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.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Humbling Ourselves Before God, Psalm 131
Ordinarily, when someone claims to be humble, we have good reason to be skeptical. Humility is one of those virtues which is easily counterfeited, and those who are most aware of their humility are usually deceiving themselves. One of the most famous examples of false humility is the character Uriah Heep, in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield. When Heep first appears in the novel he is only 15 years old, but he looks much older: “[his] hair was cropped as close as the closest stubble; who had hardly any eyebrows and no eyelashes, and eyes of red-brown so unsheltered and unshaded I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was high shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat, and had a long, lank, skeleton hand’’ (ch15). One of his favorite phrases is “I am ever so `umble.” He goes on and on about his humility, fawning over everyone and pretending to be a humble servant. But in reality he’s one of the real villains in the novel. Dickens describes him as an oily creature, who writhes like a snake and tries to take control of the law firm where he works as a clerk by blackmailing his employer. Heep seems so humble at first. When I first encountered him in the book, I thought his humility was genuine. And he succeeds in deceiving people for awhile (although he eventually ends up in prison).
The author of our psalm professes to be humble, but he’s not making that claim to other people. He’s not trying to earn other people’s trust–as Uriah Heep was–he’s not trying to impress us with his humility. He’s professing his humility to God, who knows his heart: “My heart is not proud, O Lord.” It’s easy to get the wrong idea about humility, which is why people like Uriah Heep so often succeed in deceiving us. Uriah Heep is obsessed with himself. He’s always talking about his humility, telling everyone “I am ever so `umble.” The psalmist’s focus is not on himself. He’s humble because he knows who God is and has seen himself as a creature before the One who created him. That’s what humility is. It has nothing to do with trying to see ourselves as nobodies, trying to persuade ourselves that we really don’t have any gifts, that we really don’t have anything to offer in the church. Humility is simply seeing ourselves as we are, being rid of our illusions, seeing ourselves more truly as God sees us. It means seeing ourselves as finite, dependent creatures in the hands of an infinite Creator. As one writer describes it: “Humility is the truth about ourselves, the whole truth–about our weaknesses, our failures, our history, our virtues, our gifts. Once we are truthful about ourselves before God and others, we can deal gently with others who are afraid to face the truth about themselves or who fancy themselves our competitors. Christ humbled himself out of compassion; out of humility grows our compassion for one another” (Hugh Feiss, Essential Monastic Wisdom, pp. 90-91). Humility is the truth about ourselves.
The psalmist is not at all like Uriah Heep. Because he sees the truth about himself, he’s not puffed up with pride. That’s the claim he makes in verse 1: “My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty.” The word “heart,” in Scripture, usually refers to the center of our being, the thing that determines our character. For example, in Ezekiel, God promises: “When the people return to their homeland, they will remove every trace of their detestable idol worship. And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their hearts of stone and give them tender hearts instead, so they will obey my laws and regulations” (11:18-20, NLT). The problem with Israel, God says, is that they have “hearts of stone.” They’re unrepentant, unwilling to obey. So He promises to give them tender hearts, hearts that are willing to submit to His will. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it affects everything you do.” He’s not talking here about doing aerobics to improve our cardio-vascular fitness. He’s saying that we need to make sure our priorities are in order, that God is at the center of our being. What he’s saying is really the same thing as this from Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands I am giving you today.” (Deut. 6:4-6, NLT). So, when the psalmist says that his heart is not proud, he’s saying that he is not ruled by pride. Proud self-sufficiency is not the thing that is determining the direction of his life.
When our hearts are full of pride, we’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve forgotten that we are creatures, dependent on our creator. This sort of outlook is epitomized in a poem by William Ernest Henley. He had recently had a foot amputated because of a tubercular infection, and had been in the Edinburgh Infirmary from 1873-1875. As he was recovering, he wrote “Invictus,” his most famous poem:
Often suffering humbles us, because we see how frail and needy we are. But Henley had survived, and it filled him with pride. If he had overcome this, he thought, nothing could conquer him. He was unconquerable, the master of his own fate. This is the temptation Eve faced in the garden: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). “You will become just like God.” Or, “you will become the master of your fate, the captain of your soul.” When we begin thinking in this way, we’ve forgotten who we are and who God is. The psalmist comes before God recognizing that he is dependent on Him for his next breath, that all he has comes to him as a gift from God’s hand. He recognizes that “in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28, NLT). And because he’s seen the truth about himself, the psalmist also doesn’t look down on others: “my eyes are not haughty.”
But what does he mean by the words, “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me?” When I was a young Christian I worshiped among people who thought intellectual activity was in conflict with real faith. And when I was growing up I often heard from people who despised the kind of learning that comes from books. Is that what the psalmist is advocating. Is he the sort of person who despises theology and only wants to hear “practical messages?” In many evangelical churches today, we hear that theology isn’t important, that what really matters are practical truths about how to live in the world (how to have a successful marriage, how to parent, how to stay out of debt, etc.). But the psalmist is not saying that sort of thing. This psalm is part of the whole revelation of Scripture, which is full of truth about who God is and how He deals with His people. Scripture tells us many things about God–theological truths–and those things are meant to build our faith and to help us worship.
But there are some things we can’t know, simply because we’re finite creatures. Deuteronomy 29:29 says: “There are secret things that belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our descendants forever, so that we may obey these words of the law” (NLT). The psalmist is saying that he doesn’t try to pry into these things that belong to God alone, that are beyond our grasp. What are some of these things? Surely the question of when Christ is returning is one of those subjects. Jesus said clearly “The Father sets those dates... and they are not for you to know” (Acts 1:7, NLT). Whenever we hear people speculating about when Christ is going to return, we need to know that they are concerning themselves with “great matters, or things too wonderful” for them. We should immediately write off what they’re saying. They’re speaking without authority, no matter how much study they’ve done on the matter.
But there are other areas of mystery in Scripture. It shouldn’t surprise us that an infinite God is beyond our comprehension. The Bible clearly asserts God’s absolute sovereignty over His creation, and at the same time it clearly assumes that we have the ability to make real choices that affect our eternal well-being. Jesus said “you did not choose me, but I chose you,” and the doctrines of election and predestination weren’t invented by John Calvin (or Augustine). These things are there in the Bible. But at the same time there are invitations like this one: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Paul, who taught most clearly about election, also said God “wants everyone to be saved and to understand the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). We don’t know how to reconcile these truths. The only safe course is to faithfully assert both things and confess that we’re out of our depth. Paul models the right attitude at the end of Romans 11. After his discussion of election in chapters 9-11, in the light of all the difficult things he’s been saying, Paul doesn’t attempt to explain God’s ways. He concludes in worship: “Oh, what a wonderful God we have! How great are his riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods! For who can know what the Lord is thinking? Who knows enough to be his counselor? And who could ever give him so much that he would have to pay it back? For everything comes from him, everything exists by his power and is intended for his glory. To him be glory evermore. Amen” (Romans 11:33-36, NLT).
The psalmist is not saying that he doesn’t exercise his mind about the things of God. He’s saying that he accepts the limits God has placed upon his mind. And he trusts God with those things he doesn’t understand. Job got into trouble because his grief caused him to doubt God’s goodness. At the end of the book, he says: “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). Joni Eareckson said: “After studying Job I saw that God was not accountable to me, but that I was accountable to God” (quoted by Lane Adams, “Intellectual Clarification Calls for Devotional Illumination,” at the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy). The psalmist understands that he is accountable to God and that there are mysteries beyond his comprehension. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”
He sees the truth about himself. But it hasn’t come naturally to him. Some people are unassuming by nature. They don’t assert themselves or try to impose their will on others. That’s just the personality they were given, and it really has nothing to do with humility. The psalmist doesn’t seem to be that sort of person. He says: “I have stilled and quieted my soul.” He’s exercised some diligence to accomplish this. His soul hasn’t always been in that condition. Here’s what one commentator says about him: “This psalm was written... by a hot-blooded man. Once he had a heart that craved wealth, luxury and pleasure, eyes that were set on power and station, and a mind that busied itself with matters beyond its ability to understand. He was in consequence full of unrest, for pride, envy and pretentiousness gave him no peace. But now all this has been changed” (The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 4, pp. 682-83). The psalmist isn’t describing his personality in this psalm. He’s testifying to the fruit of God’s grace in his life.
By diligently stilling and quieting his soul before God, he’s become like a “weaned child with its mother.” “I’ve cultivated a quiet heart. Like a baby content in its mother’s arms, my soul is a baby content” (The Message). He’s at rest in God’s presence, in contrast to those who persist in rebelling against Him: “But the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. ‘There is no peace,’ says my God, ‘for the wicked’” (Isaiah 57:20-21). But there’s more than this. “The Christian is ‘not like an infant crying loudly for his mother’s breast, but like a weaned child that quietly rests by his mother’s side, happy in being with her.... No desire now comes between him and his God; for he is sure that God knows what he needs before he asks him. And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes. His life’s centre of gravity has shifted. He now rests no longer in himself but in God’” (Arthur Weiser, quoted by Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 151). As he’s persisted in cultivating a quiet heart before God, he’s learned to rest in Him “like a weaned child with its mother.”
Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, went through a crisis in his ministry. He was a very conscientious leader, and he felt the weight of his responsibilities. As missionaries in various parts of China began to suffer persecution, he felt responsible for their sufferings, and there was an increasing lack of funds to carry on the work. He reached a point where his spiritual life wasn’t able to keep up with the strain and stress he was under (Dr. & Mrs. Howard Taylor, J. Hudson Taylor, p.211). He was overwhelmed with the burden of the ministry God had given him, and he was in despair. But then, God gave him a new realization of the sufficiency of Christ in all things. Here’s what he said, in a letter to his sister: “I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest positions He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult His grace is sufficient” (p. 214). His favorite hymn became “Jesus, I am Resting, Resting.” The burden of the work was no longer his, and the ministry of the China Inland Mission was no longer his work. He had humbled himself before God, had accepted his own limitations, and had become “like a weaned child with its mother.” He was able to rest in God, rather than being dependent on his own efforts.
After this experience, Taylor began exhorting others to rest in the sufficiency of Christ. And that’s what the psalmist does. He exhorts his fellow-pilgrims “O Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore.” His fresh realization of God’s grace overflows with blessing for others. I’ve mentioned meeting a 92-year-old missionary, A.R. Fromman, when I was working in India early in 1978. He had been working in India for 65 years when I met him. He and his wife had retired and returned to the West, but after two years they felt certain that God was calling them back to India, so they moved to a remote district in Madhya Pradesh, where there were no other missionaries. They lived in a tent for two years (they were in their late 60's at this point), until they were able to build a mud hut, where they continued to live for more than 20 years. His wife had died the year before, and he had no plans to leave India again. He was, without any doubt, the most godly man I’ve ever met. I and another American on the team had the privilege of eating breakfast with him each morning for two weeks. And while we were eating our breakfast, his would get cold as he ministered to us. He poured out his heart to us about God’s faithfulness and sufficiency, and about all the ways they had experienced His help over the years. We commented once on the fact that his breakfast was growing cold, and he said something like “God has given me so much, I have a responsibility to share it.” God had blessed him, over a very long lifetime, and he wanted to share that blessing with us. And the brief time I spent with him all those years ago continues to impact me today. When God blesses us, we have a responsibility to share that blessing with others. The psalmist has humbled himself in the Lord’s presence, has stilled and quieted his soul so that he is like a weaned child with its mother. He’s experienced God’s sufficiency and grace, and it’s not enough that he himself has put his hope in the Lord. It’s not enough that he feels better. He wants his fellow pilgrims to know that God is sufficient for all their needs. He wants them also to humble themselves before God’s mighty hand.
