Copyright by Shea Oakley
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“What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest but only turmoil.” Job 3:25-26
What do we do when we have no peace, no quietness, no rest and seemingly no hope? What is a Christian to do when, like Job, he feels that his worst case scenario is coming true before his eyes? Most, if not all, believers will know the “dark night of the soul” at some point in their lives. This is the time when all seems lost, when we no longer sense the presence of God, when we are tempted to despair of ever knowing it again. It is when we have “made our bed in Hell”. The world would label it depression. To us this state is all that and more. Call it “spiritual depression”. Few experiences in the life of a believer are more miserable.
The condition I speak of is sometimes the result of personal sin, but not always. Job, for instance, was a righteous man. God Himself called him “blameless and upright”. David was a “man after God’s own heart” but knew all about the dark night, experiencing it long before his disastrous tryst with Bathsheba. Just read the Psalms and that much is clear. No, spiritual depression is sometimes caused by someone else’s sin or simply by the experience of living in a deeply fallen world. Christ Himself knew such pain in the Garden of Gethsemane.
So what can save the struggling child of God from complete despair? It is more than a little comforting to know that all of the men mentioned endured their misery and emerged on the other side of it. None of them cursed God and died. Job ended up with twice as much as what he lost. King David, for all his self-inflicted trouble later in life, never fell away from the Lord he loved. As for Jesus Christ, well, suffice it to say that He now sits at the right hand of God the Father glorified forevermore. Hope for deliverance is the only thing that will keep us from giving up and the stories of other’s who suffered in the Word of God will furnish that hope if we only seek it.
We can also find comfort in the knowledge that everything which happens to the believer happens for a reason. We may not know the reason why we have suffered spiritual depression until after we have come through this trial. One hint, though, may have to do with the most profound kind of sanctification. In Timothy Roger’s A Discourse on Troubles of Mind and the Disease of Melancholy, written over 250 years ago, he describes the long trial of one man and its outcome:
“John Foxe, in his “Book of Martyrs,” gives an account of a certain John Glover, who was worn and consumed with inward trouble for five years, so that he had no comfort in his food, nor in his sleep, or in any enjoyment in life. He was so perplexed, as if he had been in the deepest pit of hell, and yet this good servant of God, after all these horrid temptations and buffetings of Satan, was delivered from all his trouble, and the effect was such a degree of mortification of sin, that he appeared as one already in heaven.”
In Glover’s life, and in our own, the deepest, darkest night of the soul can be the gateway to even deeper blessing.