When God's Servant is Depressed
When God’s Servant is Depressed
Jeremiah 20:7-18
Dr. Tim LaHaye claims to have asked over one hundred thousand people among his audiences if there were any who have never been depressed. Among one hundred thousand people so questioned not one has ever responded to his query by stating “I have never been depressed.” It would actually appear that those who live in pleasant surroundings are most susceptible to being depressed. Someone has said that a pessimist is someone who has to live with a constant optimist.
Depression is both ancient and universal. The Psalmist implored:
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
[Psalm 42:5]
Hippocrates, the ancient physician, wrote a treatise on melancholy. Winston Churchill, during the Battle of Britain, was a bastion of strength, but at the same time he underwent severe bouts of depression. Edgar Allan Poe is said to have been depressed for four days after writing The Pit and the Pendulum. Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, recalls that the bloodthirsty dictator was the victim of deep and dark depression. Charles Spurgeon, arguably the greatest preacher in Christendom since apostolic days, knew weeks on end of darkness and melancholy. Depression knows neither moral boundaries nor social distinction; all alike are subject to bouts of melancholy.
A few years back we heard a great deal about the Moral Majority in the media. When you leaf through the Bible you meet the “Miserable Majority.” So many of God’s greatest servants were, at critical moments in their lives, depressed. Moses asked God to take his life. Job pleaded with the Lord, “Kill me!” Elijah desired death by God’s hand. Jonah wanted God to do away with him. And Saul, king of Israel, did destroy himself and many of those around him by reason of his fits of depression.
I suggest that in Jeremiah Twenty is found the most miserable description of all of the effects of depression. Jeremiah had hit rock bottom. His experience should be helpful to each of us who must deal intermittently and periodically with depression. I am encouraged by the very degree of Jeremiah’s discouragement. The very fact that Jeremiah’s experience is unveiled in the Bible and that God could accept him and use him in spite of his depression, is a redemptive encouragement to anyone experiencing depression. I testify that this account has encouraged me at critical moments.
The Reason God’s People May Experience Depression — I shall not exhaustively explore reasons for depression as this is not a psychological treatise; but from the text we see that depression results when we imagine ourselves victims of divine deceit. In verse seven, Jeremiah reveals unremitting pain and deep disappointment by crying out: O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived; You overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. What could have happened to bring Jeremiah to this point that he believed himself a victim of divine deceit?
He had just spent time in the stocks for the crime of preaching the mind of God. He had just been punished as result of righteous teaching. He had experienced yet another confrontation with the power structure of the nation who refused to do right and who refused to heed the warnings of God.
Psychologists tell us that one element in virtually all types of depression is a sense of disappointment. Jeremiah had certainly experienced one of the greatest disappointments of all. He looked up to Heaven and cried out: “God, You Yourself have deceived me!” He was so disappointed that he used incredibly strong language, some of the most exceptional language to be found in the entire Old Testament. His literal words are: “You raped me.” In another place he pointed his finger to heaven and charged God with deceit in this way: Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable? Will You be to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails? [Jeremiah 15:18].
Jeremiah lived in Judah, a semiarid land dotted with watercourses which from a distance promise refreshment and relief to the weary traveller. Upon closer inspection, however, many of these brooks and streams would prove to be waterless … mere wadis which though gushing with water periodically were usually dry and dusty, arid and parched. Such conditions are difficult for us to imagine, living as we do in a land blessed with an abundance of water as is true for Canada. The weary prophet charges God with being like such a wadi, promising much from afar but proving a disappointment nearby.
When God called Jeremiah He had informed him:
My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken Me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
[Jeremiah 2:13]
Now, Jeremiah charges that he has invested two decades – and to no avail; the people are no nearer God than when he started and God is no nearer than when Jeremiah began. The Babylonians are still on the march. The people are still playing church. The politicians and religionists were still in control of daily life and conspiring to exclude God from that life. Jeremiah is himself hurting, the butt of ridicule and cruel calumny.
This last matter points to another reason God’s people may experience depression: they experience repeated rejection. Hear his plaintive cry. O LORD, You deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the LORD has brought me insult and reproach all day long… I hear many whispering, "Terror on every side! Report him! Let's report him!" All my friends are waiting for me to slip, saying, "Perhaps he will be deceived; then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him" [verses seven, eight and ten].
Jeremiah had experienced the cruellest form of rejection – mockery and ridicule. He had preached with a heart of love and the people had rejected him with biting mockery and with cruel vindictiveness. The old saw says, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It is a lie!
Too often have I comforted the child cruelly taunted by playmates or classmates to ever repeat such foolishness. Too often have I comforted the spouse left torn and emotionally bruised for life by unkind remarks, whether thoughtless or deliberate. Too often have I been on the receiving end of such injurious statements to ever dismiss in a cavalier fashion the pain resulting from words. Sticks and stones may break my bones … and words can wound deeper still and injure for a lifetime.
