I’ve often heard this question from people who struggle with prayer: “If God knows everything about me, if He knows all my needs, what is the point of prayer? If God loves me and knows what I need, why doesn’t He take care of me whether I ask or not?” What is the point of telling God our needs, when He already knows them? Certainly we aren’t giving Him any new information. We aren’t telling Him something He doesn’t know already.
In Evangelicalism, to a large extent, prayer has been reduced to intercession and supplication. Prayer consists in asking God to do things for us (supplication) and for others (intercession). I’ve been in prayer meetings where the leader is in a hurry to finish with worship and praise, saying “we need to get moving, because we have a lot to pray about.” The really important part of prayer is intercession; worship is just a prelude to put us into the right mood. But in this prayer, in Psalm 139, the psalmist doesn’t seem concerned with making requests. He doesn’t seem to be troubled by the fact that God already knows everything about him. His experience is just the opposite: the realization that God knows all things encourages him to pray. It leads him to worship. In prayer, he has fellowship with the One who knows him better than he knows himself.
We’d do well to begin with this question: What is prayer? What kinds of things can properly be defined as prayer? E.M. Bounds wrote a number of books on the importance of prayer. And he himself was a very prayerful man. If I hear that Bounds prayed two hours each day (I think it was actually much more than that), what was he doing all that time? Was he speaking, making requests, the whole time? If I decide to imitate him in spending large amounts of time in prayer, what will I do with the time I’ve set aside?
This is, for me, an important question. When I was in Nepal, as a relatively new Christian, I had read much about these people who spent two hours each day in prayer, so I decided to do it. I started getting up at 4 in the morning, so that I could spend two hours in prayer before breakfast. But I got tired of praying through lists of names, so I’d break up the time by spending a lot of time singing hymns and choruses. But then I felt guilty. I wasn’t sure that this really qualified as prayer. Somehow I had it in my mind that singing to the Lord didn’t count as prayer, that if I was really praying–like the people I’d read about–I’d be filling the whole time with requests.
Since that time I’ve come to the conclusion that prayer includes more than intercession and supplication. Prayer is more than asking God for things. Some people seem to be particularly gifted in intercession. We should all intercede for one another, and some people clearly have a special gift and call from God in this area. But prayer is more than intercession.
Eugene Peterson has a good description of prayer in his book, Answering God, a book about praying the Psalms: “Prayers are tools, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting, but for being and becoming. In our largely externalized culture, we are urgently presented with tools that enable us to do things (a machine, for instance, to clean the carpet), and to get things (a computer, for instance, to get information). We are also well trained in their use. We are not so readily offered tools that enable our being and becoming human.... At the center of the whole enterprise of being human, prayers are the primary technology. Prayers are tools that God uses to work his will in our bodies and souls. Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in his work with us” (p. 2).
Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in God’s work with us. Peterson goes on to point out that prayer is, by its very nature, responsive speech. God has spoken first, and in prayer we respond. The most important thing in prayer is not our speech, but the fact that God, in mercy and grace, has reached out to us. Prayer is answering speech. We’re in a relationship with God. He has spoken to us in His Word, and prayer continues the conversation. Peterson says this a few pages later: “What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God. The Psalms show us how to answer” (p. 6). Prayer is not primarily about expressing ourselves in God’s presence–even expressing our needs–but about responding to Him. That’s why it’s so important to make use of these models of prayer in the Psalms. That’s why the Psalms are so often called a “school of prayer.” They train us in responding to God out of a wide variety of situations and emotional states.
In prayer, we are carrying on a conversation with God. We’re spending time in His presence, interacting with Him. But in a relationship we don’t have to fill all of the time with talk. I try to include several elements in my prayer life: I pray the Psalms every day. I also meditate on Scripture, seeking to be attentive to the fact that it is God’s Word. I spend some time in silence, simply sitting in God’s presence. I sing hymns and choruses. I pray the Lord’s Prayer, morning and evening. I also spend some time in intercession. But I don’t try to fill the whole time with requests, because the point is not to ask God for as many things as is humanly possible during the time I’ve set aside for prayer. The point is to spend time with God, worshiping Him and getting to know Him better; from within that context, I also lift up my own needs and the needs of others. Prayer is not just asking God for things. In prayer, we have fellowship and communion with God, the One who knows us better than we know ourselves.
The psalmist begins, in verses 1-6, by meditating on God’s complete knowledge of him. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “Yahweh, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too–your reassuring presence, coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful–I can’t take it all in!” Notice that he doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, you know everything about me,” and then move on to something else. He stays with the idea, looking at it from different angles, to let it sink into his mind.
