“When you don’t have faith, pray for the faith to have faith”
Teresa Regula arrived at Auschwitz as a sixteen-year-old. Once a healthy child, she contracted chickenpox, measles, and scarlet fever in the horrific Nazi concentration camp.
Speaking ahead of yesterday’s eightieth anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation by Soviet troops, she said: “When I returned (from the camp), I thought, ‘I’m never going to have children—ever.’ If they had to go through even a fraction of what I went through, I didn’t want that.”
Though she later married, she has remained childless all her life.
Having visited the Holocaust museum in Israel and several in US cities over the years, I know that I cannot begin to understand the horror of the atrocities inflicted on the Jewish people by the Nazis. A million of them were murdered in Auschwitz, six million in total. A fourth of the victims were children.
“I cry by day, but you do not answer”
I would imagine that many of Hitler’s Jewish victims knew Psalm 22, David’s famous prayer of lament. They of all people would have the right to pray its opening words:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest (vv. 1–2).
David goes on to describe his suffering in detail:
- “All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; ‘He trusts in the Lᴏʀᴅ; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!’” (vv. 7–8).
- “They have pierced my hands and feet” (v. 16).
- “I can count all my bones—they stare and gloat over me” (v. 17).
- “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing, they cast lots” (v. 18).
And yet, he refuses to abandon his belief in the goodness of his God: “You are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them” (vv. 3–4).
Now comes the hard question: What do we do when God does not deliver us?
What would David say to the victims of Auschwitz?
Psalm 22 on the cross
One Jew in particular especially had the right to ask our question.
Jesus made David’s initial lament his own cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). His death on Calvary fulfilled Psalm 22’s descriptions in stunning detail:
- “They have pierced my hands and feet” (Psalm 22:16) is a graphic depiction of crucifixion, though the Persians did not invent this horrific form of execution until four centuries after the time of David.
- “I can count all my bones” (Psalm 22:17): before Jesus’ executioners could break his legs to hasten his death, as was typical, he “gave up his spirit” (John 19:30, 33).
- “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” (Psalm 22:18): this was precisely how Jesus’ executioners stole his clothing (John 19:23–24).
Crucifixion was one of the worst forms of torture ever devised. And yet Jesus refused to drink even wine mixed with gall to dull his senses, choosing to experience the cross in all its excruciating pain (Matthew 27:34).
What’s more, his sinless soul was made to bear the sins of all of humanity across all time (Isaiah 53:6; 2 Corinthians 5:21). You and I have no possible way to imagine the horror, disgust, and grief this must have caused him. Even worse, the holy Father was forced in that moment to turn from his sin-bearing Son, causing Jesus to cry out in agony at having been “forsaken” by him.
In total, Jesus suffered physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual pain on a level no other human has ever experienced. And yet, somehow, he found the faith to pray at the end, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
How can we do the same?
I have no simple formulas to offer Holocaust survivors, or those devastated by the wildfires and now the floods and mudslides in California, or Ukrainians continuing to suffer from Russia’s immoral and illegal invasion, or anyone else facing the tragedy and pain of our fallen world.
However, I’ve made two discoveries over the years that I find deeply encouraging in my hardest days.
One: Faith in God is most needed when it is hardest.
When all is well, it is easy to trust in the God we credit for our success. When he answers our prayers in the ways we want him to, it’s easy to have faith in him. But when our days are painful beyond despair, when our suffering knows no release and our grieved questions have no answers, those are the times when we need an omnipotent Father the most.
But he cannot give what we do not have faith to receive. And so, it is when we find it hardest to trust him that we most need to trust him. It is when we are sickest that we most need a doctor.
Of course, it is in such times that faith can be hardest to choose, which leads to my second observation.
Two: My lack of faith is God’s invitation to seek the faith he alone can give.
One reason God allows us to come to the end of ourselves is so we can turn to him for the faith we cannot muster up ourselves, a faith that our circumstances can neither warrant nor produce. Then we can cry with the demoniac’s desperate father, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
I once heard a pastor say, “When you don’t have faith, pray for the faith to have faith.”
We can ask our Lord to help us believe that his omniscient ways are higher and better than ours (Isaiah 55:9); that the God who “is” love can only want our best (1 John 4:8); that the Father who redeems all he allows will redeem even this, whether we understand his redemption in this life or the next (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:12).
Carolyn Custis James observed,
“Joy isn’t grounded in our circumstances; it is grounded in the unchanging character of God.”
Will you choose joy today?
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