More difficult perhaps than imprisonment and deprivation was the rejection and ridicule which the prophet experienced. Because his message was one of confrontation and because he was a prophet dispatched to warn of impending judgement, Jeremiah was ridiculed by those who heard him. He could hear them whispering mockingly as he passed by: Terror on every side. The warnings were turned into taunts and jeers and he received the painful nickname: Terror on every side [bybiS;mi rwgOm;]. Unknown people pointed behind his back and scoffed at his message. Few can ever know the pain of the pastor’s heart when the message he brings is scorned and when those who have heard his pleas rush headlong toward disaster and confrontation with divine judgement. I have too often left the pulpit crushed and broken in spirit because of the hard looks on the face of those who heard but refused to heed.
Even those whom Jeremiah had called friends were now waiting for him to slip. Those friends, called men of peace by the prophet of God, were those whom the prophet had greeted by name as he met them in the streets, those whom he had greeted with a wish for their peace. It is painful enough when those we do not know laugh at us and when those with whom we are unacquainted ridicule us for our message and for our identification with righteousness; but when even our close friends mock us and deride our words we are wounded more deeply than any mere visual inspection could ever reveal. When friends reject our pleas and refuse our warnings, entering into the contemptuous and disdainful mockery, we experience a pain unlike anything we might ever have imagined.
The Response Of God’s People To Depression — How do God’s people respond to depression? I suppose there are as many responses as there are members of the Body of Christ. However, certain repeated strains appear when God’s people are depressed. First appears a retreat from service. Jeremiah spoke of this response in verse nine when he determined: "I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name." However, the prophet soon discovered His Word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. “How can I speak of God, how can I speak of His mercy, how can I speak of His grace, when I hurt so deeply that I cannot even express my pain?” The first response to depression is to distance ourselves from God, the one source to lift us from depression.
Again, the depressed individual is seized with black bitterness. Listen to the black words Jeremiah pours forth in the midst of his depression; they may be akin to some you have spoken: Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! [Jeremiah 20:14]. Have any of us never said, “I wish I’d never been born!” It was a grave sin and a capital crime for a Jew to curse his parents, and Jeremiah treads as close to the unseen line as he possibly can with this cry. In cursing the day of his birth, Jeremiah cruses the call of God on his life. I daresay that every conscientious minister of Christ has at one time of another approached perilously close to this line.
Nor is this the only time Jeremiah wishes he were dead. Jeremiah 15:10 records another occasion when this same prophet of God cried out in blackest depression: Alas, my mother, that you gave me birth, a man with whom the whole land strives and contends! I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me. I confess that I find more than a touch of humour in the final complaint: I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me. If you wish to be cursed … lend to another. If you wish to be cursed, borrow from another. Lending and borrowing are subject to misunderstanding and tend to strain relationships. Jeremiah says, “I never loaned anything. I never borrowed anything. Nevertheless, everyone curses me! What have I done?”
A child of God is approaching a dark pit when he begins to wish himself dead. That one has taken his eyes off God and is focused on the situation. He no longer believes that God rules over all, much less that God can overrule all. Pity the poor saint who despairs.
Added to retreat and bitter blackness is irrational unfairness. The prophet makes the statement: Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, "A child is born to you – a son!" May that man be like the towns LORD overthrew without pity [Jeremiah 20:15,16a]. The statement is astonishing for its display of irrationality. Poor man! Hapless fellow! All he had done was inform Jeremiah’s father that he had a son! Jeremiah was so irrationally unfair that he wished the man could be like Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone raining down on him from heaven! The prophet of God no longer is rational at this point.
Neither are you and I rational when gripped by despair and depression, because we speak out of our anger and surrender to the overwhelming emotion of the moment. Psychological research suggests that within every case of depression is an element of anger. As an example of that matter, Dr. Mortimer Ostow, in his book The Psychology of Melancholy, says:
Depression at every phase of its development includes a component of anger. This anger is directed against the individual who is expected to provide love, but who disappoints at different phases. The anger may arouse a man’s wish to irritate, to hurt, to destroy, depending upon the degree of pain that he faces.[1]
We do not speak wisely when angry and anger boils to the surface in depression.
Jeremiah had travelled along the road of depression so far that he had passed beyond isolation and black bitterness and irrational unfairness, arriving finally at a position of suicidal despair. Listen as he wails out his mournful lament, the logical conclusion of his depressed state: [God] did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame? [Jeremiah 20:17,18]. Not in all of Scripture will you discover more vehement words!
One of God’s greatest men had just experienced a total eclipse of faith. What would you have said to Jeremiah when he wailed out, “I wish I had been slain from the womb, my mother forever my grave!” Do you suppose his case would have responded to a glib, “Why not cheer up? Things will get better.” Martin Luther, who himself knew depression deep and dark, speaking of this passage, wrote:
Those who condemn this impatience and call attention to the need of patience are mere theoretical theologians. If you have met with such experiences in practical life, you will understand that stories such as this one are too great than that we should dispute about them in theoretical fashion.
