Empathy?
He will call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him. I will satisfy him with a long life, and show him My salvation. Psalm 91:15-16 NASB
With him – “He will call. I will answer.” What more could we ask from God? Well, in fact, we might ask just one more thing: that He answers with care. We don’t want just any answer. We want an answer that will help us, and for that to occur, we need a God who cares about us. In the ancient world there were plenty of gods, but they were occupied with their own lives, their own desires. In fact, in most ancient religions, the gods were basically hostile toward men, first creating them to serve their needs and second, punishing them for infractions or just for the fun of it. YHVH, the God of Israel, was very different. He empathized. Even more importantly, He felt what His people felt. It wasn’t just empathy. It was identification.
The Hebrew text demonstrates this added nuance by its syntax. The literal verse doesn’t read, “I will be with him in trouble.” It reads, “With him I in trouble.” God’s version places us first. In addition, since there is no copula, God’s version treats both us and Him as the subject. “him—I” in trouble. When we are in trouble, God is also in trouble. That’s a rung higher than simply recognizing our trouble. Our trouble is His (existential) trouble.
ṣārâ ( צָרָה ) is from the root ṣārar, “bind, be narrow, be in distress,”[1] “ṣārar may refer to anything which is narrow or confining. . . It also may refer to the strong emotional response that one experiences when pressed externally by enemies or internally by wrong decisions or passions;”[2] We know exactly what ṣārâ is like. English is filled with synonyms, like “problems, difficulty, issues, bother, inconvenience, worry, anxiety, distress, concern, disquiet, unease, irritation, vexation, annoyance, stress, agitation, harassment, unpleasantness, hassle.” Pick one (or more). Humanity’s common language is pain, and ṣārâ is the source code. But this isn’t the astounding fact. The staggering surprise is that God also personally knows ṣārâ. In us and in Him. When His purposes and desires for our shalom do not happen, He experiences ṣārâ: confinement, restriction, distress. Just think about that! When God tells us that He is also the victim of trouble, He reaffirms not only identification with our experience, He also tells us that resolving our troubles resolves His troubles. What kind of a God is this?! How could we believe in any other?!
So, pray, my friend. Pray with all your troubles front and center. Don’t hide anything behind “proper prayer” language. This word is used to describe the emotional distress accompanying childbirth. Scream it out. Give birth to those deep troubles—and know that you are relieving God of His agony over you.
Topical Index: ṣārâ, distress, prayer, Psalm 91:15-16
[1] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 778). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Ibid.
I must acknowledge with immense gratitude the persistent testimony of Israel’s witness to the “troubling of God” by Israel’s descendants, the people of God. Were it not for Israel’s testimony and witness to truth, I would be in Sheol awaiting God’s adjudication by which I would be found both guilty and justly condemned. But as it is, God troubled himself by my problems and issues and the difficulty from which I could not extract myself… an agony of nihilistic hopelessness from which I could find no way of escape.
But because of a certain Jewish Rabbi, who was willing to take the troubling of my soul to himself, my dilemma was brought before HaShem, and profoundly, HaShem assumed my distress… my agony… as his own. Not only did HaShem assume my agony, he assumed my overwhelming and immeasurable debt—and he assumed the full price of my redemption, willingly paid and satisfied by the sacrificial substitute of a life… a lamb without blemish. The life that was substituted was the life of that Jewish Rabbi, full of grace and truth, who was known by HaShem as no other son was known—as his own Son alone. He prayed on my behalf when I could not… and when I could no longer endure to labor, he labored in my stead, relieving God of his agony over me, bringing me through a new birthing to that life derived and sustained from above.