Humility is seeing ourselves as we are, being rid of our illusions and seeing ourselves as God sees us. How do we go about cultivating this kind of awareness? We don’t learn humility by expending a great effort to become humble, lowly people. All that does is make us more aware of ourselves, more self-absorbed. If we begin to make any progress at all in that direction, we’ll only become proud of our supposed humility. Trying to become humble by a direct effort is self defeating. It doesn’t help much to tell ourselves what horrible people we are either. We may be telling ourselves some things that are true, but we’re still absorbed with ourselves.
The great thing about the psalmist is not his lack of pride and haughtiness. The great thing is that he is absorbed with God, rather than with himself. The way to learn humility is to absorb ourselves with God, to become more aware of who He is. The more we know of God, the more we’ll be humbled. When we see God as He is, we don’t need to expend any effort at cultivating humility. So, the way to become more humble is to cultivate an awareness of God.
We cultivate an awareness of God by learning more about Him and by spending time in His presence. Read God’s Word, paying special attention to the ways God reveals Himself there. Ask yourself, as you’re reading, “what does this passage, or story, tell about what God is like and how He deals with His people?” And then respond in prayer, thanking Him for the things you’ve observed in His Word. Books like Knowing God, by J.I. Packer, or The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer, can be a real help in learning more about God. And reading through a hymnal is a good practice, especially if you also use it for prayer and worship. The object is not just to learn more information about God, but to understand Him better and then to worship Him on the basis of what we’ve learned.
Use this psalm as part of your prayer life, and ask God to make these things a reality in your life. I’ve been recommending this practice of praying the Psalms, but maybe you’ve tried it and gotten discouraged. It’s unfamiliar at first, and it’s easy to get bogged down and wonder whether this is really a worthwhile thing to do. Especially if we see prayer primarily as a way of expressing our needs and desires in God’s presence, the Psalms don’t seem to fit.
But this work of growing to know who God is, becoming more absorbed with Him and less absorbed with ourselves, won’t happen without a sustained effort on our part. Eugene Peterson has wise counsel in this area: “Believers must be aware that most of the time discipline feels dull and dead. We’re impatient if we have to wait a long time for something, especially in America. If we don’t find instant zest in a discipline, we make a negative snap judgment about it. But often what we describe as deadness, dullness, or boredom is simply our own slow waking up. We just have to live through that. Simple desire for more in our Christian lives is sufficient evidence that the life is there. Be patient and wait. It’s the Spirit’s work. We simply put ourselves in the way of the Spirit so he can work in us” (E. Peterson, Living the Message, p. 295). Jesus prayed the Psalms, and most Christians throughout the centuries have made this their regular practice. They’re the best tool I know of for this work of “unselfing,” becoming less absorbed with ourselves and more absorbed with the things of God. But we need to persevere. If you’ve struggled with this, try just praying the Psalms of Ascent for awhile. They’re all fairly short, and this is a manageable way to get started. From there, you could begin praying Psalm 119, section by section, and then move on to other familiar psalms.
As we take pains to cultivate an awareness of God, He will make Himself known to us. A number of years ago I heard a BIC missionary share about spending several days with John Stott, the English preacher and author. He had looked up to Stott for many years and looked forward to the opportunity to meet him personally. Often this sort of situation sets us up for disappointment, because our heroes usually don't live up to our expectations. But this man shared that John Stott was everything he had hoped from reading his books. He’s the opposite of Uriah Heep, with all his professions of being “ever so `umble.” And he got that way by persevering, over a long lifetime, in seeking to know God, both by studying His Word and by cultivating His presence. Let’s press on to know Him, praying that He might increase–that His presence might become more and more evident in our lives–and that we might decrease.
The author of our psalm professes to be humble, but he’s not making that claim to other people. He’s not trying to earn other people’s trust–as Uriah Heep was–he’s not trying to impress us with his humility. He’s professing his humility to God, who knows his heart: “My heart is not proud, O Lord.” It’s easy to get the wrong idea about humility, which is why people like Uriah Heep so often succeed in deceiving us. Uriah Heep is obsessed with himself. He’s always talking about his humility, telling everyone “I am ever so `umble.” The psalmist’s focus is not on himself. He’s humble because he knows who God is and has seen himself as a creature before the One who created him. That’s what humility is. It has nothing to do with trying to see ourselves as nobodies, trying to persuade ourselves that we really don’t have any gifts, that we really don’t have anything to offer in the church. Humility is simply seeing ourselves as we are, being rid of our illusions, seeing ourselves more truly as God sees us. It means seeing ourselves as finite, dependent creatures in the hands of an infinite Creator. As one writer describes it: “Humility is the truth about ourselves, the whole truth–about our weaknesses, our failures, our history, our virtues, our gifts. Once we are truthful about ourselves before God and others, we can deal gently with others who are afraid to face the truth about themselves or who fancy themselves our competitors. Christ humbled himself out of compassion; out of humility grows our compassion for one another” (Hugh Feiss, Essential Monastic Wisdom, pp. 90-91). Humility is the truth about ourselves.
The psalmist is not at all like Uriah Heep. Because he sees the truth about himself, he’s not puffed up with pride. That’s the claim he makes in verse 1: “My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty.” The word “heart,” in Scripture, usually refers to the center of our being, the thing that determines our character. For example, in Ezekiel, God promises: “When the people return to their homeland, they will remove every trace of their detestable idol worship. And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their hearts of stone and give them tender hearts instead, so they will obey my laws and regulations” (11:18-20, NLT). The problem with Israel, God says, is that they have “hearts of stone.” They’re unrepentant, unwilling to obey. So He promises to give them tender hearts, hearts that are willing to submit to His will. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it affects everything you do.” He’s not talking here about doing aerobics to improve our cardio-vascular fitness. He’s saying that we need to make sure our priorities are in order, that God is at the center of our being. What he’s saying is really the same thing as this from Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands I am giving you today.” (Deut. 6:4-6, NLT). So, when the psalmist says that his heart is not proud, he’s saying that he is not ruled by pride. Proud self-sufficiency is not the thing that is determining the direction of his life.
When our hearts are full of pride, we’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve forgotten that we are creatures, dependent on our creator. This sort of outlook is epitomized in a poem by William Ernest Henley. He had recently had a foot amputated because of a tubercular infection, and had been in the Edinburgh Infirmary from 1873-1875. As he was recovering, he wrote “Invictus,” his most famous poem:
“Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”
Often suffering humbles us, because we see how frail and needy we are. But Henley had survived, and it filled him with pride. If he had overcome this, he thought, nothing could conquer him. He was unconquerable, the master of his own fate. This is the temptation Eve faced in the garden: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). “You will become just like God.” Or, “you will become the master of your fate, the captain of your soul.” When we begin thinking in this way, we’ve forgotten who we are and who God is. The psalmist comes before God recognizing that he is dependent on Him for his next breath, that all he has comes to him as a gift from God’s hand. He recognizes that “in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28, NLT). And because he’s seen the truth about himself, the psalmist also doesn’t look down on others: “my eyes are not haughty.”
But what does he mean by the words, “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me?” When I was a young Christian I worshiped among people who thought intellectual activity was in conflict with real faith. And when I was growing up I often heard from people who despised the kind of learning that comes from books. Is that what the psalmist is advocating. Is he the sort of person who despises theology and only wants to hear “practical messages?” In many evangelical churches today, we hear that theology isn’t important, that what really matters are practical truths about how to live in the world (how to have a successful marriage, how to parent, how to stay out of debt, etc.). But the psalmist is not saying that sort of thing. This psalm is part of the whole revelation of Scripture, which is full of truth about who God is and how He deals with His people. Scripture tells us many things about God–theological truths–and those things are meant to build our faith and to help us worship.
But there are some things we can’t know, simply because we’re finite creatures. Deuteronomy 29:29 says: “There are secret things that belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our descendants forever, so that we may obey these words of the law” (NLT). The psalmist is saying that he doesn’t try to pry into these things that belong to God alone, that are beyond our grasp. What are some of these things? Surely the question of when Christ is returning is one of those subjects. Jesus said clearly “The Father sets those dates... and they are not for you to know” (Acts 1:7, NLT). Whenever we hear people speculating about when Christ is going to return, we need to know that they are concerning themselves with “great matters, or things too wonderful” for them. We should immediately write off what they’re saying. They’re speaking without authority, no matter how much study they’ve done on the matter.
But there are other areas of mystery in Scripture. It shouldn’t surprise us that an infinite God is beyond our comprehension. The Bible clearly asserts God’s absolute sovereignty over His creation, and at the same time it clearly assumes that we have the ability to make real choices that affect our eternal well-being. Jesus said “you did not choose me, but I chose you,” and the doctrines of election and predestination weren’t invented by John Calvin (or Augustine). These things are there in the Bible. But at the same time there are invitations like this one: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Paul, who taught most clearly about election, also said God “wants everyone to be saved and to understand the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). We don’t know how to reconcile these truths. The only safe course is to faithfully assert both things and confess that we’re out of our depth. Paul models the right attitude at the end of Romans 11. After his discussion of election in chapters 9-11, in the light of all the difficult things he’s been saying, Paul doesn’t attempt to explain God’s ways. He concludes in worship: “Oh, what a wonderful God we have! How great are his riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods! For who can know what the Lord is thinking? Who knows enough to be his counselor? And who could ever give him so much that he would have to pay it back? For everything comes from him, everything exists by his power and is intended for his glory. To him be glory evermore. Amen” (Romans 11:33-36, NLT).
The psalmist is not saying that he doesn’t exercise his mind about the things of God. He’s saying that he accepts the limits God has placed upon his mind. And he trusts God with those things he doesn’t understand. Job got into trouble because his grief caused him to doubt God’s goodness. At the end of the book, he says: “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). Joni Eareckson said: “After studying Job I saw that God was not accountable to me, but that I was accountable to God” (quoted by Lane Adams, “Intellectual Clarification Calls for Devotional Illumination,” at the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy). The psalmist understands that he is accountable to God and that there are mysteries beyond his comprehension. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”
He sees the truth about himself. But it hasn’t come naturally to him. Some people are unassuming by nature. They don’t assert themselves or try to impose their will on others. That’s just the personality they were given, and it really has nothing to do with humility. The psalmist doesn’t seem to be that sort of person. He says: “I have stilled and quieted my soul.” He’s exercised some diligence to accomplish this. His soul hasn’t always been in that condition. Here’s what one commentator says about him: “This psalm was written... by a hot-blooded man. Once he had a heart that craved wealth, luxury and pleasure, eyes that were set on power and station, and a mind that busied itself with matters beyond its ability to understand. He was in consequence full of unrest, for pride, envy and pretentiousness gave him no peace. But now all this has been changed” (The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 4, pp. 682-83). The psalmist isn’t describing his personality in this psalm. He’s testifying to the fruit of God’s grace in his life.
