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Psalm 102:8-10  All day long my enemies taunt me; those who rail against me use my name as a curse.  For I eat ashes as my food and mingle my drink with tears because of your great wrath, for you have taken me up and thrown me aside.

Very many of the Psalms in our English Bibles have a rubric at the beginning giving some background of the authorship, the musical accompaniment for singing them, and the historical circumstances in which they were written.  Our Bibles have these printed in italics and do not include them in the verse numbering, giving the impression that they are not part of the inspired text of Scripture.  The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, numbers them as ‘verse 1’ and treats them as integral with the Scriptures.

The ‘rubric’ of this Psalm calls it a ‘lament’ (NIV, KJV)  or ‘complaint’ (ESV).  Sadly, our present culture does not lend itself to ‘lamentation’.  We prefer a more positive, optimistic, stiff-upper-lip outlook on life that tends to suppress, and even deny, negative feelings.  We like to imagine ourselves in a brighter world where we have everything ‘together’, and where we try to pretend that things are not really as bad as they seem.

The Book of ‘Lamentations’, on the other hand, gives us permission to take a more realistic view of things – which is important, especially as we see our ‘Utopia’ crumbling before our eyes whenever we read the newspaper or watch the TV news.  The biblical concept of ‘lament’ gives us a way to process our emotions, to vent our anger against what is happening, and to express dismay at the way sin (including our own sin) destroys lives and our collective well-being.  ‘Lament’ gives us a place to voice confusion as suffering can easily cause us to start to doubt God’s character.  ‘Lamentation’ gives a sacred dignity to human suffering as we worship our God who is sovereign, just and merciful.  ‘Lamentation’ is a direct, honest, and godly response to life’s perplexing problems.

But, most importantly, ‘lamentation’ helps us to understand and appreciate what Jesus, the Eternal Son of God, was prepared to endure on our behalf to rescue us from this broken world.  Things are what they are because of the ‘great wrath’ of a just God poured out on a sin-ridden world – and Jesus has come to die, bearing the full impact of that wrath in our place so as to prptect us from it!  Until we ‘stoics’ learn to really lament, we can never fully understand what Jesus, willingly and voluntarily, went through for us, and what it meant for him to cry out from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

As we read Psalm 102, let us reflect on what Jesus went through as he suffered the taunt of his enemies and as people throughout the world continue ‘rail against’ him, ‘use his [holy] name as a curse’, and ‘throw him aside’.  And let us truly ‘lament’ over the way our sin contributes to the brokenness of our world.
– Bruce Christian