He is Altogether Lovely

That old song, Take the world, but give me Jesus, seems to leave out the times when the world is taken, and He appears to be gone as well. The greatest testing of faith and suffering of soul is not the pain of broken relationships, the loss of life as we knew it, or injury from those we love—as havoc-wreaking to our lives and hearts as these things are. The striking of the watchmen holds no candle to the absence of the Beloved and the silence we find when we call for Him (Song. 5:7).

To lose all but gain Him is what Paul spoke of. But what sends the soul into the bitterest of sorrows is the perception that after all the losses have come, after every earthly comfort has been stripped away, God Himself remains silent and far.

Like our Lord, the most poignant agony and turmoil of soul is in the prayer that makes our bones feel like water and our heart melt like wax:

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? — Ps. 22:1

The sense of abandonment from the Lord Himself is the darkest pit of all. And it can rob a song right out of the chest of the sincere lover of God. It can send a soul into despairing depths never before imagined. We realize here in this darkness that we had thought if we lose everything, but find Him in the darkness, all would be well with our soul. But to be in that darkest night, devoid of all comforts and amidst all losses, and then to find Him absent as well, it takes the soul beyond its capacities. The waves and breakers crash over.

And after we have beaten our fists against the walls of that pit, and cried out from its floor until there are no more words, we find ourselves at the greatest crossroads yet.

Will we trust Him still? Or even more piercing: Will we love Him still?

We have cried out to know Him —in the fellowship of suffering and the power of the resurrection, making vows to count all else as rubbish in light of this gain. Perhaps we were not ready for the strange irony that to fellowship with Him in His suffering necessitates the bitter experience of the sting of His absence, not presence. Fellowship around a sense of abandonment. The cup our Lord drank was not merely pain, reproach, and death. Its most agonizing dregs brought forth His stinging cry:

My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?—which feels like no fellowship at all, only forsakenness.

The very affliction of this bitter cup we must drink, if we truly desire to know Him, is the same sense of forsakenness He experienced in His suffering. How else would we know fellowship with Him here, in His darkest hour?

The Word of God does not draw back from this mysterious way of the Lord. Again and again, we find His saints running headlong into the cement wall of what seems to be His silence. The psalmist cries day and night and receives no answer. The bride rises to seek the One her soul loves, but cannot find Him. Job sits bewildered beneath a silent heavens. Joseph spends the strength of his youth in a dungeon’s cold. Again and again, faithful obedience and loyal love seem to be answered not with consolation, but with the painful absence of the Watcher of men (Job 7:20), as their paths bend ever more deeply into the cruciform shape of Christ’s own.

This too is part of knowing Him and being conformed to His likeness. Yet to know that this is one of the ways the Lord leads us does not remove the sting.  We cannot reason our way beyond it, nor spiritualize our broken heart out of it. Always the drinking of this cup is mixed with our tears. The heavy sense of forsakenness must itself be passed through.

As we grope in this felt darkness, we must follow our Lord to the next cry of His heart, after the groans of desertion. The free-falling soul, tormented by an overwhelming experience of divine abandonment, catches its footing once again with the confession:

Yet You are holy. — Ps. 22:3

With the prayer of our Beloved Jesus, our soul finds a place to stand when every other ground gives way. We have not yet found the One our soul loves, nor been given understanding as to why He would leave us alone in our darkest hour. He has not yet broken the silence with His longed for voice. We do not have answers for the searing confusion of His ways. Yet He is who He is. He is the Holy One from of old.

His ways are not our ways. He does not stoop to lead us in a way that we understand or agree with. He waits—even presses— for our untethered trust. A trust severed from every human reasoning or explanation, every confidence and consolation.

Here at the bottom, either He is who He says He is or He is not. Either we believe His Word to be more real than any circumstance or explanation, or we do not. Either He is worthy of our trust or He is not. And most sacred and tender of all—either we love Him still, or we do not.

And in this place of reduction, our souls cry the only thing left to cry: Where else would I go?

