, be honest.

Rehearsing Our Hopes

The third lesson is this: Rehearse your hopes. There’s only one Psalm of Lament that doesn’t turn either at least to a vow, to praise or to actual praise. Most of the Psalms of Lament actually end up praising God. And so what we find is this, amazingly, in spite of the trauma of their experiences, the psalmist didn’t lose hope, and that then is the third breathing lesson. Rehearse your hopes to keep your hope alive. Rehearse your hopes to keep your hope alive. After breathing out their laments and complaints, the Psalmist breathed in and what they breathed in made them hopeful. They breathed in truths about God’s character, about his promises, about his previous wondrous acts for Israel and about his record of individualized care for them. In other words, in trying to catch their breath, the psalmist focused on facts that made them confident that their God would ultimately put things right. They countered their feelings with theological truths and history.

And here’s the most wonderful example in all of scripture at Psalm 22. You remember that our Lord took it on his lips as he was on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s the very first verse of Psalm 22, we know that Psalm 22 was written by some Old Testament saint. We can’t even understand who could have written it because in fact, it involves, it seems to portray somebody actually dying. And so how would you get somebody to write it after that had happened? But the interesting thing is this, while our Lord took the first words upon his lips, our Lord was not more stupid than we are. If you’ve ever read all of Psalm 22, you know that it ends in hope. Our Lord did that. I think that probably David was the one who wrote Psalm 22, and we can watch him breathing as he wrote it.

He first exhales with this plaintiff cry:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
     Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
     and by night, but I find no rest (Psalm 22:1–2).

Then he inhaled by recalling God’s holiness in his previous deliverance of Israel:

Yet you are holy,
     enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our fathers trusted;
     they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried and were rescued;
     in you they trusted and were not put to shame (Psalm 22:3–5).

He then exhales again, breathing out some of the existential horror of his own situation:

But I am a worm and not a man,
     scorned by mankind and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me;
     they make mouths at me; they wag their heads;
“He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him;
     let him rescue him, for he delights in him!” (Psalm 22:6–8).

But he exhaled that way only to inhale the history of God’s goodness to him, which then became the basis of a plea:

Yet you are he who took me from the womb;
     you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts.
On you was I cast from my birth,
     and from my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Be not far from me,
     for trouble is near,
     and there is none to help.

He then exhales once more, breathing out a really vivid raft of images:

Many bulls encompass me;
     strong bulls of Bashan surround me;
they open wide their mouths at me,
     like a ravening and roaring lion.

I am poured out like water,
     and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
     it is melted within my breast;
my strength is dried up like a potsherd,
     and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
     you lay me in the dust of death.

For dogs encompass me;
     a company of evildoers encircles me;
     they have pierced my hands and feet —
I can count all my bones —
     they stare and gloat over me;
they divide my garments among them,
     and for my clothing they cast lots (Psalm 22:12–18).

And then those images form the content of his primary plea:

But you, O Lord, do not be far off!
     O you my help, come quickly to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword,
     my precious life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion!
     You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen!

Then right in the midst of all this careful breathing, David went from pleading, to vowing to praise God, to actually praising him:

I will tell of your name to my brothers;
     in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
     All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him,
     and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
For he has not despised or abhorred
     the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him,
     but has heard, when he cried to him (Psalm 22:22–24).

David’s perspective changed abruptly in both tone and content. For the rest of the psalm, he took his pleas as answered, and he focused on praising God for answering them. In fact, his sense of deliverance through God’s overruling providence became so confident that it broadens out into a prediction:

All the ends of the earth shall remember
     and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations
     shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the Lord,
     and he rules over the nations (Psalm 22:27–28).

Indeed, “all humankind,” David declared, “would bow before the Lord and his righteous work would be proclaimed to a people yet unborn” (Psalm 22:29–31). Now, Psalm 22 is extraordinary in a lot of ways, but one way in which it is not is in its movement from complaint through plea to confident praise. That’s standard with the Psalms personal laments.

I tell my students that if they tried to write a lament in Old Testament times and handed it to the choir master and said, “Can this be one of the laments of the Psalms?” if it didn’t move from complaint to praise, it would be handed back to them and they would be told, “No, this isn’t a Lament.” At some point in each psalmist’s prayer, other than Psalm 88, the psalmist quits lamenting and complaining, quits asking and pleading, and begins praising. That shift is marked by words such as “yet you,” or, “but you,” and it is addressed to God and in each case, those words signal a real change in the psalmist perspective from doubt and alarm to trust and peace.

Very often, the immediate cause of the psalmist’s new confidence is unclear, and yet how the shifts occurred isn’t as important as the fact that in all but one lament they always did. If we pray the Psalms of Lament, the Holy Spirit will usually come to us and help us to feel the same confidence.

For Those Who Stand and Wait

We then need to remember this, that no matter how awful things seem, no matter how dry the valley that we seem to be going through, if we will hearken to God’s word, his Holy Spirit will carry it in our hearts in such a way that we may in fact be a place of springs even when it seems that we are only a dry desert.

Over the years, as I’ve had to deal with my disability, there were times when I was in graduate school and so on, when I thought I was just getting a good headstart on being able to work really hard and come up with something marvelous and I’d get sick again. I found myself thinking, “How can I honor the Lord if I keep on getting sick again these ways?” One sonnet helped me more than anything else: John Milton’s sonnet on his blindness. This is a wonderful piece, particularly for caregivers or for any of us who may in fact know the degree of disability that means that our bodies or our minds aren’t trustworthy for us. It’s the last couple of words that are important here. Milton became completely blind and he wrote this particular sonnet. He said:

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; “Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?” I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.”