By diligently stilling and quieting his soul before God, he’s become like a “weaned child with its mother.” “I’ve cultivated a quiet heart. Like a baby content in its mother’s arms, my soul is a baby content” (The Message). He’s at rest in God’s presence, in contrast to those who persist in rebelling against Him: “But the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. ‘There is no peace,’ says my God, ‘for the wicked’” (Isaiah 57:20-21). But there’s more than this. “The Christian is ‘not like an infant crying loudly for his mother’s breast, but like a weaned child that quietly rests by his mother’s side, happy in being with her.... No desire now comes between him and his God; for he is sure that God knows what he needs before he asks him. And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes. His life’s centre of gravity has shifted. He now rests no longer in himself but in God’” (Arthur Weiser, quoted by Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 151). As he’s persisted in cultivating a quiet heart before God, he’s learned to rest in Him “like a weaned child with its mother.”
Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, went through a crisis in his ministry. He was a very conscientious leader, and he felt the weight of his responsibilities. As missionaries in various parts of China began to suffer persecution, he felt responsible for their sufferings, and there was an increasing lack of funds to carry on the work. He reached a point where his spiritual life wasn’t able to keep up with the strain and stress he was under (Dr. & Mrs. Howard Taylor, J. Hudson Taylor, p.211). He was overwhelmed with the burden of the ministry God had given him, and he was in despair. But then, God gave him a new realization of the sufficiency of Christ in all things. Here’s what he said, in a letter to his sister: “I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest positions He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult His grace is sufficient” (p. 214). His favorite hymn became “Jesus, I am Resting, Resting.” The burden of the work was no longer his, and the ministry of the China Inland Mission was no longer his work. He had humbled himself before God, had accepted his own limitations, and had become “like a weaned child with its mother.” He was able to rest in God, rather than being dependent on his own efforts.
After this experience, Taylor began exhorting others to rest in the sufficiency of Christ. And that’s what the psalmist does. He exhorts his fellow-pilgrims “O Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore.” His fresh realization of God’s grace overflows with blessing for others. I’ve mentioned meeting a 92-year-old missionary, A.R. Fromman, when I was working in India early in 1978. He had been working in India for 65 years when I met him. He and his wife had retired and returned to the West, but after two years they felt certain that God was calling them back to India, so they moved to a remote district in Madhya Pradesh, where there were no other missionaries. They lived in a tent for two years (they were in their late 60's at this point), until they were able to build a mud hut, where they continued to live for more than 20 years. His wife had died the year before, and he had no plans to leave India again. He was, without any doubt, the most godly man I’ve ever met. I and another American on the team had the privilege of eating breakfast with him each morning for two weeks. And while we were eating our breakfast, his would get cold as he ministered to us. He poured out his heart to us about God’s faithfulness and sufficiency, and about all the ways they had experienced His help over the years. We commented once on the fact that his breakfast was growing cold, and he said something like “God has given me so much, I have a responsibility to share it.” God had blessed him, over a very long lifetime, and he wanted to share that blessing with us. And the brief time I spent with him all those years ago continues to impact me today. When God blesses us, we have a responsibility to share that blessing with others. The psalmist has humbled himself in the Lord’s presence, has stilled and quieted his soul so that he is like a weaned child with its mother. He’s experienced God’s sufficiency and grace, and it’s not enough that he himself has put his hope in the Lord. It’s not enough that he feels better. He wants his fellow pilgrims to know that God is sufficient for all their needs. He wants them also to humble themselves before God’s mighty hand.
Humility is seeing ourselves as we are, being rid of our illusions and seeing ourselves as God sees us. How do we go about cultivating this kind of awareness? We don’t learn humility by expending a great effort to become humble, lowly people. All that does is make us more aware of ourselves, more self-absorbed. If we begin to make any progress at all in that direction, we’ll only become proud of our supposed humility. Trying to become humble by a direct effort is self defeating. It doesn’t help much to tell ourselves what horrible people we are either. We may be telling ourselves some things that are true, but we’re still absorbed with ourselves.
The great thing about the psalmist is not his lack of pride and haughtiness. The great thing is that he is absorbed with God, rather than with himself. The way to learn humility is to absorb ourselves with God, to become more aware of who He is. The more we know of God, the more we’ll be humbled. When we see God as He is, we don’t need to expend any effort at cultivating humility. So, the way to become more humble is to cultivate an awareness of God.
We cultivate an awareness of God by learning more about Him and by spending time in His presence. Read God’s Word, paying special attention to the ways God reveals Himself there. Ask yourself, as you’re reading, “what does this passage, or story, tell about what God is like and how He deals with His people?” And then respond in prayer, thanking Him for the things you’ve observed in His Word. Books like Knowing God, by J.I. Packer, or The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer, can be a real help in learning more about God. And reading through a hymnal is a good practice, especially if you also use it for prayer and worship. The object is not just to learn more information about God, but to understand Him better and then to worship Him on the basis of what we’ve learned.
Use this psalm as part of your prayer life, and ask God to make these things a reality in your life. I’ve been recommending this practice of praying the Psalms, but maybe you’ve tried it and gotten discouraged. It’s unfamiliar at first, and it’s easy to get bogged down and wonder whether this is really a worthwhile thing to do. Especially if we see prayer primarily as a way of expressing our needs and desires in God’s presence, the Psalms don’t seem to fit.
But this work of growing to know who God is, becoming more absorbed with Him and less absorbed with ourselves, won’t happen without a sustained effort on our part. Eugene Peterson has wise counsel in this area: “Believers must be aware that most of the time discipline feels dull and dead. We’re impatient if we have to wait a long time for something, especially in America. If we don’t find instant zest in a discipline, we make a negative snap judgment about it. But often what we describe as deadness, dullness, or boredom is simply our own slow waking up. We just have to live through that. Simple desire for more in our Christian lives is sufficient evidence that the life is there. Be patient and wait. It’s the Spirit’s work. We simply put ourselves in the way of the Spirit so he can work in us” (E. Peterson, Living the Message, p. 295). Jesus prayed the Psalms, and most Christians throughout the centuries have made this their regular practice. They’re the best tool I know of for this work of “unselfing,” becoming less absorbed with ourselves and more absorbed with the things of God. But we need to persevere. If you’ve struggled with this, try just praying the Psalms of Ascent for awhile. They’re all fairly short, and this is a manageable way to get started. From there, you could begin praying Psalm 119, section by section, and then move on to other familiar psalms.
As we take pains to cultivate an awareness of God, He will make Himself known to us. A number of years ago I heard a BIC missionary share about spending several days with John Stott, the English preacher and author. He had looked up to Stott for many years and looked forward to the opportunity to meet him personally. Often this sort of situation sets us up for disappointment, because our heroes usually don't live up to our expectations. But this man shared that John Stott was everything he had hoped from reading his books. He’s the opposite of Uriah Heep, with all his professions of being “ever so `umble.” And he got that way by persevering, over a long lifetime, in seeking to know God, both by studying His Word and by cultivating His presence. Let’s press on to know Him, praying that He might increase–that His presence might become more and more evident in our lives–and that we might decrease.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Crying Out From the Depths, Psalm 130
When I was growing up, my family didn’t go to church. For awhile my parents sent me to Sunday School at a nominal mainline church, but even then I rarely attended the worship service. On the few occasions when I actually went to the service–and I only went a handful of times–I was struck by the superficiality of the whole thing. All the people were dressed up to look their best. Everyone pretended that things were going well, even though many of their lives were falling apart (as I learned later). It struck me, as an unbeliever at the time, that church was just one big show, where people tried to outdo each other with putting on a good appearance.
I’ve often spoken to people who think they need to be at their best before they can come into God’s presence. When you witness to people like this, they may truly believe that you’re telling them the truth, but they say things like “maybe someday. I’m just not ready yet. I need to get my life together first, then I’ll be able to start coming to church.” They understand that being in church involves coming into God’s presence, but they think they need to “get their act together” before they can turn to Him. They certainly can’t come to Him just as they are. It would be like going to church in my hometown without dressing up and putting on a good face for everyone.
But the truth is just the opposite. It’s when we’re at our worst–when we’re “in the depths”–that we’re most in need of God’s help. We always need His help, but when everything is going well we tend to be less aware of our need. We’re likely, when everything is going well, to think we can wait for a better time. But when we’re in the depths, when everything is falling apart and life seems to be at a standstill, we become painfully aware of our spiritual poverty and need. And at those times when we’re most aware of our neediness, we need to know that God hears us from the depths. We can cry out to Him when we’re overwhelmed with despair and know that He will hear us.
Thomas Merton tells of how he began praying for the first time: “The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw, and my whole being rose up in revolt against what was within me, and my soul desired escape and liberation and freedom from all this with an intensity and an urgency unlike anything I had ever known before. And now I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray–praying not with my lips and with my intellect and my imagination, but praying out of the very roots of my life and of my being, and praying to the God I had never known, to reach down towards me out of His darkness and to help me to get free of the thousand terrible things that held my will in their slavery” (The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 124).
We can cry out from the depths because God is merciful. The psalmist doesn’t give any details of how he ended up in his condition. He is crying out for mercy, and he’s acutely aware of his own sinfulness. It may be that he has committed a grievous sin–like David in his sin with Bathsheba–and is now crying out in repentance. But it could also be that he has been living a godly life without any major offenses, but that he is suffering physically or emotionally in some way. He may be crying out in repentance, or he may be in despair because of his afflictions. Suffering makes us more aware of our need for mercy. All our false confidence is wiped away, and we see more clearly how weak and fallible we are. The psalmist is aware of his spiritual poverty. His smugness has been overwhelmed by his experience in the depths. He doesn’t pray, “Lord, I thank you that I’m not like other people.” He prays “Lord, hear me.... If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?”
When we reach that point, we need to know that God is merciful or we’ll be overwhelmed. During my brief time at Westminster Theological Seminary, I used to hear stories about John Murray, one of the early theology professors from that school. His academic standards were very high, and he expected a lot from his students. He had a glass eye, which I think had resulted from an automobile accident. Everyone said that if you went to John Murray asking for mercy because you hadn’t completed an assignment and thought you could see a gleam of mercy in his eye, you were sadly deceived. It was only the light shining on his glass eye. Mercy just wasn’t an option. He maintained very high standards in his own work, and he expected students to complete their assignments on time. And, from what I understand, students learned not to go to him asking for mercy. John Murray didn’t really need to be merciful in that setting. His strictness gave students an incentive to complete their work. But our condition as sinners is such that when we see ourselves as we are we’ll never come to God unless we know He is merciful. When we come to Him crying out from the depths, we know that He is merciful and that He will receive us.