There are two things going on here. The psalmist is offering worship to God in response to the realization of God’s complete knowledge of him. But he’s also using prayer here as a tool, in the way Peterson describes, so he stays with the idea to let it sink in more deeply. “He wants the conviction to sink deeply into his soul that God knows him through and through, so he comes at the idea from a variety of angles and aspects” (Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, p. 277). Both aspects of prayer are important. We’re offering something to God, and, at the same time, we’re being transformed.
We often pass by things too quickly in our spiritual lives. We’ve heard the same truths over and over, all our lives, and when we hear and read them they just skim over the surface of our minds. We live at such a fast pace, going from one thing to another, that often we’re not even fully engaged in what we’re doing. It takes unhurried time for the truth of God’s Word to sink into our minds. Several years ago I read a book about praying Scripture, and the author had this helpful advice: “First, we must create within our hearts a flexible space of resonance, so that the Word can penetrate its deepest parts and touch its innermost fibers. This demands the kind of recollection we feel the need for when something great and beautiful appears in our life. A poem demands that we pause at the end for silence. A musical theme that has moved us continues to echo, sweetly and insistently, within our soul. We feel the need to keep listening to this inner echo until it has permeated every fiber of our heart. The Word of God is much more demanding than a musical theme and much more profound.... meditation is compared to the assimilation of food.... We ponder each word in order to grasp its full meaning, imprint it on our memory and taste its sweetness, find joy and nourishment for our soul” (Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible, p. 109). That’s what the psalmist is doing here. He’s not anxious to get on to the next thing. He keeps looking at the truth from different angles, to let it sink into his mind and heart. He’s giving himself time to assimilate it.
But then, this realization that God knows him completely doesn’t lead immediately to warm, secure feelings. He doesn’t immediately feel uplifted. From time to time I receive mailings from churches promoting their services, promising that those who attend will hear an “uplifting message.” But the truth doesn’t always affect us in this way. The psalmist’s instinctive reaction, when he realizes God’s complete knowledge of him, is to run and hide. He wants to respond the way Adam and Eve did in the Garden, immediately after the Fall: “The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, and realize at the same time that this God knows the secrets of our hearts, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8). We instinctively want to hide from Him.
But the Psalmist realizes that this is impossible, that there is nowhere in the universe where he can escape God’s presence. Listen, again, to these verses in The Message: “Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on the morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute–you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!’ It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.” Jonah sought to escape God’s presence, because he didn’t want to do what God was commanding him to do. The psalmist realizes that there’s no point in trying to escape from God. Everywhere he turns, everywhere he could possibly go, God is there. God knows everything about him, and it is impossible to escape His presence. We have a plaque in our living room with these words: “Bidden or not bidden God is present.” God’s presence is inescapable.
The psalmist knows that he is a sinner. That’s why he instinctively wants to run from God. He knows that the words of his mouth and the thoughts of his heart have often been displeasing to God. He knows that he has often rebelled and gone his own way. So why is God so interested in him? Why is God so attentive to him? The answer is in verses 13-18: God is his Creator. God formed him in his mother’s womb and has cared for him since his birth: “Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you, High God–you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration–what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; you know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day. Your thoughts–how rare, how beautiful! God, I’ll never comprehend them! I couldn’t even begin to count them–any more than I could count the sand of the sea” (The Message).
Notice what is happening at this point. As he continues meditating on this truth, he begins to overflow with praise. He doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, I praise you,” over and over, until he feels emotionally stirred. He’s been gripped by the truth. This God, who knows everything, who is present everywhere, created him and has sustained him since his birth. This God is intimately aware of him and cares about him. The magnitude of this truth leads him to burst into praise. Remember what we saw in Isaiah 40. We begin with the truth. We begin with theology, the truth that God has revealed about Himself. We don’t begin by trying to work up our emotions. But when we grasp the truth, when it begins to sink into the depth of our hearts, we burst into praise, gratitude and wonder.
And then, in the middle of this wonderful meditation on God’s constant presence and care, the psalmist abruptly cries out: “If only you would slay the wicked, O God!” What is the point of verses 19-22? Why does the psalmist bring this into his peaceful meditations on God’s presence? Why can’t he maintain a more inspirational tone? His prayer life isn’t isolated from the reality of life in a fallen world. He’s not writing an uplifting inspirational book. He’s praying, crying out to God in the midst of a sinful, unjust, violent world. He’s surrounded by wicked people. This may be the thing that drove him into God’s presence in the first place. Some commentators think the psalmist has been unfairly accused of something and is taking refuge in God’s presence, meditating on the fact that even if everyone around him believes the lie, God knows the truth.