What do you say to a man like Jeremiah? How do you encourage a fellow believer who has slid to the bottom and is ready to give up? How do you counsel a friend who is in mental agony because of deep depression? What do you say to yourself when black bitterness, dark despair, and despondence become your lot – even in the Lord’s service?
The Resource Available to God’s People During Depression — In the midst of despair Jeremiah revealed something of the prophetic heart and looked to the great resource ever available to God’s people during depression. I recall a time some years back when I was beaten and knocked about quite severely and when it seemed God was no longer receiving calls. I said in retrospect: “When one is flat on his back, there is but one direction to look.” That is ever true for the child of God, and it was true for Jeremiah.
Jeremiah had two great resources which are available to each child of the King. His first resource was the confidence that even in the silence God is working. We modern evangelicals appear to be strangely of the opinion that if God is at work we will be in constant communication – that there will be a constant dialogue between God and us. When Jeremiah begged for intervention there was only silence.
How many of the Psalms have you read lately? As you read did you notice how very frequently the Psalmist cries out to God only to be met by silence? Listen to a few of the Psalms which speak of this eerie and frightening silence.
O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, and am not silent.
[Psalm 22:2]
To you I call, O LORD my Rock;
do not turn a deaf ear to me.
For if you remain silent,
I will be like those who have gone down to the pit.
[Psalm 28:1]
Let not those gloat over me
who are my enemies without cause;
let not those who hate me without reason
maliciously wink the eye.
They do not speak peaceably,
but devise false accusations
against those who live quietly in the land.
They gape at me and say, “Aha! Aha!
With our own eyes we have seen it.”
O LORD, you have seen this; be not silent.
Do not be far from me, O Lord.
[Psalm 35:19-22]
O God, do not keep silent;
be not quiet, O God, be not still.
[Psalm 83:1]
O God, whom I praise,
do not remain silent,
[Psalm 109:1]
Did you note how frequently God appears silent in the estimate of the Psalmist? Did you take note that in every instance the Psalmist concludes with the victorious note that God has been at work all along? God works in silence!
I am amused and encouraged whenever I read of Elijah as he fled from Jezebel. Discouraged and defeated, dejected and depressed – Elijah was ready to end it all. You will no doubt recall the account of his flight and the description of his feelings which is given us in 1 Kings 19:3-5. Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day's journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. "I have had enough, LORD," he said. "Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors." Then he lay down under the tree and fell asleep.
God took the prophet into the mountains and there revealed Himself to Elijah. First God sent a great wind powerful enough to tear mountains and shatter rocks; but God was not in the wind. Then God sent a great earthquake which caused the mountains to skip like lambs; but God was not in the earthquake. Finally God sent fire which lapped up even the stones in the intensity of heat; but God was not in the fire. God rides on the storm; God commands the earthquake; God rules over the fire, but God is not in the fire.
It is that last sentence in the twelfth verse which instructs us in God’s way to work: And after the fire came a gentle whisper, and the thirteenth verse gives Elijah’s response: When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. God works in the quiet time. We seem to have actually convinced ourselves that only in the spectacular and the noisy can we know God’s presence, when all along we learn that in repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength [Isaiah 30:15]. For you who read music, have you ever long considered the sign for a rest? Someone has wisely stated that there is no music in a rest; but there is the making of music in that rest. Without the rest there is but a constant din, a cacophony of sound merging into discordant restlessness. Without the rest, there is no music.
Never think that because God does not thunder from heaven that He is incapable of working or that He is unconcerned about His child. Jesus our Lord, and God’s own Son hanging on the cross, cried out, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me? [Mark 15:34]. God maintained utter silence even as His Son cried out in lonely agony. Was God unable to work? Did the Father not care that His Son was tasting death for fallen man? In the silence of those six hours, God provided for mankind’s redemption.
Jeremiah drew yet upon another precious resource available to every child of God. Even while at the bottom he kept on talking to God. I will admit that his prayers were not especially pretty little prayers designed to make anyone overhearing his pleas comfortable, but he did keep on talking. He bombarded heaven with pleas and with cries for merciful relief. Think about this: is God so feeble that He cannot tolerate sobs of anguish and cries of bitter invective arising from the wounded heart? My God is too great to be toppled by the raging cries of a wounded heart, and He loves His child too deeply to ever permit the strong words which grow out of that child’s pain to diminish His love. My God is too merciful to ever dismiss His child’s painful plea. He hears; and He is at work.