The psalmist’s confidence doesn’t cause him to become flippant about sin. I’ve often heard people say that the message of free grace gives people an excuse to continue in sin, because they know God will forgive them anyway. This is the accusation that people in the first century leveled at the apostle Paul. He found himself answering this charge repeatedly: “It’s simply perverse to say, ‘If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.’ Some people are actually trying to put such words in our mouths, claiming that we go around saying, ‘The more evil we do, the more good God does, so let’s just do it!’ That’s pure slander, as I’m sure you’ll agree” (Romans 3:8, The Message).
The psalmist is confident of God’s mercy and forgiveness, but notice what he adds: “But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.” A genuine experience of God’s mercy and forgiveness has just the opposite result of what we’d expect. The genuine fear of the Lord, a sense of reverential awe and fear of offending Him, isn’t produced by legalism. Legalism, in fact, produces a more calculating attitude toward God. It doesn’t lead to holy living at all. But those who’ve experienced the free gift of God’s mercy, who’ve seen themselves as lost sinners with no hope apart from Christ, and have been assured of His mercy and acceptance–these are the ones who learn to fear the Lord. J.I. Packer, in Knowing God, said: “Those who suppose that the doctrine of God’s grace tends to encourage moral laxity... are simply showing that, in the most literal sense, they do not know what they are talking about” (p. 124). The psalmist’s experience of mercy doesn’t encourage him to sin. It drives him away from sin.
We can cry out from the depths, also, because we know God cares about us. The psalmist says, in verse 7: “with the Lord is unfailing love, and with him is full redemption.” He cares about us when we are in the depths, even if we are there through our own fault. We’re often harsh with one another. We say things like, “you got yourself into this mess; it’s your job to find a way out.” We can be especially judgmental towards people who get into financial trouble because they haven’t made wise decisions. But God doesn’t deal with us in this way. He lovingly comes to our rescue when we’ve gotten ourselves into trouble.
God has provided redemption because He loves us: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, NLT). Or this, from Romans 5: “When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners.... But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:6, 8, NLT). God didn’t provide redemption because He made an abstract decision that this was the proper and benevolent thing to do. Have you ever been helped by people who did it coldly and distantly, out of a sense of doing “the right thing?” They may not like you very much, but they believe it’s the right, moral thing, to do. That kind of help feels demeaning and dehumanizing. God provided redemption because He loves us.
And because He’s gone this far in providing redemption, we can also be confident that He cares about us when we’re in the depths. Paul makes a similar argument in Romans 8. He points out in chapter 5, as we just read, that God sent Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Then he goes on, in chapter 8: “Since God did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t God, who gave us Christ, also give us everything else?” (Romans 8:32, NLT). He’s arguing from the greater to the lesser. Since God has done this incredible thing in providing for our redemption, do we doubt that He will care for us now that we are His own adopted children?
When we’re in the depths, we can know that God cares about what is happening to us. It doesn’t matter how we got there. The thief on the cross was there by his own fault–he admitted that this was true–but he heard those comforting words from Jesus: “this day you will be with me in paradise.” God’s people fall into sin and do foolish things, and sometimes their foolish acts have irreversible consequences. David couldn’t undo the horrible murder of Uriah that he committed to cover up his adultery. A prodigal son who is suffering from AIDS because of his sinful lifestyle can’t undo the past. But he can cry to God from the depths and know that God loves him and has provided for his redemption. A recovering alcoholic who’s fallen off the wagon and gone on a binge can’t go back and change the past. But he can cry out to God from the depths and find that He is merciful and loving. When we reach these lowest points in our lives, we need to know that God cares about us, no matter how we got there.
And when we cry out to God from the depths, we can know that we are not alone in our experience. We’re part of God’s kingdom, and though we may feel like we’re all alone in our difficulties, the truth is that we are part of the body of Christ. We’re part of a body of people, many of whom have been in the depths and can testify, from experience, that God is faithful. The psalmist is not only concerned about himself. He begins by crying out to God from the depths, but at the end he exhorts his fellow pilgrims: “O Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love, and with him is full redemption.” He’s experienced God’s faithfulness, and he now turns to help others who might be facing the same struggle. When we’re overwhelmed with difficulties, when we’re in the depths, we need to know that others have been through the same sorts of things and have found that God is merciful and faithful.
Elijah was one of the great prophets of the Old Testament. He rebuked Ahab, one of the most wicked kings of Israel, and he confronted 250 prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. God did great things through Him, answering with fire to prove to the nation that He is the true God. But right after Elijah’s greatest moment, Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, threatened to kill him and he fled into the wilderness. While he was there, God said to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” And Elijah replied: “I have zealously served the Lord God Almighty. But the people of Israel have broken their covenant with you, torn down your altars, and killed every one of your prophets. I alone am left, and now they are trying to kill me, too.” He felt alone, isolated. Everyone had turned to idolatry, and he alone was left. And it’s true that he was the only one taking such a bold stand in public. But God said to him: “Yet I will preserve seven thousand others in Israel who have never bowed to Baal or kissed him!” (1 Kings 19:13-14, 18, NLT). He felt alone, but he wasn’t really the only one left. He was part of a bigger group than he realized.
Maybe you’ve had the experience of listening to someone sharing a testimony about a struggle, and you think, “I thought I was the only one who struggled with that.” Part of the problem with the church I went to as a child was the lack of openness and genuineness. People’s lives were falling apart, but they came to church on Sunday and pretended that everything was fine. We need to follow the example of the psalmist; he cried out from the depths, and then spoke encouraging words to his fellow-pilgrims, urging them to hope in the Lord.
Jesus, our great High Priest, cried out to God from the depths. When He began to pray in the garden of Gethsemane, he said to Peter, James and John: “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and watch with me” (Matthew 26:38, NLT). He was overwhelmed with grief at the thought of what was coming, so He cried out to the Father repeatedly, asking Him to let the cup pass from Him. He knows what it is to cry out in grief. “This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same temptations we do, yet he did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it” (Hebrews 4:15-16, NLT).
When we cry out to God from the depths, we can be confident that He hears us. He is merciful, and He cares about what’s happening to us. But that doesn’t mean He’ll do what we want or that He’ll act on our schedule. Jesus cried out to God, but then He went to the cross. Because God answers in ways we wouldn’t expect, and because He usually doesn’t work on our schedule, we need these words in verses 5&6: “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.”
The problem is that when we’re in the depths it usually doesn’t feel like God is with us. We feel isolated and abandoned, and we often can’t even imagine how God’s deliverance is going to come about. In 1986, Annie and I moved to Philadelphia so I could begin my studies at Westminster Theological Seminary. After one semester, I dropped out, partly because of the hectic schedule I’d been keeping (I was working 4pm to midnight and taking classes during the day), and partly because I just didn’t fit at Westminster. We had also run out of money, and the seminary had very little financial aid to offer. On several levels, it just wasn’t working out. I found a job working evenings in a warehouse and applied to graduate school at Temple University and University of Pennsylvania. I was accepted into both programs, but at first it looked like I wouldn’t be getting any financial aid. So we gave up on the idea of graduate school.
At that point, in the spring of 1987, it looked like the Lord had led us to Philadelphia and abandoned us there. We had been part of a good church before we moved, but in Philadelphia we hadn’t been able to find a church where we fit in. We didn’t really know anyone, and we hated living in the city. As far as we could tell at the time, God was no longer with us. He was no longer leading and blessing us. We had moved to a place we didn’t like so that I could work in a warehouse on the 4 to midnight shift for a boss who resented the fact that I had more education than he did. But just a couple of weeks after that low point, I received a letter from Temple University saying that I had been granted a teaching assistantship, which would enable me to begin graduate school in the fall. The Lord was with us all that time, and He was doing things we weren’t aware of. It felt like He’d abandoned us, but He hadn’t abandoned us at all. His purposes were better than what we had planned for ourselves.
This is why we need to wait on the Lord. Very often we don’t understand what He’s doing. But we know Him. We know that with Him there is unfailing love. He cares about what is happening with us. When I was a very young Christian, someone said to me, “don’t forget in the darkness what God has shown you in the light.” We all go through times of darkness, times when nothing seems to make sense and we lose all realization of God’s comfort and presence. But what we know of Him is enough: “Oh Israel, wait and watch for God–with God’s arrival comes love, with God’s arrival comes generous redemption” (The Message). We may not understand what is happening, but we know God.
So what do we do when we find ourselves in the depths, when everything seems bleak and there’s no light to be seen at the end of the tunnel? We cry out to God from the depths, knowing that He is merciful. We may not feel His mercy, and we probably won’t feel like praying. We may not even be able to come up with any words to pray. It’s enough, at such times, to use the words of this psalm: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.” Use them over and over, and then sit silently in God’s presence. He’s there, and He is at work. You just can’t perceive Him. So keep on calling out to Him, accepting by faith that He is there and that He hears you.
As you continue calling out to Him from the depths, wait on His time. He will be faithful to His Word: “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.” The psalmist compares himself to a watchman, anxiously and expectantly waiting for the morning. I used to work as a security guard at Certain-Teed Corporation. We didn’t do any productive work for the company. By the time we got there, most of the employees had gone home. We just watched, and made rounds once an hour. I used most of the time to study, with the approval of those who had hired me. They didn’t really want me to do anything except be there and walk through the building several times a night. Often when we’re in the depths we feel like we need to do something to get ourselves out. But what God calls us to do is pray and wait. We can wait expectantly because we know He is at work and will fulfill His promises. Here’s how Eugene Peterson describes this waiting: “The psalmist’s and the Christian’s waiting and hoping is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption. Waiting does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying. And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion of fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, pp. 139-40).
When we’re in the depths, we cry out to God and we wait and hope in Him, confident that He will come to our rescue. We’d also do well to speak to ourselves, the way the psalmist speaks to Israel in verse 7. We often get into trouble by listening to ourselves. We go around saying, “things are really bad; I don’t see how they can possibly get worse. I just don’t know what to do about this situation. Things are really hopeless.” And, of course, the more we talk to ourselves in this way the worse we become. We need, at times like this, to take ourselves in hand and preach to ourselves, as the psalmist does in Psalm 42: “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Psalm 42:11). Instead of listening to ourselves complain, we remind ourselves of the truth. We speak to ourselves, and to one another, as the psalmist does: “O Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.” “O my soul, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.”
Doing these things may not make us feel better at the moment. That’s not the point. We do these things with the assurance that God is truly at work, knowing that in His time He will come to our rescue and lift us out of the depths. We cry out to Him and then go about our duties, trusting Him to know when to intervene. And we look forward, with anticipation, to the day when we’ll look back and say, “He reached down from heaven and rescued me; he drew me out of deep waters.... He led me to a place of safety; he rescued me because he delights in me” (Psalm 18:16, 19, NLT).
