The Dark Night of the Soul

There is a time in every Christian’s life when God begins removing the things we love. 

Peace is replaced with anxiety. Health with sickness. Family with emptiness. Success with failure. Joy with depression. 

In these moments, the Christian clings to that which is left—God. We clutch and snatch but grab only air. When our screams are silenced by the silence, we weep and look to Christ. 

But this is only the beginning. In the dark night of the soul, Christ is not there either. Just the darkness. We look up to Christ, but only see the emptiness. Not the emptiness like that of a dark hallway, but the emptiness of evil that stares back with a crooked smile—the feeling that the future is long, blind, pitiless, and indifferent. 

This is what it means to cry out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” These words mean nothing if not complete abandonment. Make no mistake—God does leave His people. 

That may sound extreme but it is also biblical: “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones; he has made my paths crooked. He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver; I have become the laughingstock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.’” (Lamentations 3:1–18, ESV) 

These inerrant and inspired words attribute the lack of God—the experience of suffering—to God’s activity. Is it God who has “made me desolate,” the Bible says. 

Why?

Because sin is the most powerful human force in the world its remedy must be even stronger. Every person is born with hellish corruption which leads him to forsake God and His commandments. Our sin prompts us to scratch and claw for more sin. We are all born with the delusion that we are our own masters and that we can attain what we need on our own. If you are a corporate ladder-climber or a mountain climber these inclinations aren’t quite so dangerous. Indeed, they can be a benefit to your earthly success. But for the soul, these tendencies are eternally destructive. 

There is no life outside of Christ. So, when we pursue life outside of Him we are drinking the poison of eternal death. God, in His mercy, brings us to seasons of death in order to demonstrate to our sin-sick souls what our end will be without Him. He allows us to peer over the precipice of hell so that we won’t go there. The saints who experience more of this misery experience more of God because their horror is translated into a white-knuckle grip on the robes of Christ.  

If Christ swooped us up when we lost everything, we would never learn what it is to be nothing. We would not have to sit in our own sin. We wouldn’t truly know what He’s saved us from. Therefore, we would never truly love Him. 

Christians feel the flames of hell singe the souls of their feet so that they might jump out of their own lives and into the arms of Christ, forever.