Jeremiah found the greatest relief from depression when he discovered something in the midst of darkness to express as an act of praise to God. In fact, the only relief seen in the whole of this passage is the praise found between two bouts of darkest depression. Jeremiah found something verbally with which to express his praise to God. When Jeremiah began overt, open praise of God, he began the journey up out of the pit of despair and the slough of despondency. He praised God for His vindicating power;
But the LORD is with me like a mighty warrior;
so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail.
They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced;
their dishonour will never be forgotten.
[verse eleven],
… for His discerning power;
O LORD Almighty, you who examine the righteous
and probe the heart and mind,
let me see your vengeance upon them,
for to you I have committed my cause.
[verse twelve],
… and for His rescuing power;
Sing to the LORD!
Give praise to the LORD!
He rescues the life of the needy
from the hands of the wicked.
[verse thirteen].
I am not suggesting that voicing praise is the cure for pathologic depression, but I do contend that God’s people are subject to depression, to despondency, to discouragement, to dejection, to despair. None of us want to dishonour God through speaking against Him or through saying something inappropriate in our sorrow which would wound another. Nevertheless, we are sensitive and ever alert to the disquieting knowledge that we are liable to do precisely that because we are depressed.
May I make simple application of the message, seeking to provide you that which will benefit when the dark days come. I suspect that I am speaking to people who have at one time or another experienced the dark pit of depression. If among us is one who says such an experience is utterly foreign, I suggest that that person is either lying or that individual is seriously emotionally impaired. The greater tragedy than that we should have experienced depression is the knowledge that we are each likely to again experience times of depression. Though the dark days may be brief and the depression may not be severe, it is likely that some among us, and perhaps each of us eventually, will find it necessary to struggle against the downward pull of dark depression.
When depressed, turn again to Jeremiah’s experience and the resources which he demonstrated; they are your resources as a child of God. Jeremiah learned that God works even though He is silent. Don’t despair and draw the conclusion that because God does not immediately answer He does not care or that He is incapable of intervening; He may even then be in the process of sending relief. We may be confident that our Father is too good to ever needlessly hurt us and too wise to ever make a mistake. Though Daniel prayed for three weeks and all heaven seemed unconcerned with his cries, God had from the first dispatched an angel with the answer Daniel sought [Daniel 10:12-14].
Keep on talking to God. Your prayer may not be a model for the pulpit, but keep on talking to God. Cry out your pain and your sorrow, but keep on talking to God. Amazingly, as you sob out your sorrow you will make a startling discovery – your cries of anguish will turn to songs of praise. If you have known God and if you have seen Him work in days gone by, you will find solace and comfort and strength in the knowledge that He has intervened before and that He will do it again.
Do you maintain a diary? That is a discipline all but lost in our day of restless searching and desperate seeking. Should you be one who keeps a diary, and in that journal of life you should record the accounts of those special times when God intervenes, you will have a record of the ongoing acts of God. While I do not discourage reading the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, I do encourage recognition that that particular book is a continuing record and that it is we who are disciples who now provide the accounts for the continuing saga of the work of God in the world. A diary will reveal the many and continuing ways in which God works in your own life. Reading such accounts will encourage you in the dark days to remember that God has intervened before and that He will soon deliver you again. Thus encouraged you will find a deep desire to call out to God yet one more time.
Jesus spoke hard truths and the “wannabe Christians” deserted him en masse. Turning to the Twelve, Jesus asked: You do not want to leave too, do you? You will recall Peter’s answer: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life [John 6:67,68]. Peter truly answered for each of us. Where will we turn but to the One who loves us? Regardless of how difficult the trial we experience, to whom shall we go … if not God? Where shall we turn … if not to our Father? To Him we turn again and again, sobbing out our sorrow and crying out our discouragement, until He provides the answer. We turn to Him because it is our nature as twice born children of the king; and we turn to Him because we know intuitively there is no answer to be found in the world about us.
Facing the wrath of an enraged king and his sarcastic question of who was able to rescue them from his hand, three young Hebrew men confidently and calmly asserted: If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up. [Daniel 3:17,18]. God has rescued His people before, and God can do it again; but if not … He is still God.
I have spoken at length of depression and the resources available to gain a victory over depression. I have spoken out of experience. I would not want any to know the depths to which this pastor can descend nor would I wish on any the despair I have known. All that I have said by way of obtaining relief is founded upon the Word of God and has been tested in the laboratory of my own experience. However, these two simple steps to relief are worthless if you are not related to the Father. If you have never experienced the second birth, if you are not born from above into the Family of God, if you are unsaved, if you are an outsider to the grace of God, and if you are not a Christian, you have no promise of relief and respite. To you who have yet to be born into this family, may I present to you the promise of life in Christ. I invite you to consider the life offered in Him. If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved… Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. [Romans 10:9,10,13]. Receive His grace today. Amen.
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[1] Ostrow, Mortimer, The Psychology of Melancholy, New York: Harper and Row, 1970, pg. 104