In this place of raw, pure trust in the Holy One—though we sorrow over the seeming silence of God—something else goes quiet as well. A lifetime of whispering doubts and negotiations fall silent at last. The endless taunting voices lose their grip. They have nowhere else to go. No more depths to call to. No lower place to descend. The soul begins to simplify. The questions and fears that once scattered in every direction begin gathering around a singular focal point. We find ourselves clinging to Him alone.

We had thought it was over —that love and faith had fought a good fight, but in the end been overcome by the forces of grief, fear, sorrow, and confusion. We had thought He had left us to ourselves. Yet still, without understanding His ways, or forcing His dealings to come under the ceiling of our reasoning, we simply clung to Him. Our senses cried of His abandonment, but His Word and unchanging Person prevailed over these conclusions. And somewhere in that wrestle, faith bowed its knee. And we found ourselves saying with Job,  Habakkuk,  Jeremiah, Peter, and Mary of Bethany:

Yet You are the Holy One. Your Word is true above all. I trust You still. I love. You still. Even when Your ways confound me and when bitter abandonment is the only taste in my mouth.

We do not escape our sense of divine abandonment by suddenly experiencing His nearness. Confusion does not resolve by all the answers to our questions. Rather, beneath every contrary feeling, faith entrusts itself to the Holy One whose character does not change. Questions resolve not in reason but in a Person. Love does not survive because the darkness lifts, but by confidence in the Beloved whom though we do not see, we yet trust and we yet love.

Arising from the pit, all but one candle went out. We love Him still. We know not His ways. All other confidence is gone. All past certainties ripped out from beneath our feet. All comforts far. One flickering light remains. Love with no conditions. Without alternative strategy. Without divisions of heart. When all was reduced to a faintly burning wick, the flame that remained held more resolve and fire than all the fervency of former days. From that solitary flame, arose one singular song into the great darkness and long silence:

If you find my Beloved, tell Him I am lovesick…He is altogether lovely. — Song. 5:8, 16

And that purified love —with faith beneath and coursing through its veins — breaks forth as the love that many waters cannot quench. That the floods could not overcome. The love as strong as death and unyielding as the grave (Song. 8:7). The love tested and refined and made ready for the Beloved.

The fellowship with Christ carries us not only into the grave, but beyond its grasp. The Psalm that opened with the cry, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” ends with another testimony altogether:

For He has not despised or scorned  the suffering of the afflicted one; He has not hidden His face from him but has listened to his cry for help. — Ps. 22:24

If no sparrow falls to the ground without His knowing, then there is no pit into which I may descend that He is not already there. Though I do not yet see Him. Though all my senses cry that He has abandoned me, He is there—descending with me into death, and raising me with Himself into a faith refined as gold and a love purified by fire.

The face that I believed had turned away was, in truth, never withdrawn at all. It had been fixed upon me the whole while—etched with holy tears of His intimate knowing and infinite treasuring of my uplifted face and trembling love for Him. He never turned away His gaze. Never looked away. Ever loving me with a love deeper than my deepest pit and stronger than my strongest sense of abandonment. Ever present. From the very place where I believed myself forsaken, He was drawing me even further into the deepest desire of my soul: fellowship and communion with Himself, and forging the holy faith and love in me worthy of Himself.

Beneath the darkness of every pit into which His beloved descends, we find the One greater than the darkness drawing us into a depth of communion with Himself we could not have known any other way. Forming by fire a faith and purified love that qualifies us to share in His holiness and behold His glory (Heb. 12:10, 14). Surely, when the age is over, and we finally see His face, He will come to me, and of my little life, He will say:

Look, I kept the bottle. Every tear was My escort. Every twist and turn was My yearning heart for you, drawing you to Myself. Every flower on the hills. Every joy in your marriage, in your children. Every sorrow of betrayal, every sting of reproach, it was My pressing on your capacities, that I might fill you with more of Myself. Love was always the banner —over it all.

Believing this extravagant love and tenderness of His heart, we entrust ourselves to Him here and now in the darkness—clinging to Him rather than drawing back—we find that these chambers of suffering are not the end of our love, but its necessary holy purification, until every lesser longing falls away, and only one flickering song remains:

You’re still the One I love.

The One I trust.

Where else would I go?

You alone are holy.

You are altogether lovely.