I’ve often spoken to people who think they need to be at their best before they can come into God’s presence. When you witness to people like this, they may truly believe that you’re telling them the truth, but they say things like “maybe someday. I’m just not ready yet. I need to get my life together first, then I’ll be able to start coming to church.” They understand that being in church involves coming into God’s presence, but they think they need to “get their act together” before they can turn to Him. They certainly can’t come to Him just as they are. It would be like going to church in my hometown without dressing up and putting on a good face for everyone.
But the truth is just the opposite. It’s when we’re at our worst–when we’re “in the depths”–that we’re most in need of God’s help. We always need His help, but when everything is going well we tend to be less aware of our need. We’re likely, when everything is going well, to think we can wait for a better time. But when we’re in the depths, when everything is falling apart and life seems to be at a standstill, we become painfully aware of our spiritual poverty and need. And at those times when we’re most aware of our neediness, we need to know that God hears us from the depths. We can cry out to Him when we’re overwhelmed with despair and know that He will hear us.
Thomas Merton tells of how he began praying for the first time: “The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw, and my whole being rose up in revolt against what was within me, and my soul desired escape and liberation and freedom from all this with an intensity and an urgency unlike anything I had ever known before. And now I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray–praying not with my lips and with my intellect and my imagination, but praying out of the very roots of my life and of my being, and praying to the God I had never known, to reach down towards me out of His darkness and to help me to get free of the thousand terrible things that held my will in their slavery” (The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 124).
We can cry out from the depths because God is merciful. The psalmist doesn’t give any details of how he ended up in his condition. He is crying out for mercy, and he’s acutely aware of his own sinfulness. It may be that he has committed a grievous sin–like David in his sin with Bathsheba–and is now crying out in repentance. But it could also be that he has been living a godly life without any major offenses, but that he is suffering physically or emotionally in some way. He may be crying out in repentance, or he may be in despair because of his afflictions. Suffering makes us more aware of our need for mercy. All our false confidence is wiped away, and we see more clearly how weak and fallible we are. The psalmist is aware of his spiritual poverty. His smugness has been overwhelmed by his experience in the depths. He doesn’t pray, “Lord, I thank you that I’m not like other people.” He prays “Lord, hear me.... If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?”
When we reach that point, we need to know that God is merciful or we’ll be overwhelmed. During my brief time at Westminster Theological Seminary, I used to hear stories about John Murray, one of the early theology professors from that school. His academic standards were very high, and he expected a lot from his students. He had a glass eye, which I think had resulted from an automobile accident. Everyone said that if you went to John Murray asking for mercy because you hadn’t completed an assignment and thought you could see a gleam of mercy in his eye, you were sadly deceived. It was only the light shining on his glass eye. Mercy just wasn’t an option. He maintained very high standards in his own work, and he expected students to complete their assignments on time. And, from what I understand, students learned not to go to him asking for mercy. John Murray didn’t really need to be merciful in that setting. His strictness gave students an incentive to complete their work. But our condition as sinners is such that when we see ourselves as we are we’ll never come to God unless we know He is merciful. When we come to Him crying out from the depths, we know that He is merciful and that He will receive us.
The psalmist’s confidence doesn’t cause him to become flippant about sin. I’ve often heard people say that the message of free grace gives people an excuse to continue in sin, because they know God will forgive them anyway. This is the accusation that people in the first century leveled at the apostle Paul. He found himself answering this charge repeatedly: “It’s simply perverse to say, ‘If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.’ Some people are actually trying to put such words in our mouths, claiming that we go around saying, ‘The more evil we do, the more good God does, so let’s just do it!’ That’s pure slander, as I’m sure you’ll agree” (Romans 3:8, The Message).
The psalmist is confident of God’s mercy and forgiveness, but notice what he adds: “But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.” A genuine experience of God’s mercy and forgiveness has just the opposite result of what we’d expect. The genuine fear of the Lord, a sense of reverential awe and fear of offending Him, isn’t produced by legalism. Legalism, in fact, produces a more calculating attitude toward God. It doesn’t lead to holy living at all. But those who’ve experienced the free gift of God’s mercy, who’ve seen themselves as lost sinners with no hope apart from Christ, and have been assured of His mercy and acceptance–these are the ones who learn to fear the Lord. J.I. Packer, in Knowing God, said: “Those who suppose that the doctrine of God’s grace tends to encourage moral laxity... are simply showing that, in the most literal sense, they do not know what they are talking about” (p. 124). The psalmist’s experience of mercy doesn’t encourage him to sin. It drives him away from sin.
We can cry out from the depths, also, because we know God cares about us. The psalmist says, in verse 7: “with the Lord is unfailing love, and with him is full redemption.” He cares about us when we are in the depths, even if we are there through our own fault. We’re often harsh with one another. We say things like, “you got yourself into this mess; it’s your job to find a way out.” We can be especially judgmental towards people who get into financial trouble because they haven’t made wise decisions. But God doesn’t deal with us in this way. He lovingly comes to our rescue when we’ve gotten ourselves into trouble.
God has provided redemption because He loves us: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, NLT). Or this, from Romans 5: “When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners.... But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:6, 8, NLT). God didn’t provide redemption because He made an abstract decision that this was the proper and benevolent thing to do. Have you ever been helped by people who did it coldly and distantly, out of a sense of doing “the right thing?” They may not like you very much, but they believe it’s the right, moral thing, to do. That kind of help feels demeaning and dehumanizing. God provided redemption because He loves us.
And because He’s gone this far in providing redemption, we can also be confident that He cares about us when we’re in the depths. Paul makes a similar argument in Romans 8. He points out in chapter 5, as we just read, that God sent Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Then he goes on, in chapter 8: “Since God did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t God, who gave us Christ, also give us everything else?” (Romans 8:32, NLT). He’s arguing from the greater to the lesser. Since God has done this incredible thing in providing for our redemption, do we doubt that He will care for us now that we are His own adopted children?
When we’re in the depths, we can know that God cares about what is happening to us. It doesn’t matter how we got there. The thief on the cross was there by his own fault–he admitted that this was true–but he heard those comforting words from Jesus: “this day you will be with me in paradise.” God’s people fall into sin and do foolish things, and sometimes their foolish acts have irreversible consequences. David couldn’t undo the horrible murder of Uriah that he committed to cover up his adultery. A prodigal son who is suffering from AIDS because of his sinful lifestyle can’t undo the past. But he can cry to God from the depths and know that God loves him and has provided for his redemption. A recovering alcoholic who’s fallen off the wagon and gone on a binge can’t go back and change the past. But he can cry out to God from the depths and find that He is merciful and loving. When we reach these lowest points in our lives, we need to know that God cares about us, no matter how we got there.
And when we cry out to God from the depths, we can know that we are not alone in our experience. We’re part of God’s kingdom, and though we may feel like we’re all alone in our difficulties, the truth is that we are part of the body of Christ. We’re part of a body of people, many of whom have been in the depths and can testify, from experience, that God is faithful. The psalmist is not only concerned about himself. He begins by crying out to God from the depths, but at the end he exhorts his fellow pilgrims: “O Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love, and with him is full redemption.” He’s experienced God’s faithfulness, and he now turns to help others who might be facing the same struggle. When we’re overwhelmed with difficulties, when we’re in the depths, we need to know that others have been through the same sorts of things and have found that God is merciful and faithful.
Elijah was one of the great prophets of the Old Testament. He rebuked Ahab, one of the most wicked kings of Israel, and he confronted 250 prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. God did great things through Him, answering with fire to prove to the nation that He is the true God. But right after Elijah’s greatest moment, Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, threatened to kill him and he fled into the wilderness. While he was there, God said to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” And Elijah replied: “I have zealously served the Lord God Almighty. But the people of Israel have broken their covenant with you, torn down your altars, and killed every one of your prophets. I alone am left, and now they are trying to kill me, too.” He felt alone, isolated. Everyone had turned to idolatry, and he alone was left. And it’s true that he was the only one taking such a bold stand in public. But God said to him: “Yet I will preserve seven thousand others in Israel who have never bowed to Baal or kissed him!” (1 Kings 19:13-14, 18, NLT). He felt alone, but he wasn’t really the only one left. He was part of a bigger group than he realized.
Maybe you’ve had the experience of listening to someone sharing a testimony about a struggle, and you think, “I thought I was the only one who struggled with that.” Part of the problem with the church I went to as a child was the lack of openness and genuineness. People’s lives were falling apart, but they came to church on Sunday and pretended that everything was fine. We need to follow the example of the psalmist; he cried out from the depths, and then spoke encouraging words to his fellow-pilgrims, urging them to hope in the Lord.
Jesus, our great High Priest, cried out to God from the depths. When He began to pray in the garden of Gethsemane, he said to Peter, James and John: “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and watch with me” (Matthew 26:38, NLT). He was overwhelmed with grief at the thought of what was coming, so He cried out to the Father repeatedly, asking Him to let the cup pass from Him. He knows what it is to cry out in grief. “This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same temptations we do, yet he did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it” (Hebrews 4:15-16, NLT).
When we cry out to God from the depths, we can be confident that He hears us. He is merciful, and He cares about what’s happening to us. But that doesn’t mean He’ll do what we want or that He’ll act on our schedule. Jesus cried out to God, but then He went to the cross. Because God answers in ways we wouldn’t expect, and because He usually doesn’t work on our schedule, we need these words in verses 5&6: “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.”
The problem is that when we’re in the depths it usually doesn’t feel like God is with us. We feel isolated and abandoned, and we often can’t even imagine how God’s deliverance is going to come about. In 1986, Annie and I moved to Philadelphia so I could begin my studies at Westminster Theological Seminary. After one semester, I dropped out, partly because of the hectic schedule I’d been keeping (I was working 4pm to midnight and taking classes during the day), and partly because I just didn’t fit at Westminster. We had also run out of money, and the seminary had very little financial aid to offer. On several levels, it just wasn’t working out. I found a job working evenings in a warehouse and applied to graduate school at Temple University and University of Pennsylvania. I was accepted into both programs, but at first it looked like I wouldn’t be getting any financial aid. So we gave up on the idea of graduate school.
At that point, in the spring of 1987, it looked like the Lord had led us to Philadelphia and abandoned us there. We had been part of a good church before we moved, but in Philadelphia we hadn’t been able to find a church where we fit in. We didn’t really know anyone, and we hated living in the city. As far as we could tell at the time, God was no longer with us. He was no longer leading and blessing us. We had moved to a place we didn’t like so that I could work in a warehouse on the 4 to midnight shift for a boss who resented the fact that I had more education than he did. But just a couple of weeks after that low point, I received a letter from Temple University saying that I had been granted a teaching assistantship, which would enable me to begin graduate school in the fall. The Lord was with us all that time, and He was doing things we weren’t aware of. It felt like He’d abandoned us, but He hadn’t abandoned us at all. His purposes were better than what we had planned for ourselves.
This is why we need to wait on the Lord. Very often we don’t understand what He’s doing. But we know Him. We know that with Him there is unfailing love. He cares about what is happening with us. When I was a very young Christian, someone said to me, “don’t forget in the darkness what God has shown you in the light.” We all go through times of darkness, times when nothing seems to make sense and we lose all realization of God’s comfort and presence. But what we know of Him is enough: “Oh Israel, wait and watch for God–with God’s arrival comes love, with God’s arrival comes generous redemption” (The Message). We may not understand what is happening, but we know God.
