In the modern world, especially here in the West, we tend to see ourselves as autonomous individuals. Other people have rights, certainly, but what we do with our private lives is our own business. Over the past generation or so, Americans have been increasingly concerned about the right to privacy. The arguments for assisted suicide, for example, are based on the idea that I, as an individual, have the right to do what I want with my own life, and no one has the right to intrude into my own private sphere of free choice. In an article in Touchstone a few years ago, Eric Scheske says this: “With the help of the Supreme Court, the right of privacy became about as close to an absolute value as modern culture was willing to accept, exceeding even the right of free speech.... By elevating privacy to such a level, each person is guaranteed power, especially within the sanctity of his home. In each person’s home, he is the master. There, if nowhere else, he has almost complete control over his life” (“Is There No Privacy?” in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July/August 2001, p. 14).
This outlook affects the way we look at the church. Rather than members of the body of Christ, we tend to see ourselves as individuals who choose to attend a particular church because it meets some of our felt needs. If one church no longer meets these needs, we’ll go somewhere else. In this view, the church is made up of free individuals who’ve decided to get together to have their spiritual needs met. We are at the center of things, and we enter God’s house because He has something to offer us. We’re consumers, and when we come to the church as consumers we bring along our assumptions from the marketplace: we’re here to receive something and if we don’t receive it we’ll move on; in other words, our commitment to this place is dependent on receiving the services we’re seeking.
Thomas Reeves, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, made this observation: “Religious individualism seems to be at the core of American Christianity. This is a characteristic in harmony with our historic sense of personal independence as well as the considerable socioeconomic mobility we have long enjoyed. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney concluded, ‘Typically Americans view religious congregations as gatherings of individuals who have chosen to be together, in institutions of their own making and over which they hold control–fostering what sometimes, in the eyes of observers from other countries, appears as “churchless Christianity.”’ For Americans, ‘religious authority lies in the believer–not in the church, not in the Bible, despite occasional claims of infallibility and inerrancy on the part of some’” (“Not So Christian America,” in First Things, October 1996, p. 19).
When I was a young Christian, in the mid-70's, I worshiped in the radical wing of the charismatic movement. We were convinced that God was doing a new thing among us and that He was laying aside all those dead denominational churches with their love for the things of the past. There’s a tendency to think that the past is irrelevant. I know many Christians don’t even read the Old Testament, because it seems irrelevant to them. They’re not interested in church history, and they assume that Christians who lived in the past have nothing to teach them about how to live today. They associate the past with dead traditionalism, and they want to leave all that behind and enter this new thing that God is doing.
But the new things going on in the Church aren’t always the result of God’s intervention. Reeves concludes his article with these sobering conclusions: “Christianity in modern America is, in large part, innocuous. It tends to be easy, upbeat, convenient, and compatible. It does not require self-sacrifice, discipline, humility, an otherworldly outlook, a zeal for souls, a fear as well as a love of God. There is little guilt and no punishment, and the payoff in heaven is virtually certain. The faith has been overwhelmed by the culture, producing what is rightly called cultural Christianity.... What we now have might best be labeled consumer Christianity. The psychologist Paul C. Vitz has observed, ‘The “divine right” of the consumer to choose as he or she pleases has become so common an idea that it operates in millions of Americans like an unconscious tropism.’ Millions of Americans today feel free to buy as much of the full Christian faith as seems desirable. The cost is low and consumer satisfaction seems guaranteed” (p. 21).
An autonomous individual, cut off from the past, coming to the church as a consumer. Contrast this with the assumptions of the psalmist. He sees himself as part of a community that has its roots in what God has done in the past and which is dependent on His promises for the future. God is at the center, and His purposes are primary. Everything He’s done throughout history is relevant as we seek to walk with Him together as a body. God and His purposes for the Church, not our own “felt needs,” are the most important things to consider. The psalmist is conscious that he’s been graciously included in something God has been doing over many centuries; he’s caught up, not by his own choice, but by God’s grace, in something bigger than himself and longer-lasting than his own needs and desires.
Notice, first of all, the psalmist’s awareness of the past. In verses 1-10, he’s praying for the community of God’s people, but he prays for them, “O Lord, remember David and all the hardships he endured,” and then, “For the sake of David your servant, do not reject your anointed one.” Things maybe weren’t going well for the nation. This is probably the earliest of the psalms of ascent, written before the exile to Babylon. One of David’s descendants was still on the throne, but during this period after David’s death and before the exile, the nation repeatedly fell into idolatry. If you read through the books of Kings and Chronicles (which both cover roughly the same time period, with Chronicles focusing primarily on the southern kingdom), you’ll see this consistent pattern of general decline, interrupted by times of reform and revival.
