Now is Not Forever
“Now is not forever.” I can still see my grandmother’s handwriting, splotched on the page by her favorite ballpoint pen. I had just received her letter during my own struggle with mental health. I had lost faith in God’s forgiveness and had isolated myself from my faith community. In response to my letter outlining the despair and doubt that had overtaken my faith, my grandmother replied in her typical candor, “Remember, now is not forever.”
While I did not realize it then, these words would remind me in many situations that life has its rhythms and seasons. While sorrow may last for the night, joy comes in the morning (Psalm 30:5). There is a time for mourning and a time for dancing (Ecclesiastes 3:4b). Sometimes burning precedes beauty rising from the ashes (Isaiah 61:3). We see this cycle of life in the Book of Esther through the alternation between times of feasting and times of fasting:
Why is This Happening to Me?
The first two chapters of Job give us the large-scale scope of what is happening to Job: He is stuck in a cosmic tug-of-war between God and the Accuser, Satan. Satan argues that God has blessed Job, and this is the reason he is righteous. If God would take away everything that Job owns, he would curse God. Job loses his livestock, his servants, and his children, but still does not blame God or sin in any way (Job 1:22). Satan then argues that if God were to strike Job’s flesh, this would surely cause him to curse God, so God allows Job to be infected with terrible boils from the soles of his feet to the top of his head (Job 2:7). Amid all this happening, Job has no knowledge of the machinations behind the scenes. His only reality is the pain and suffering he is experiencing. His wife urges him to curse God and die (Job 2:9). His friends sit silently with him for seven days and seven nights (Job 2:13). But Job must eventually give voice to his anguish.
A Picture of Job
One of the most well-known Biblical stories about depression has to be the story of Job, a man who lost much but refused to curse God, a man who steadfastly upheld his innocence even when accused by his friends of sin, and a man who was humbled by a direct response from the LORD. Usually, a Biblical patriarch is introduced with a genealogy. However, Job is merely placed on the scene with no fanfare or even a reference to what time he lived in. Job is important not because of who he was related to but because of what he will experience. Therefore, Job represents anyone who suffers. The CSB characterizes Job as a man of “complete integrity” (Job 1:1). The ESV translates this phrase more literally: “blameless and upright.” What did the author of Job intend for us to know about Job from this first sentence?
The Nearness of God’s Presence
God has two more commands for Elijah: “Go out and stand.” He calls Elijah out of the cave where he has spent the night—again a symbolic as well as literal call to change like “Arise and eat.” But this time, God doesn’t command a doing but a being: “stand on the mountain.” Mountaintops were often where God met His people in the Old Testament. In fact, Mount Horeb where Elijah ended up is the same Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments in Exodus 19 and 34. This mountain in particular was primed to be a place of revelation. But Elijah’s role is merely to stand—to stay put. Where? In the Lord’s Presence. God would do the revealing while Elijah would do the standing as God’s Presence came down.
A Lack of Faith?
As believers, we often see a depressed Christian, or even an unhappy Christian, as an oxymoron. There must be something lacking in their spiritual life. When I have voiced my own struggles with depression, other well-meaning Christians have asked, “But doesn’t Scripture tell us to be joyful in the Lord?” This kind of reminder comes from a reductive explanation for the root cause of depression: If only you had more faith, you wouldn’t feel so depressed. It is easy to use this thinking on ourselves to conclude that if we are depressed, we just don’t believe enough in God’s power to heal us. But a lack of faith is not the cause of depression for those in Scripture. In previous weeks, we picked up the story of Elijah at his worst suicidal moment, but how did he find himself in this position? Was it because he did not have enough faith? Was there some major weakness or deficiency in his faith-walk that led him to struggle with depression?