So what do we do when we find ourselves in the depths, when everything seems bleak and there’s no light to be seen at the end of the tunnel? We cry out to God from the depths, knowing that He is merciful. We may not feel His mercy, and we probably won’t feel like praying. We may not even be able to come up with any words to pray. It’s enough, at such times, to use the words of this psalm: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.” Use them over and over, and then sit silently in God’s presence. He’s there, and He is at work. You just can’t perceive Him. So keep on calling out to Him, accepting by faith that He is there and that He hears you.
As you continue calling out to Him from the depths, wait on His time. He will be faithful to His Word: “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.” The psalmist compares himself to a watchman, anxiously and expectantly waiting for the morning. I used to work as a security guard at Certain-Teed Corporation. We didn’t do any productive work for the company. By the time we got there, most of the employees had gone home. We just watched, and made rounds once an hour. I used most of the time to study, with the approval of those who had hired me. They didn’t really want me to do anything except be there and walk through the building several times a night. Often when we’re in the depths we feel like we need to do something to get ourselves out. But what God calls us to do is pray and wait. We can wait expectantly because we know He is at work and will fulfill His promises. Here’s how Eugene Peterson describes this waiting: “The psalmist’s and the Christian’s waiting and hoping is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption. Waiting does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying. And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion of fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, pp. 139-40).
When we’re in the depths, we cry out to God and we wait and hope in Him, confident that He will come to our rescue. We’d also do well to speak to ourselves, the way the psalmist speaks to Israel in verse 7. We often get into trouble by listening to ourselves. We go around saying, “things are really bad; I don’t see how they can possibly get worse. I just don’t know what to do about this situation. Things are really hopeless.” And, of course, the more we talk to ourselves in this way the worse we become. We need, at times like this, to take ourselves in hand and preach to ourselves, as the psalmist does in Psalm 42: “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Psalm 42:11). Instead of listening to ourselves complain, we remind ourselves of the truth. We speak to ourselves, and to one another, as the psalmist does: “O Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.” “O my soul, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.”
Doing these things may not make us feel better at the moment. That’s not the point. We do these things with the assurance that God is truly at work, knowing that in His time He will come to our rescue and lift us out of the depths. We cry out to Him and then go about our duties, trusting Him to know when to intervene. And we look forward, with anticipation, to the day when we’ll look back and say, “He reached down from heaven and rescued me; he drew me out of deep waters.... He led me to a place of safety; he rescued me because he delights in me” (Psalm 18:16, 19, NLT).
Monday, April 15, 2013
Enduring Persecution, Psalm 129
Persecution has been a frequent experience for God’s people throughout history. We see many examples of it in Scripture: Joseph being falsely accused by his master’s wife, the people of Israel being oppressed by the Egyptians, Daniel being accused and thrown into the lion’s den, Stephen being stoned to death. The letter to the Hebrews describes, at the end of chapter 11, what God’s people have often experienced in this world: “Some were mocked, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in dungeons. Some died by stoning, and some were sawed in half; others were killed with the sword. Some went about in skins of sheep and goats, hungry and oppressed and mistreated. They were too good for this world. They wandered over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground” (vv. 36-38, NLT).
This sort of thing should come as no surprise. Jesus clearly predicted that His people would experience persecution, that some would even think they were serving God by killing them. He said: “When the world hates you, remember that it hated me before it hated you. The world would love you if you belonged to it, but you don’t. I chose you to come out of the world, and so it hates you. Do you remember what I told you? ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ Since they persecuted me, naturally they will persecute you. And if they had listened to me, they would listen to you! The people of the world will hate you because you belong to me, for they don’t know God who sent me” (John 15:18-21, NLT).
Those who belong to Jesus Christ are not part of this world. We still live here, but we live here as strangers and pilgrims, with an awareness that our true home is elsewhere. There’s a real sense in which we are at odds with this present world, not with the people in the world, but with the spiritual powers behind all the godlessness and wickedness that we see. John, the apostle, said: “We know that we are children of God and that the world around us is under the power and control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19, NLT). We’re aware of the conflict, we’re aware that we don’t belong here, that this world and we are headed in different directions. And the world also knows this, which is why true Christianity is so often mocked and misrepresented in our culture. Why does our society seem so bent on destruction? How do you explain the rapid state of spiritual decline in America over the past generation? What is behind the current “culture of death,” with its commitment to abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia? It’s possible, and worthwhile, to look at the evidence and trace some of the things that have brought us to our current situation. Many of these things have been at work for centuries, eroding our confidence in the very existence of a supernatural world. But ultimately, the answer to the question, “how did we get here?” is this: “We know that... the world around us is under the power and control of the evil one.”
In a world like this, God’s people will often be subjected to persecution. Persecution is not something that happened in the past. Many of God’s people throughout the world today are subjected to horrible suffering at the hands of those who hate them because they belong to Jesus Christ. They can say, as the psalmist says, “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth.” But the reality of persecution is not the whole story, so it’s important not to stop there. The psalmist goes on, “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth, but they have not gained the victory over me.” Here it is in the New Living Translation: “From my earliest youth my enemies have persecuted me, but they have never been able to finish me off.” Persecution has been a frequent experience for God’s people, but the persecutors have always found that they are up against more than they expected. They set out to destroy a religious system, or decided to suppress a group of unpopular people, but then they found themselves fighting against the Living God Himself.
Notice, first of all, that this persecution hasn’t been a half-hearted effort. It has been severe and prolonged: “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth.” The psalmist is not speaking about his own experience. He’s speaking on behalf of Israel. “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth–let Israel say.” He himself may not have experienced the worst of it, but he’s part of God’s kingdom and he shares in the suffering of God’s people. He’s not saying that persecution is always going on everywhere. Satan resorts to different tactics in his assault on the Church. Sometimes he tries to draw us into the world by seducing us. But at other times he prompts his followers to resort to violence. Persecution, at least in its more violent forms, is not always his method. But it’s been such a frequent thing that he can say, on Israel’s behalf, that it’s been happening since her youth, or all her life. And this has also been true for the Church.
This persecution has not only been prolonged over many centuries, it has also been severe. “Plowmen have plowed my back and made their furrows long.” They’re being flogged, but the flogging is being done in a very systematic, cruel way, like a farmer carefully plowing a field, digging up long, straight rows. It’s not a half-hearted effort. The persecutors are intent on destruction. They’re like Saul the Persecutor, before he met the Lord on the Damascus road: “Saul was uttering threats with every breath. He was eager to destroy the Lord’s followers” (Acts 9:1, NLT). Christians in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, had planned an Easter crusade several years ago with an evangelist from Germany, but at the last minute the Sudanese government overruled their plans. So they gathered in All Saints Cathedral to pray and to prepare a letter of protest to the government. While they were there the police, using tear gas, stormed the church and arrested 100 people. But they weren’t satisfied with that. They went on to flog fifty-three of the believers, including several women and children, and then sent the men to prison for 20 days. They weren’t satisfied with breaking up the meeting. They wanted to destroy them. “Plowmen have plowed my back, and made their furrows long.”
But then, notice that despite their strenuous efforts, the persecutors haven’t been able to achieve their aim: “they have not gained the victory over me.” Their persecution hasn’t accomplished what they were after. “But the Lord is righteous; he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.” God has intervened on behalf of His people. The persecutors have found that they were fighting against more than they anticipated. Saul is a classic case. He had been breathing out slaughter, determined to destroy the church, thinking that in doing so he was serving God, but then as he drew near to Damascus: “a brilliant light from heaven suddenly beamed down upon him! He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul! Why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:3-4). Saul’s teacher, the Pharisee Gamaliel, had warned the Jewish leaders that they might find themselves fighting against God. And Saul discovered that this is exactly what he had been doing. All his destructive energy had been directed against God, his creator, the one on whom he was dependent for his next breath.
Several years ago I saw a movie with Steve Martin in which he played a faith healer. I think the title was “Leap of Faith.” The character he plays is not a real faith healer. He’s a con artist, who is taking advantage of people. He doesn’t believe the things he’s preaching. The whole thing is a scam, and he’s making a good living at it. But near the end of the movie something happens. Someone is genuinely healed, and he suddenly discovers that he’s in over his head. He discovers that he’s been trifling with things he doesn’t understand. This has often been the experience of those who’ve persecuted God’s people. They discover that they are trifling with things they don’t understand, that they are in over their heads. They’ve discovered that they are fighting against the Living God (and many persecutors, like Saul, have been converted in this way). “But the Lord is righteous; he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.” Eugene Peterson says: “The people of God are tough. For long centuries those who belong to the world have waged war against the way of faith, and they have yet to win. They have tried everything, but none of it has worked. They have tried persecution and ridicule, torture and exile, but the way of faith has continued healthy and robust” (A Long Obedience, p. 122).
The persecution doesn’t always involve physical suffering. In 1977 I was traveling with a group of OM’ers from Minneapolis to Philadelphia. We stopped along the way to spend the night with some Christian university students, and while we were walking from the car to their apartment, several other students started yelling obscenities at us, just because we were with them. But often it’s more subtle than this. God’s people are often excluded from job advancement, or merely treated as second-class citizens because of their faith. These are all just less violent manifestations of the same problem: “The people of the world will hate you because you belong to me, for they don’t know God who sent me”. J.I. Packer tells of a friend of his who had been denied academic advancement because he had clashed with church dignitaries over the gospel. He had stood firm for the truth, and as a result was unable to experience the degree of outward success he might have had otherwise. Here’s how he responded: “But it doesn’t matter... for I’ve known God and they haven’t” (Knowing God, p. 20). Their oppression hadn’t achieved what they were after: “they have not gained the victory over me.”
The last thing to notice here is in verses 5-8. Not only have the persecutors failed to achieve their goals; they themselves are headed for ruin: “May all who hate Zion be turned back in shame. May they be like grass on the roof, which withers before it can grow.” The psalmist doesn’t say: “may all those who hate me be turned back in shame.” He’s not speaking about personal enemies here, but about those who are the declared enemies of God’s people. It’s not just that they hate God’s people. In fact, that’s not the main problem at all. The problem is that they hate God. And since they can’t do anything against Him, they persecute His people: “The people of the world will hate you because you belong to me, for they don’t know God who sent me.... they saw all that I did and yet hated both of us–me and my Father” (John 15:21, 24, NLT).
These verses emphasize that persecution is temporary. Those who hate God and who seek to destroy His people will not be allowed to persist forever in their hatred. They are being thwarted from achieving their aims now, and in the future they will be brought to a complete stop. “Why do the nations rage? Why do the people waste their time with futile plans? The kings of the earth prepare for battle; the rulers plot together against the Lord and against his anointed one. ‘Let us break their chains,’ they cry, ‘and free ourselves from this slavery.’ But the one who rules in heaven laughs. The Lord scoffs at them. Then in anger he rebukes them, terrifying them with his fierce fury” (Psalm 2:1-5, NLT). They won’t be allowed to persist forever in their destructive course.
