How Long, a devotional thought

The other day I was talking to a friend about some struggles she’s been going through lately, and as we were talking, this line from Psalm 13 came to mind for me. It’s more a phrase, than a line, actually; or maybe better yet, a question.

It is, incidentally, the fundamental question that the authors of the Bible asked, whenever they came into contact with the brokenness of this world—the evil, the suffering, the trials, and the tribulations that seems so regularly to beset the people of God.

The question is: How long?

In Psalm 94 it says it like this: “How long, O Lord, will the wicked be allowed to gloat? How long will you hide your face from me?”

In Psalm 35 it says it like this: “How long, O Lord, will you look on [as the wicked gnash their teeth at me]; how long till you rescue my soul from their ravages?”

And In Revelation, the martyred saints, slain for their witness to Jesus, cry out to God from beneath the heavenly alter, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You avenge our blood and judge those who dwell on the earth?”

In Psalm 13, the one that came to mind as my friend and I were chatting, it says it four times in a row:

How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face form me?

How long must I take counsel in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

As an answer to the problem of pain, this question may feel profoundly unsatisfying to modern-day Christians like us, who have grown up in a technocratic culture with a decidedly litigious bent to it. In a world like ours, where problems have causes and effects, legal liabilities, and technological solutions, we don’t intuitively ask “how long?” when we encounter pain or suffering.

Instead, our default questions are “who?” (who is responsible?), “why?” (why did it happen?), and “how?” (how do we fix it?)

The question “how long” is entirely off the radar for us, because it presupposes that the solution to the problem of pain, whatever yours or my particular encounter with pain may be, is not within our control. Short term solutions, of course, are well within our control; and so were they in Bible times. We can salve, balm, soothe, and medicate our pain. We can legislate against it. We can optimize our responses to it. 

But the the deeper problem—that bend in the very warp and woof of creation that we intuitively know to be wrong, but can’t explain or resolve hard as we try—the solution to that very real pain is always frustratingly beyond our grasp.

This is why the Bible’s response to suffering is so disarmingly unexpected, on the one hand, but poignantly wise, on the other. Because the default posture of the biblical authors, when confronted with the suffering that is beyond us, was to cry out to the Lord with ache and urgency: how long, O Lord, till you fix this!

This is an utterly unsantized cry, by the way.  Most of the Psalms that ask “how long” like this are aching songs of lament, because the question “how long” does not minimize or deny the ache; if anything it expresses it in all its rawness. To ask God, how long till this ends, is to confess, in the very same breath, how desperately we long for it to end.

I think the modern world, politically conflicted and economically imbalanced and environmentally devastated and covid-harried as it is, would do well to develop a “biblical reflex” when it comes to our response to evil, and start asked “how long?” more consistently when we brush up against the brokenness of this world.

It doesn’t need to stop there, mind you. There still comes a time when it is altogether appropriate to ask “who is responsible?” and “how can fix what’s been broken?” Those questions must follow the “how long?” question though, rather than preempting it, or preventing it from being asked at all.

I say this because when we ask “how long?” what we’re really doing is confessing our deep down belief that God still is at work in the world, our belief that he has promised in the end to fix the hurt of this world in Jesus Christ, and that we are taking him at his word on the matter. To ask “how long,’ is to remind ourselves that in the end, the only thing that will truly and fully heal this hurting world, is His divine acting on our behalf. Human ingenuity and creativity, however much it can accomplish, cannot accomplish a lasting fix to the hurt of this world, on its own.

But thanks be to God that in the offer of New Creation he extends to us in Jesus Christ, God has promised to do for us what all our scientific know-how, and bureaucratic policies, and psychological methods, and social engineering combined could never do without him, and wipe every tear from every eye, while the leaves of his heavenly tree sprout for the healing of the nations.

Ours is first and foremost to long for that day, heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to cry out “how long?” as we wait for Him to do it.