It may be that the psalmist is writing during a time when they were being threatened by other nations. Judah was a small country surrounded by larger, more powerful, empires, who threatened their existence again and again. But God had been faithful and had delivered them from their enemies in the past. And despite all his sins and weaknesses, David was the ideal that the people looked back upon. He was a king “after God’s own heart,” one who was concerned with God’s interests and not only his own. Most of their kings had not been this way. Saul, the king who immediately preceded him, was concerned first of all with his own power. This eventually led to his downfall, because he was even willing to disobey God to hold onto his position as king. And most of the kings who followed David were considerably worse than Saul. David was more concerned about knowing God and being faithful to Him than he was with being king. He refused to kill Saul when he had the opportunity, because he realized the seriousness of attacking God’s anointed king. He trusted God to place him in the kingship when the time was right. He said: “The one thing I ask of the Lord–the thing I seek most–is to live in the house of the lord all the days of my life, delighting in the Lord’s perfections and meditating in his temple” (Psalm 27:4, NLT). He was a man after God’s own heart.
David vowed that he would not rest until he found a “place for the Lord, a dwelling for the Mighty One of Jacob.” This psalm looks back on two events in David’s life. The first one happened after he was well-established as king. David said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar while the ark of the covenant of the Lord is under a tent” (1 Chronicles 17:1). In response to this, he received a promise: “I declare that the Lord will build a house for you: When your days are over and you go to be with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever.... I will set him over my house and my kingdom forever; his throne will be established forever” (1 Chronicles 17:10-14). This immediately refers to Solomon, the one who would build the temple, but it ultimately points to Jesus Christ, the descendent of David whose throne would be established forever. David expressed his desire to provide a place of worship, one that was worthy of the Lord’s great majesty, and God responded by giving him a part in His great work of redemption, promising that one of his descendants would be the promised Savior of the world.
The oath in verses 2-5 reminds us of that. But verses 6-9 refer to an earlier event. During the period of the judges, before Saul had become king, the ark of the covenant had been taken into battle against the Philistines. The Israelites were doing poorly in the battle, and they thought bringing the ark along would give them miraculous power against the enemy. But they had been defeated and the Philistines had captured the ark. The ark was in their midst as a symbol of God’s presence, to help them worship Him. It wasn’t there as a magical talisman to help them get what they wanted. But then things hadn’t gone well for the Philistines after they captured the ark. There were outbreaks of plague wherever they tried to keep it, so they had sent it back to Israel, and it had been at Kiriath Jearim ever since. “The fields of Jaar” is a poetic variant of Kiriath Jearim, and verses 6-9 reenact the return of the ark from a remote village to Jerusalem, at the center of Israel’s worship. So this whole passage points to David’s desire to bring the ark back into prominence in the life of Israel. The emphasis is on David as a king who was concerned about worship. One of the great priorities of his reign was to facilitate the true worship of God. “The one thing I ask of the Lord–the thing I seek most–is to live in the house of the lord all the days of my life, delighting in the Lord’s perfections and meditating in his temple” (Psalm 27:4, NLT).
So the psalmist comes into God’s presence and prays “O God, remember David, remember all his troubles! And remember how he promised God, made a vow to the Strong God of Jacob.... Honor your servant David; don’t disdain your anointed one” (The Message). His faith is rooted in the past, in the things God has been doing for His people throughout the centuries, and in the promises He has made. When he cries out for help, he’s not only relying on his own prayers; he’s able to draw from prayers of the past. His faith may be weak. He may be on the verge of despair. But he remembers that God had made a promise to David, the man after his own heart, and he uses that as a basis for his prayer. Here’s what Eugene Peterson says about the importance of the past: “This history is important for without it we are at the mercy of whims. Memory is a data bank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 162).
The past is important, but we don’t live in the past. The things God has done in the past help us live in the present and give us hope for the future. But we’re not interested in the past as a relic, as something we try to reproduce painstakingly, exactly as it was back then. The great classical guitarist, Andres Segovia, was criticized for recording a major work by Bach on the guitar. The work was written for violin, but it fit very well on the guitar, so Segovia transcribed it, and some purists were disturbed by this. The piece should have been played only on the violin, just as Bach intended! But Segovia wasn’t interested in creating museum pieces; he wanted to play great music for people today, and his recording of the chaconne is beautiful. In the same way, we’re not interested in preserving the past so that everyone can walk by and say “Oh, isn’t that interesting!” Our desire is to walk with God in the present, with an awareness of all we have inherited from the past.
And the psalmist is not living in the past either. He’s not saying, “Oh, I wish I lived back then, when God was doing great things in the nation. It would have been so much easier if I had lived during that time.” He knows that there’s no ideal time to live in this fallen world, that there are difficulties in the life of faith no matter when or where we live. He’s not trying to return to the past, he’s drawing from the past for the sake of the present: “For the sake of David, your servant, do not reject your anointed one.” He’s looking back on the promises God made, and praying for God to bring them to fulfillment: “The Lord swore an oath to David, a sure oath that he will not revoke.... For the Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling: ‘This is my resting place for ever and ever.”