The psalmist prays: “May they be like grass on the roof, which withers before it can grow.” The houses in Palestine had flat roofs covered with a protective layer of clay, and often grass would sprout, especially after a rain. But the grass wasn’t worth anything. There wasn’t enough soil there to produce a crop, and the grass would wither very quickly after it sprouted. During harvest time, workers would greet one another with a blessing. Here’s an example, from the book of Ruth “While [Ruth] was there, Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and greeted the harvesters. ‘The Lord be with you!’ he said. ‘The Lord bless you!’ the harvesters replied” (Ruth 2:4, NLT). So the psalmist is just reinforcing the fact that this grass is not good for anything. People won’t be blessing one another because of a bountiful harvest of roof grass. Here’s Eugene Peterson again: “The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile. It is like plowing a field, thinking you are tramping all over God’s people and cutting his purposes to ribbons, but unaware that long ago your plow was disengaged. It is naively thinking you might get harvest of grain from that shallow patch of dirt on your rooftop. The way of the world is peppered with brief enthusiasms, like that grass upon the roof, springing up so wonderfully and without effort, but as quickly withering. The way of the world is cataloged with the proud, God-defying purposes, unharnessed from eternity, and therefore worthless and futile” (A Long Obedience, p. 125). Those who hate God and who have set out to destroy His people are both doomed for failure and headed for destruction. “The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile.”
The letter to the Hebrews was written to Christians who were suffering persecution and were on the verge of throwing in the towel. The author encourages them with these words: “And let us run with endurance the race that God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from start to finish. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy he knew would be his afterward. Now he is seated in the place of highest honor beside God’s throne in heaven. Think about all he endured when sinful people did such terrible things to him, so that you don’t become weary and give up” (Hebrews 12:1b-3, NLT). As we cry out to God, telling Him how we really feel when we see His people suffering unjustly in this evil world, we do so in the light of Jesus’ example, who endured because of the hope that was ahead of Him. And He gives us grace to go beyond our desire for vengeance and to follow Him in saying, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” If they hate us, it’s only because they hate Him. And because they are blinded by the god of this world, they don’t understand what they’re doing when they fulfill his plans.
In communion, we’re reminded of our oneness, in Christ, with all believers throughout the world. We are all part of the same body. Each time we celebrate, let’s do so with an awareness that Christians in many parts of the world are following Jesus in suffering for the sake of the gospel. They are, in Paul’s words, “completing what remains of Christ’s sufferings for his body, the church” (Colossians 1:24). They’re suffering as members of the body of Christ. Persecution continues to be a reality, but it will not continue forever. And even as it continues, it will fail miserably to achieve its aims. “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth–let Israel say–they have greatly oppressed me from my youth, but they have not gained the victory over me.” God’s people continue to suffer for their faith, but “our present troubles are quite small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us an immeasurably great glory that will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see right now; rather, we look forward to what we have not yet seen. For the troubles we see will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18, NLT)
This sort of thing should come as no surprise. Jesus clearly predicted that His people would experience persecution, that some would even think they were serving God by killing them. He said: “When the world hates you, remember that it hated me before it hated you. The world would love you if you belonged to it, but you don’t. I chose you to come out of the world, and so it hates you. Do you remember what I told you? ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ Since they persecuted me, naturally they will persecute you. And if they had listened to me, they would listen to you! The people of the world will hate you because you belong to me, for they don’t know God who sent me” (John 15:18-21, NLT).
Those who belong to Jesus Christ are not part of this world. We still live here, but we live here as strangers and pilgrims, with an awareness that our true home is elsewhere. There’s a real sense in which we are at odds with this present world, not with the people in the world, but with the spiritual powers behind all the godlessness and wickedness that we see. John, the apostle, said: “We know that we are children of God and that the world around us is under the power and control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19, NLT). We’re aware of the conflict, we’re aware that we don’t belong here, that this world and we are headed in different directions. And the world also knows this, which is why true Christianity is so often mocked and misrepresented in our culture. Why does our society seem so bent on destruction? How do you explain the rapid state of spiritual decline in America over the past generation? What is behind the current “culture of death,” with its commitment to abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia? It’s possible, and worthwhile, to look at the evidence and trace some of the things that have brought us to our current situation. Many of these things have been at work for centuries, eroding our confidence in the very existence of a supernatural world. But ultimately, the answer to the question, “how did we get here?” is this: “We know that... the world around us is under the power and control of the evil one.”
In a world like this, God’s people will often be subjected to persecution. Persecution is not something that happened in the past. Many of God’s people throughout the world today are subjected to horrible suffering at the hands of those who hate them because they belong to Jesus Christ. They can say, as the psalmist says, “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth.” But the reality of persecution is not the whole story, so it’s important not to stop there. The psalmist goes on, “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth, but they have not gained the victory over me.” Here it is in the New Living Translation: “From my earliest youth my enemies have persecuted me, but they have never been able to finish me off.” Persecution has been a frequent experience for God’s people, but the persecutors have always found that they are up against more than they expected. They set out to destroy a religious system, or decided to suppress a group of unpopular people, but then they found themselves fighting against the Living God Himself.
Notice, first of all, that this persecution hasn’t been a half-hearted effort. It has been severe and prolonged: “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth.” The psalmist is not speaking about his own experience. He’s speaking on behalf of Israel. “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth–let Israel say.” He himself may not have experienced the worst of it, but he’s part of God’s kingdom and he shares in the suffering of God’s people. He’s not saying that persecution is always going on everywhere. Satan resorts to different tactics in his assault on the Church. Sometimes he tries to draw us into the world by seducing us. But at other times he prompts his followers to resort to violence. Persecution, at least in its more violent forms, is not always his method. But it’s been such a frequent thing that he can say, on Israel’s behalf, that it’s been happening since her youth, or all her life. And this has also been true for the Church.
This persecution has not only been prolonged over many centuries, it has also been severe. “Plowmen have plowed my back and made their furrows long.” They’re being flogged, but the flogging is being done in a very systematic, cruel way, like a farmer carefully plowing a field, digging up long, straight rows. It’s not a half-hearted effort. The persecutors are intent on destruction. They’re like Saul the Persecutor, before he met the Lord on the Damascus road: “Saul was uttering threats with every breath. He was eager to destroy the Lord’s followers” (Acts 9:1, NLT). Christians in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, had planned an Easter crusade several years ago with an evangelist from Germany, but at the last minute the Sudanese government overruled their plans. So they gathered in All Saints Cathedral to pray and to prepare a letter of protest to the government. While they were there the police, using tear gas, stormed the church and arrested 100 people. But they weren’t satisfied with that. They went on to flog fifty-three of the believers, including several women and children, and then sent the men to prison for 20 days. They weren’t satisfied with breaking up the meeting. They wanted to destroy them. “Plowmen have plowed my back, and made their furrows long.”
But then, notice that despite their strenuous efforts, the persecutors haven’t been able to achieve their aim: “they have not gained the victory over me.” Their persecution hasn’t accomplished what they were after. “But the Lord is righteous; he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.” God has intervened on behalf of His people. The persecutors have found that they were fighting against more than they anticipated. Saul is a classic case. He had been breathing out slaughter, determined to destroy the church, thinking that in doing so he was serving God, but then as he drew near to Damascus: “a brilliant light from heaven suddenly beamed down upon him! He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul! Why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:3-4). Saul’s teacher, the Pharisee Gamaliel, had warned the Jewish leaders that they might find themselves fighting against God. And Saul discovered that this is exactly what he had been doing. All his destructive energy had been directed against God, his creator, the one on whom he was dependent for his next breath.
Several years ago I saw a movie with Steve Martin in which he played a faith healer. I think the title was “Leap of Faith.” The character he plays is not a real faith healer. He’s a con artist, who is taking advantage of people. He doesn’t believe the things he’s preaching. The whole thing is a scam, and he’s making a good living at it. But near the end of the movie something happens. Someone is genuinely healed, and he suddenly discovers that he’s in over his head. He discovers that he’s been trifling with things he doesn’t understand. This has often been the experience of those who’ve persecuted God’s people. They discover that they are trifling with things they don’t understand, that they are in over their heads. They’ve discovered that they are fighting against the Living God (and many persecutors, like Saul, have been converted in this way). “But the Lord is righteous; he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.” Eugene Peterson says: “The people of God are tough. For long centuries those who belong to the world have waged war against the way of faith, and they have yet to win. They have tried everything, but none of it has worked. They have tried persecution and ridicule, torture and exile, but the way of faith has continued healthy and robust” (A Long Obedience, p. 122).
The persecution doesn’t always involve physical suffering. In 1977 I was traveling with a group of OM’ers from Minneapolis to Philadelphia. We stopped along the way to spend the night with some Christian university students, and while we were walking from the car to their apartment, several other students started yelling obscenities at us, just because we were with them. But often it’s more subtle than this. God’s people are often excluded from job advancement, or merely treated as second-class citizens because of their faith. These are all just less violent manifestations of the same problem: “The people of the world will hate you because you belong to me, for they don’t know God who sent me”. J.I. Packer tells of a friend of his who had been denied academic advancement because he had clashed with church dignitaries over the gospel. He had stood firm for the truth, and as a result was unable to experience the degree of outward success he might have had otherwise. Here’s how he responded: “But it doesn’t matter... for I’ve known God and they haven’t” (Knowing God, p. 20). Their oppression hadn’t achieved what they were after: “they have not gained the victory over me.”
The last thing to notice here is in verses 5-8. Not only have the persecutors failed to achieve their goals; they themselves are headed for ruin: “May all who hate Zion be turned back in shame. May they be like grass on the roof, which withers before it can grow.” The psalmist doesn’t say: “may all those who hate me be turned back in shame.” He’s not speaking about personal enemies here, but about those who are the declared enemies of God’s people. It’s not just that they hate God’s people. In fact, that’s not the main problem at all. The problem is that they hate God. And since they can’t do anything against Him, they persecute His people: “The people of the world will hate you because you belong to me, for they don’t know God who sent me.... they saw all that I did and yet hated both of us–me and my Father” (John 15:21, 24, NLT).
These verses emphasize that persecution is temporary. Those who hate God and who seek to destroy His people will not be allowed to persist forever in their hatred. They are being thwarted from achieving their aims now, and in the future they will be brought to a complete stop. “Why do the nations rage? Why do the people waste their time with futile plans? The kings of the earth prepare for battle; the rulers plot together against the Lord and against his anointed one. ‘Let us break their chains,’ they cry, ‘and free ourselves from this slavery.’ But the one who rules in heaven laughs. The Lord scoffs at them. Then in anger he rebukes them, terrifying them with his fierce fury” (Psalm 2:1-5, NLT). They won’t be allowed to persist forever in their destructive course.
