Lenten Devotions: Robert S Smith

from an article by Robert S Smith (footnotes removed) 

To sing lament, however, is not merely to begin a journey toward praise, it is itself to set foot on the path of praise. “As strange as it sounds, prayers of lament in a biblical pattern are actually a form of praise to God and an expression of trust in his promises.” After all, the whole Psalter is labelled tehillim (praises); the laments as much as every other “type.” As Shead and Cameron write: “Whatever a given psalm looks like—lament, instruction, thanksgiving, and so on—the act of taking it upon our lips becomes an act of praise.” This can be seen in the way the lament psalms “express a fundamental trust in God in the midst of tribulation.” Hence my description of lament above as “praising in the dark”! But even more than that, the laments “open us to the greatness of a God who not only can hear, but also can handle our pain, our self-pity, our blame, and our fear.” They, thus, propel us toward “new and unforeseen breakthroughs in understanding who God is and how God can be trusted.” In this way real lament leads to growth in the knowledge of God and thus serves to increase his praise.

In the larger frame, and this side of the consummation, praise and lament work together and need each other to keep the one honest and the other focused. For, on the one hand, praise “can retain its authenticity and naturalness only in polarity with lamentation.” Yet on the other hand, and as we learn from the content of Psalter itself, “Israel also mixes lament with praise, because they know beyond doubting that in God’s unchanging, unfailing love they will be saved in the end.” The same is true for the Christian church: lament we must, but only ever in hope! For “the spine of lament is hope: not the vacuous optimism that ‘things will get better,’ which in the short run is usually a lie, but the deep and irrepressible conviction, in the teeth of present evidence, that God has not severed the umbilical cord that has always bound us to the Lord.” It is this conviction that enables believers to sing their griefs before the throne of grace, confident that he will never leave or forsake us (Heb 13:6).