How Can the Christian Life Be Enriched by Lament: A Conversation with Dr. Bryan Babcock, Pt 1

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm here with Brian Babcock. Brian and I actually met at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where I finished my PhD and he started his PhD work. I'll let him tell you a little bit more about that, but Brian and I have been in contact ever since, and it's been great to have him collaborate on A Praying People. He wrote a chapter in A Praying People, and so that's what we're really going to cover today. But Brian's a really interesting guy. He's had sort of a diverse background of different things he does, and so Brian, it's great to have you, man. And maybe just tell people, I don't know, maybe start a little bit. What did you do prior to doing your PhD in Old Testament? Maybe that's the best place to start. Talk a little bit about maybe some of your highlights prior to doing an Old Testament theology PhD. Oh, James, thank you so much. It's so good to be here and to share a little bit about God and prayer. So God has had me on an interesting journey. I mean, people say, be careful what you wish for, so be careful what you pray for because God opens interesting doors. And so I came out of a background in healthcare where I was a hospital CEO, and God had placed on my heart some different business ideas. And coming from an entrepreneurial family, I set out on this entrepreneurial path and had a couple of ideas that grew and was able to grow these businesses and sell them. And during that process, I had a tragedy. And it's a hard thing to start a podcast with that, but it's so interesting to me how God leads. And what had happened in my life is God gives us all these talents, and he lets us go out and use them. And unfortunately, in my case, one little step after another, I used these talents that God gave and moved away from God. Then the world would say, man, you are accomplishing great things. Look at your house. Look at your cars. Look at your perfect family. And yet inside, I am worshiping career, worshiping money. And as I grew, I really separated from God. And it came to a point where I was living in Denver during the week and in Kansas on the weekends running a business that we had started. And my son committed suicide. And it's one of those moments that you would trade it all. I mean, millions of dollars you would trade for one more day with your child. It's not supposed to happen that way. And my family and I sat down and we went, where are we? What is it that is important in life? And we decided that God was the center of life and we had to reconnect. And in my case, I'm kind of in my head. I'm not a truly emotional guy. And I knew that God existed. I just didn't think I liked him very much. And so being in my head, I read every book I could find on suicide and after suicide. And then I turned to God and felt led to go seminary. And so my quest was really leaving a worldly existence and trying to explore who God is and whether I was going to have a relationship with him or not. That a God who could do something like that, allow something like that. Is that a God I really want to be part of? And so I went to Denver Seminary and had an amazing healing experience. Found how God and I fit together, developed a true personal relationship. And during that, I really enjoyed languages. And so, you know, in seminary, you do Hebrew and you do Greek and most people go, yeah, this is not so much fun. And I'm like, this is awesome. You know, Hebrew's kind of like a secret decoder ring, you know, you get this stuff. And one of my faculty, Dr. Rick Hess, also taught Akkadian. And I was able to spend some time in this other language, comparable to Hebrew at the same time, but a very, very different language and fell in love with it. And so I started to explore how different cultures impacted Israel, especially Israel of the Old Testament. And so then I went on and met you at Trinity. Then I went overseas and did my PhD at the University of Bristol in England and then a postdoc at Cambridge. And so that brought me to then how Israel expressed herself with her neighbors. And so I really did kind of a historical linguistic PhD trying to understand how Israel's culture operated among her neighbors. Very cool. Yeah, man. I mean, I think, you know, obviously we went to seminary for different reasons, but I think when I entered seminary, it was a very similar, there was a similar impetus. I had become a Christian maybe three or four years earlier and just still hadn't figured out or had really any interest in committing to it a hundred percent. And the guy who was discipling me kind of said, you know, you're too hard headed for anybody to teach you this stuff. You need to go learn it yourself. And he's like, you need to go do an MDiv. And I'm like, well, I don't even know what that is. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 948-78 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 948-78 or call 888-958-6579. But, you know, so sort of a baby Christian, four years in the making, I jumped into seminary. Hadn't, you know, you'd done the normal Bible studies and campus crusade and stuff like that. I'd had like, you know, a smattering of Bible verses. But I think at the time I'd read about half the Gospel of John because I just couldn't get through it. And, you know, portions of the book of Romans. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll go to seminary. And, yeah, my wife and I affectionately call my 12 years of seminary education the most expensive discipleship program you could ever go through. Absolutely. You know, it's, I think for guys like us where, you know, I'm a little more in my head too, it makes a lot of sense to go into seminary and just try to figure things out for yourself. I think it's a path that just unfortunately some people have to take the time and the money and find a passion in that arena. So, dude, what a great story. And, yeah, so you went on to Europe to do your PhD. You now are sort of doing something completely different with life, right? I know you keep your toes in academia. Do you still teach adjunct places and stuff like that? I'm not right now. I retired about seven years ago and I love it. And I missed the classroom. I actually sold a business and was able to sit back and relax. And as you are, very quickly, I started to twiddle my thumbs and go, all right, what's next? And God put this opportunity in my life where I could minister in two really very different ways. The first was with a faith-based disaster relief company where I started helping with disasters around the world. And so for the last five years.