The assumption throughout this psalm is that God has made a covenant with His people, a covenant which is rooted in the past, but extends into the future. The word “covenant” is only used explicitly in verse 12, but it’s assumed throughout. David “swore an oath” to the Lord, verse 2, and God “swore and oath to David,” verse 11. God, throughout Scripture, deals with His people through covenants. In the ancient Near East, people used covenants to form relationships with each other by spelling out the mutual obligations of the relationship and formalizing the covenant with some sort of ceremony (often involving sacrifices). A covenant is an agreement, or treaty, between two parties. God took this cultural form and used it to help His people understand their relationship to Him. He made an agreement with them: “I am your God, and you are my people.” And then, in various places, He spelled out the terms of the agreement. The psalmist is aware of being in a covenant relationship with the Living God, a covenant which is rooted in the very distant past and stretches forward into eternity.
But he’s not just thinking about himself. In this psalm, his primary concern is for the people of God. He’s aware of being part of a community with whom God has made a covenant. God has called a people to Himself, and He’s included us. When we approach the church as individuals who are choosing to get together to accomplish something for God, we’ve gotten everything backwards. We’re not seeing things clearly. In 1976, when I was stationed in Naples, Italy, I witnessed to an American woman I met on the bus. When I referred to the sufferings of Christ on our behalf, she responded that she really couldn’t get into someone else’s sufferings in that way. The whole thing made no sense to her. She had her own life to live. Why should she care about the sufferings of this man who lived 2000 years ago, and what possible relevance could it have to her own life? How could this possibly be of benefit to her?
There are two tendencies we need to avoid. One is this tendency toward individualism. In this way of thinking the individual is primary. But the tendency is always to swing from one extreme to the other. Those most critical of individualism today often subscribe to some sort of collectivism which is so concerned with the community that the needs and rights of the individual are cancelled out. Some of the worst atrocities in history have been committed by people who were trying to make a better world, and who were willing to sacrifice individuals in order to accomplish their aims.
God is concerned with us as individuals. He calls us to Himself, and we turn to Him individually, but we do so as part of a community. We hear God’s Word from others, who also received it from others, and on and on through the centuries. We’re able to read God’s Word in our native language because of the diligent efforts of many people, some of whom were willing to die for their faith. We come to the Lord individually, but the process doesn’t begin or end with us. We’re able to come to the Lord because He is calling a people to Himself, because God the Father is preparing the Church to be a bride for His Son and He has graciously included us in that great company. “For the Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling: ‘This is my resting place for ever and ever; here I will sit enthroned, for I have desired it.” The promises to Zion are fulfilled in the Church. God has chosen the Church for His dwelling place, and He has graciously and mercifully given us the privilege of being part of the Church.
The psalmist sees himself as part of a community which has its roots in what God has done in the past and which is dependent on His promises for the future, a community with whom God has made a covenant. God is at the center, and His purposes are primary. Everything He’s done throughout history is directed toward this work of forming a people for Himself. Paul says to the Ephesians: “God’s secret plan has now been revealed to us; it is a plan centered on Christ, designed long ago according to his good pleasure. And this is his plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ–everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because of Christ we have received an inheritance from God” (Ephesians 1:9-11a, NLT). That we have a part in this at all is sheer grace. An autonomous individual, cut off from the past, approaching the church as a consumer in search of the best religious product is going to be nothing but a nominal Christian apart from a gracious work of the Holy Spirit, because he hasn’t yet understood his position as a sinner before a Holy God.
We are a people to whom God has bound Himself by a covenant. He’s promised to be our God, and He’s called us His people. Is this how you look at your relationship with the church? It’s a good thing to periodically examine ourselves at this point, because we’re all influenced by the assumptions of our culture. The influence is so pervasive and so subtle that we usually don’t even notice it. When we pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we’re aligning ourselves with God’s priorities. We’re saying, “may your priorities be the ones that take precedence in our lives and in the world around us.” When you think about the church, do you see it as a body of people whom God has called to Himself as part of the bride for His Son, or as a gathering “of individuals who have chosen to be together, in institutions of their own making and over which they hold control?” Are you grateful that God has included you in this great work of His, or are you disgruntled and dissatisfied because the church isn’t living up to your expectations?
Despite all the claims of our culture, we are not autonomous individuals. Everything we do has an affect on others, even when we don’t perceive that effect right away. God has created us in such a way that we’re dependent on one another in more ways than we can even remember. And He’s called us together as members of Christ’s body, people with whom God has entered into covenant. “Psalm 132 cultivates a hope that gives wings to obedience, a hope that is consistent with the reality of what God has done in the past but is not confined to it. All the expectations of Psalm 132 have their origin in an accurately remembered past.... We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. And they must be connected. There must be an organic unity between them. If we never learn to do this, extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates enclosed by our birth and death and acquire an understanding of God’s way as something larger and more complete than the anecdotes in our private diaries, we will forever be missing the point of things.... For Christian faith cannot be comprehended by examining an instamatic flash picture which has caught a pose of beauty or absurdity, ecstasy or terror; it is a full revelation of a vast creation and a grandly consummated redemption” (Peterson, pp. 165-66). A “vast creation and a grandly consummated redemption.” And God has graciously and mercifully given us a part in all this. Let’s rejoice in that, and give thanks to God for His unspeakable gift.
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