Faith Without Answers: When the Bible Ends with a Question Mark

Reading Lamentations 3 through 5 feels like eavesdropping on someone trying to hold onto something that's slipping away. The pain is raw, the language unfiltered. And yet, buried in the middle of the book, there are these famous words: "The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning" (Lamentations 3:22-23, NLT). It almost feels out of place, like a gasp of air in the middle of drowning.

What struck me wasn’t the hopeful tone itself, but where it appears. It doesn't come at the end, wrapped in resolution. It shows up in the middle, surrounded by imagery of bitterness, loneliness, and devastation. It reads more like a survival instinct than a celebration—like the writer is reminding themselves to keep going.

Spoiler: The Ending Isn't Happy

By the time I reached chapter 5, any hope that things are about to turn around seems to fade again. The final verse reads: "Restore us, O Lord, and bring us back to you again! Give us back the joys we once had! Or have you utterly rejected us? Are you angry with us still?" (Lamentations 5:21-22, NLT). That question mark at the end lingers. There’s no divine response. No sign that anything will get better. Just silence.

There’s something strangely compelling about that. So much of the Bible is filled with stories of answered prayers, miraculous turnarounds, or at least moral clarity. But here, the writer is stuck between memory and silence, between what used to be and what might never come back. And still, they keep writing.

Faith (or Something Like It) in the Void

It makes me think about what it means to hold on when there are no guarantees. Not just in a religious sense, but in any context where someone is looking for stability and finding none. Lamentations offers honesty. The text doesn’t pretend things are okay, and it doesn’t demand that the reader make peace with suffering. Instead, it gives space to the discomfort.

Not all pain comes with an explanation. Not all grief turns into growth. Sometimes the most accurate thing to say is exactly what Lamentations says: “Are you angry with us still?” The value of a book like this isn’t in its ability to comfort, but in its refusal to rush the process. Faith, in this context, isn’t about knowing things will improve. It’s about continuing to speak, even when no one seems to be listening.