Years now, I've been responding to disasters, trying to, through a faith-based way, minister to people while reducing suffering and saving lives. And I just, in fact, on Friday, got back from Gaza and Egypt where I've been working on the disaster relief project trying to provide bathrooms for those who need them because right now, you've got over two million people in a space for about 200,000. And so trying to create both clean or safe drinking water and bathrooms for folks during these, what we call IDP camps, but basically a refugee camp in Gaza. So I do that, and that's a way to help serve but also minister. And then the second way, which is a very, very different way, is I teach history on Viking ocean cruise ships. So I spend about four months a year traveling around the world. Very different than disasters, having breakfast in bed. I mean, it's pretty nice. And teaching about world history. And I guess, you know, it's a grueling schedule. I mean, it's not for everybody. It's just a ton of work. I mean, 45 minutes every other day. It's a really hard schedule. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I remember. I mean, I taught on an Israel trip one time and I thought to myself, I can't believe I'm actually here and they're paying me to do this. You know, it was super fun. Well, dude, I mean, I appreciate the disaster work and I'll be interested to hear. So Brian wrote a chapter on Lament Psalms in A Praying People. And so I'm kind of interested. I want to take a quick break, but when we come back, I'd be interested to hear how you understand Lament. And I think probably where we want to get to is sort of, does Lament connect to some of the disaster relief work you're seeing in and around the world? And maybe how could Lament inform our understanding of even how to, you know, for those of us who aren't in the thick of that, right? How might Lament help us to connect with it a little bit more deeply? So let me take a quick break and then when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about Lament Psalms. Hey everybody, we're back. Brian, you know, before the break, we were going to talk about Lament Psalms. So talk us through a little bit of your chapter. What drove you into, maybe a good place to start is, what drove you to write about Lament Psalms in the first place? Yeah, prayer. Prayer is such an important part of a healthy spiritual relationship to God. I just, Moody had this quote that I love, or this story that I love, where he was saying that he would go to prayer meetings around the country. And often he would go to a church that had, you know, 800 people attending on Sunday. And he would come in on a Wednesday night and there'd be 20 people there praying. And he'd go to another church with a thousand people and there'd be a hundred people there praying. And he went to this one small church of about 350 and there were 300 people there praying on a Wednesday night. And he went up to the pastor and he goes, you know, I go to all these churches and Wednesday night, you know, prayer is, you know, a very small percentage. And the pastor looked at him and said, you know, if people actually believed that prayer worked, they would all be here. And to me, that is such a meaningful quote because I think a lot of us pray just because we're told to pray, but not because we really think that God's going to act in that prayer. And so for me, being able to write a Lament prayer chapter was all about how can we, knowing that God exists, but also knowing that we have suffering in our lives, what does the Bible teach us about how we can interact with our suffering and expect God to act in our lives? And that's really what I wanted to talk about. And it came to me, I had just come back from Ethiopia and I had seen suffering like I had never seen before. There was a civil war that's still going on that had just started and there was this northern province called Tigray that was seeking independence. And there were three different armies fighting. This little army up north of a country called Eritrea, there was Tigray, and then there was the Ethiopian Defense Force. And all three were basically fighting each other and death was everywhere. I would get up in the morning with my team and we would often cross the lines of all three armies during the day. So you'd go to one checkpoint and it would have the Ethiopian Defense Force there. And then you go to another checkpoint another mile away and there's fighting going on and you're there with your little white flag, you know, you're coming through. And they would all go, we hate those guys, but we're so glad you're here helping the people. And there were hundreds of thousands of people living in squalor. I mean, they were just camping without tents, going to the bathroom in fields, no bathrooms, no water, no food. And it struck me, I came to this one little camp that they had set up and there was a guy just rocking back and forth. And I walked up kind of behind him because I didn't want to bother him. And I noticed that he had his Bible out. And he was reading the Bible and just rocking back and forth. And I had to sit down with him and he goes, how could God allow this? How can this happen to me and to my family? And you had just asked if I'd be willing to write a chapter in this book. And I sat down and went, you know, that's the chapter is how will God do this in a real world? And so I sat down and so coming out of tragedy, and not all of us have been in a war zone, not all of us have had our houses bombed, but all of us have had tragedy. All of us have had, you know, marital problems or financial problems or children problems or drug and alcohol problems. I mean, no one's life is really untouched. So that's a great story to talk about writing a chapter on lament. I mean, I just had the opportunity. I sat down with Russ Meek, who we both know. We wrote trajectories together, 2018, I think now. And he just finished up a book on Ecclesiastes. And so let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Really cool, great conversation. But I mean, one of the things we talked about in that conversation was, you know, Ecclesiastes is all about almost like missed expectations. In other words, we expect something to happen if we're good people, if we're righteous, if we're serving the Lord, if we're obeying. And we have this sort of dichotomy of, yeah, I thought I was doing something good. I thought I was being a righteous person. I thought I was following the Lord. And my life, I don't have riches. I don't have prosperity. I don't have, you know, safety, security, all of those things. And he ties it back to Abel, the story of Cain and Abel, which is really fascinating to think about. You know, here's righteous Abel who gets killed in a field. And that's what Ecclesiastes is sort of talking about. And it's been good to do that interview after, you know, before talking about Lament. Because I think, you know, Ecclesiastes, I don't think we usually think about it in terms of Lament. At least I didn't. But the more, you know, I've looked at Lament and Ecclesiastes together, it's like, yeah, it kind of is. It's sort of a light Lament, but it's still a Lament. So how do you, you know, in your chapter, you deal with a lot of the Lament Psalms.