God is a God of justice, who will exercise vengeance on those who persist in oppressing others, and He has created us in His own image, with an innate desire for justice. The problem for us is what do we do with this sense of outrage that wells up within us? Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to pray for those who wrong us. If we’re not permitted to take vengeance, but are at the same time created with a desire for justice, how do we deal with the emotional turmoil that results from injustice, either committed against ourselves or those we care about? What do we do with our God-given emotional response to the evil things people do to one another? How do we get from where we are to where God is calling us to be? How do we let go of the rage that wells up within us? When everything within us is crying out for vengeance, how do we get ourselves to the point where we are able to love our enemies?
Praying these cries of vengeance in the Psalms–like these verses in Psalm 139–is a good first step. They help us give voice to things we probably wouldn’t express otherwise, things we may not even want to face in ourselves. Rage is similar to grief. If we try to suppress it, it will reappear in some other form and will do much damage. It needs to be expressed and articulated. We need to recognize and take ownership for our rage, and then we need to yield it to God’s wisdom and providential care, saying to God “but you know best how to deal with this.” Praying these Psalms gives us a way to express these powerful feelings, feelings which can turn into bitterness, or something worse, if we don’t deal with them.
We often move too lightly and superficially to the point of forgiveness and grace, without facing fully what is really in our hearts. When we do that, the result is less than what God is calling us to do. Eugene Peterson says some wise things about dealing with hatred: “Hate is our emotional link with the spirituality of evil. It is the volcanic eruption of outrage when the holiness of being, ours or another’s, has been violated. It is also the ugliest and most dangerous of our emotions, the hair trigger on a loaded gun. Embarrassed by the ugliness and fearful of the murderous, we commonly neither admit or pray our hate; we deny it and suppress it. But if it is not admitted it can quickly and easily metamorphose into the evil that provokes it; and if it is not prayed we have lost an essential insight and energy in doing battle with evil” (Answering God, p. 98). We need to admit our rage and hatred, and then bring them before God in prayer. Praying these Psalms helps us give expression to these things in God’s presence, where they can be transformed. But until we’ve faced the truth, we’re not able to move ahead. We can’t forgive until we’ve faced the depth of our anger and hatred. God commands us to forgive, but to get there we first need to express, in His presence, our desire for vengeance.
As far as we know, the Psalmists never take action to avenge themselves. Even in the most violent of these Psalms, the situation is committed to God and left in His hands. We know that David refused to take vengeance on Saul, even when he twice had the chance to kill him. He said: “May the Lord judge between you and me. And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you” (1 Samuel 24:12). David trusted God to take vengeance, but he refused to do it himself. Many of the people who criticize these Psalms think they are primitive and brutal. We’re more civilized now. We know better. But given the escalation of violence in our society, do we really think we’re better off than these ancient people? Far better to cry out to God in this way and then leave the whole thing in His hands than to take vengeance ourselves, as so many are doing in the world today.
So, what is the point of praying to One who already knows our needs? He already knows the worst about us. He knew all the worst before He called us to Himself. Our sinfulness never comes as a surprise to Him. He’s not going to be shocked and become disillusioned with us. He knows the worst, and He loves us and is committed to bringing us into His eternal kingdom. We can tell Him all that’s really in our hearts; He knows it all already anyway. It’s safe to bring into His presence our anger and desire for vengeance. We can be at our worst in His presence. And when we’re in His presence, He’s able to transform us and enable us to love our enemies even as He loved us when we were still His enemies.
Because He knows all, rather than fleeing from Him, we invite Him into every area of our lives, saying with the psalmist: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Since He knows everything already, there’s no reason to pretend with Him. We come into His presence and talk to Him about everything that concerns us, not because we think He doesn’t know, but because we know He loves us and because we want to know Him better. We begin by meditating on the truth: His presence is inescapable; He knows everything there is to know about us; He created us and has been caring for us since before we were born. And then, having seen the truth, we pray: “Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I’m about; See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong–then guide me on the road to eternal life” (The Message). Rather than hiding, as we were inclined to do at first, we invite Him into every area of our lives, because we want to know this One who knows us perfectly.
No comments:
Post a Comment