proper, you know, not necessarily lamentations, but definitely in the Psalter, these lament Psalms. How would you characterize lament for people who don't really fully grasp it? I mean, it's not just complaining, right? It's something other than that, you know, it's not a gossip session in prayer kind of vibe to it, right? No, that's true. And classically, there are really five different parts of a lament. So to be classified as the lament, first, you have to invoke God. So, you know, Oh God, oh God, why have you forsaken me? I mean, so you're talking to God and then, then you want to sit back and say, really, what, what am I angry about? What, what has happened in my life that has, that has put me here? How have I been wronged? So a description of your complaint and then, then you want to move into help. How, how do you expect God to help? And then an expression based upon God's character of the action you desire. And that's really the pivot point in a Psalm of lament. It's, it's, you know, how, where am I? And then shifting from me to you, God, how do we pivot? And then finally fifth, how has my perspective changed based on the fact that I know God's character and I expect him to act in my life. And it's surprising when you think about the Psalms because we, you know, we come to come to Psalms and we go, Oh, they're all praises and how wonderful. And yet a third of the Psalms are really a lament. So a third are, are how has my circumstance wronged me and how do I expect God to, to act? And then how am I thankful for God over that? Yeah. And so when we think about that, I mean, a third of the book of Psalms, that's like, I don't know, what is that? 50 or so probably somewhere in that range, right? If I'm doing math, right. Oh my God, I'm not a mathematician, but I think that's right. 50 lament Psalms. Do those, do you think contribute to an overall understanding of what's really going on in this worship book of Israel or the prayer book of Israel? It's been called the situation of Israel across time, or is it more maybe it's both, but part of an individual human expression, just that our lives are sort of characterized by these things. How do you, how do you read that in the overarching book of Psalms? I guess is my question. No, I do. Because as Christians, we were raised, I think wrongly, and this is where, I mean, the church is wonderful, but it also, it has downsides. If we think about the big C church, there is this expectation and which is what Russ had just talked to you about. There's this expectation that if we're doing the right stuff, great things are going to be happening in our life. And that if we're really good Christians, then we suck it up and we smile and we praise God. And yet a third of the Psalms are not that. I mean, a third of the Psalms are saying my life sucks and yet I still believe in God. And I think that, that where, at least the way I was, was raised, we didn't say stuff like that. You know, something bad happens. You go to church and you smile and you sing and you say, Hey, my life is great because God's in it. And yet, to be honest, there are times that we need to sit down with God and, you know, chew them out a little bit, I think, you know. And so when we look at prayer and a third of the Psalms are there, I think we have to be honest with God that having a true lasting deep relationship with God is not always to say, Oh, thank you for, you know, stubbing my toe. That feels so wonderful. But to say, this is where I'm at. This is what I feel. And to really be honest. I mean, there's a saying that, that says to cry is human, to lament is Christian. So when, when bad things happen to just people, you cry. You say, this sucks. My life is miserable. Or at least this aspect of my life is miserable. But what Christians then can say is that my God is greater than my current circumstance. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to this first half of the interview with Brian Babcock. We're going to be airing the second half tomorrow. So please join us again here on thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at life audio for their partnership with us on the thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Has fear stolen your peace? I'm Jennifer Slattery, lead host of the faith over fear podcast, helping you fight your fears and grow your faith. Subscribe at lifeaudio.com.