The psalmist prays: “May they be like grass on the roof, which withers before it can grow.” The houses in Palestine had flat roofs covered with a protective layer of clay, and often grass would sprout, especially after a rain. But the grass wasn’t worth anything. There wasn’t enough soil there to produce a crop, and the grass would wither very quickly after it sprouted. During harvest time, workers would greet one another with a blessing. Here’s an example, from the book of Ruth “While [Ruth] was there, Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and greeted the harvesters. ‘The Lord be with you!’ he said. ‘The Lord bless you!’ the harvesters replied” (Ruth 2:4, NLT). So the psalmist is just reinforcing the fact that this grass is not good for anything. People won’t be blessing one another because of a bountiful harvest of roof grass. Here’s Eugene Peterson again: “The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile. It is like plowing a field, thinking you are tramping all over God’s people and cutting his purposes to ribbons, but unaware that long ago your plow was disengaged. It is naively thinking you might get harvest of grain from that shallow patch of dirt on your rooftop. The way of the world is peppered with brief enthusiasms, like that grass upon the roof, springing up so wonderfully and without effort, but as quickly withering. The way of the world is cataloged with the proud, God-defying purposes, unharnessed from eternity, and therefore worthless and futile” (A Long Obedience, p. 125). Those who hate God and who have set out to destroy His people are both doomed for failure and headed for destruction. “The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile.”
The letter to the Hebrews was written to Christians who were suffering persecution and were on the verge of throwing in the towel. The author encourages them with these words: “And let us run with endurance the race that God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from start to finish. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy he knew would be his afterward. Now he is seated in the place of highest honor beside God’s throne in heaven. Think about all he endured when sinful people did such terrible things to him, so that you don’t become weary and give up” (Hebrews 12:1b-3, NLT). As we cry out to God, telling Him how we really feel when we see His people suffering unjustly in this evil world, we do so in the light of Jesus’ example, who endured because of the hope that was ahead of Him. And He gives us grace to go beyond our desire for vengeance and to follow Him in saying, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” If they hate us, it’s only because they hate Him. And because they are blinded by the god of this world, they don’t understand what they’re doing when they fulfill his plans.
In communion, we’re reminded of our oneness, in Christ, with all believers throughout the world. We are all part of the same body. Each time we celebrate, let’s do so with an awareness that Christians in many parts of the world are following Jesus in suffering for the sake of the gospel. They are, in Paul’s words, “completing what remains of Christ’s sufferings for his body, the church” (Colossians 1:24). They’re suffering as members of the body of Christ. Persecution continues to be a reality, but it will not continue forever. And even as it continues, it will fail miserably to achieve its aims. “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth–let Israel say–they have greatly oppressed me from my youth, but they have not gained the victory over me.” God’s people continue to suffer for their faith, but “our present troubles are quite small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us an immeasurably great glory that will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see right now; rather, we look forward to what we have not yet seen. For the troubles we see will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18, NLT)
Saturday, April 6, 2013
A Life Blessed by God, Psam 128
As we’ve been studying these Psalms of Ascent, we’ve seen again and again that difficulties and struggles are part of our lives. The psalmist is motivated to set out on pilgrimage, in Psalm 120, by a sense of disappointment with the world. This world is not all that he had hoped, so he cries out “too long have I lived among those who hate peace.” But then, right away, we find him looking desperately around and asking, “Where will my help come from?” It’s true, as Paul and Barnabas told the church at Antioch, that “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). But if we only talk about these difficulties, it’s easy to get the wrong picture of the Christian life. If we become obsessed with the difficulties of life in this world, we’re looking at things from the wrong perspective. It’s fashionable in popular culture to caricature Christians as joyless people whose main mission in life is making sure that no one has a good time. One of Satan’s strategies is to use these kinds of lies to close people’s minds to the truth of the gospel. Thomas Merton tells how he grew up with an irrational suspicion of Catholics: “This was one of the few things I got from Pop [his grandfather] that really took root in my mind, and became part of my mental attitude: this hatred and suspicion of Catholics. There was nothing overt about it. It was simply the deep, almost subconscious aversion from the vague and evil thing, which I called Catholicism, which lived back in the dark corners of my mentality with the other spooks, like death and so on. I did not know precisely what the word meant. It only conveyed a kind of a cold and unpleasant feeling” (The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 29). Many people in our culture feel that way about Christianity. They don’t know exactly what it is, but it conveys “a kind of a cold and unpleasant feeling.”
We can give the impression, if we’re not careful, that the Christian life is a grim struggle from beginning to end, that true disciples, at best, are uncomplaining stoics who endure bravely the harshness of life in God’s kingdom. We may not be having a very good time, but we’re determined to stick it out till the end. The psalmist is certainly aware of the difficulties of life in this fallen world, but at the same time he claims that there’s no contradiction between godliness and happiness. In fact, he seems to assume that these two things go together.
The psalmist states his main point in verse one. This verse really summarizes the whole psalm: “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.” The Hebrew word for “blessed,” ashre, is often translated “happy.” Here’s how it reads in The Message: “All you who fear God, how blessed you are! How happily you walk on his smooth, straight road.” Or the New Living Translation: “How happy are those who fear the Lord.” The psalmist is saying that people who walk with God have good reason to feel happy about their lives. They’re not grim stoics who are determined to hang on till the end, no matter what. They’re people who are conscious of living under God’s blessing; they’re happy people. They endure suffering, because they’re living in a fallen world. But they’re conscious of how much they’ve received from God’s hand, of how much they’re continuing to receive each day from His rich abundance.
Notice how he describes these people. First, they’re people who “fear the Lord.” This is a common theme in the Old Testament. For example: “Happy are those who fear the Lord. Yes, happy are those who delight in doing what he commands” (Psalm 112:1, NLT). Or this, from the beginning of Proverbs: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Only fools despise wisdom and discipline” (1:7, NLT). Or, a little later in the same book: “Fear of the Lord gives life, security, and protection from harm” (19:23, NLT). How should we understand this idea of fearing the Lord? It really goes against the grain of the contemporary tendency to approach God casually, even flippantly. We want to see Jesus as our buddy, and we habitually speak to God in ways which ignore His infinite majesty and holiness.
There are two opposite extremes in this area. On the one hand, we can become so aware of God’s transcendence, so conscious of His absolute holiness, that we only approach Him with slavish, cringing fear. If we go too far in this direction, we won’t dare approach Him at all. Scripture clearly calls us to come boldly into God’s presence, as children who’ve been freely accepted through the perfect sacrifice of the Son. But our tendency is to swing from one extreme to another, and when we become aware that God accepts us fully and invites us to come boldly into His presence, we’re in danger of forgetting what it means to stand in the presence of the eternal, almighty God.
It’s helpful to notice how people in Scripture respond when they’re given a clearer vision of God as He is. When Moses saw the burning bush he was curious and moved closer to have a look. But then God spoke to him out of the bush: “‘Do not come any closer,’ God told him. ‘Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground.’ Then he said, ‘I am the God of your ancestors....’ When Moses heard this, he hid his face in his hands because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:5-6, NLT). Here’s how Daniel responded, when he was given a vision, in answer to prayer: “I, Daniel, am the only one who saw this vision. The men with me saw nothing, but they were suddenly terrified and ran away to hide. So I was left there all alone to watch this amazing vision. My strength left me, my face grew deathly pale, and I felt very weak. When I heard him speak, I fainted and lay there with my face to the ground. Just then a hand touched me and lifted me, still trembling, to my hands and knees. And the man said to me,’ O Daniel, greatly loved of God, listen carefully to what I have to say to you. Stand up, for I have been sent to you.’ When he said this to me, I stood up, still trembling with fear. Then he said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Daniel...’” (Daniel 10:7-12, NLT).
It’s tempting to dismiss this by pointing out that these are Old Testament characters. God dealt with these people in terms of the Law, but now He deals with us in grace. God revealed His holiness in the Old Testament, but now He reveals Himself as our loving heavenly Father. The fear of the Lord, from this perspective, is an Old Testament theme, which really has no place in the minds of Christians. The apostle John is often called the “beloved apostle,” because he had such a close relationship with Jesus, and because love is such a strong theme in his letters. In his account of the Last Supper, John refers to himself in this way: “One of Jesus’ disciples, the one Jesus loved, was sitting next to Jesus at the table” (John 13:23). He was conscious of being “the one Jesus loved.” And yet, when he saw the risen Lord on the island of Patmos, he says this: “when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. But he laid his right hand on me and said, ‘Don’t be afraid!’” (Revelation 1:17). Jesus Himself said: “Dear friends, don’t be afraid of those who want to kill you. They can only kill the body; they cannot do any more to you. But I’ll tell you whom to fear. Fear God, who has the power to kill people and then throw them into hell” (Luke 12:4-5).
The fear of the Lord is not an Old Testament theme. It’s a biblical theme. Those who are walking in persistent rebellion, who refuse to bow before God’s authority have good reason to be afraid. In 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” This sermon has been subjected to much ridicule and hatred in the modern world. But Edwards was doing nothing more than expounding the biblical teaching on God’s wrath against sin. He describes, at some length, the precarious position of sinners outside of Christ, stressing that the only thing keeping them from the fullness of God’s wrath is His mercy and good pleasure. He’s certain that if they could see clearly their position as sinners before a holy God, they’d be overwhelmed with fear and would flee to Christ for refuge. Here’s how he concludes the sermon: “Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: ‘Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed’” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, p. 12). Those who are continuing in rebellion, refusing to bow before God’s lordship, have every reason to fear. As the author of Hebrews says, “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).
But what about those of us who’ve been reconciled to God by His free gift of grace? Paul says there is now “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1), so we don’t live in dread of God’s wrath. For us, the fear of the Lord means worshiping Him with reverence and awe. “Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be destroyed, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe. For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:28-29). Eugene Peterson does a good job of explaining what this means: “The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have toward him: will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will be always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle? But then we are not dealing with the God of creation and the Christ of the cross, but with a dime-store reproduction of something made in our image, usually for commercial reasons. To guard against all such blasphemous chumminess with the Almighty, the Bible talks of the fear of the Lord--not to scare us but to bring us to awesome attention before the overwhelming grandeur of God, to shut up our whining and chattering and stop our running and fidgeting so that we can really see him as he is and listen to him as he speaks his merciful, life-changing words of forgiveness” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 116).
This fear of the Lord is more than just an inward feeling. It affects the way we live our lives. The psalmist adds a second phrase, which fills out his meaning: “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.” Those who fear the Lord obey Him. Fear of the Lord and obedience are inseparable from each other. Proverbs 8:13 says, “All who fear the Lord will hate evil.” Or Proverbs 14:21: “The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, turning a man from the snares of death.” Here’s one more, from Leviticus: “Show your fear of God by not taking advantage of each other. I, the Lord, am your God” (25:17).
One of Satan’s strategies is to corrupt our understanding of God. He did that with Eve in the garden: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). He persuaded her that God was only watching out for Himself, trying to keep her from becoming like Him. And very often Satan tries to make us think about God in ways that undermine our reverent fear of offending Him. Surely He won’t care that much if we sin! He’s just waiting to forgive us–where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more–so we can go ahead and do what we want, then ask forgiveness right away. Paul urges us to remember both the kindness and the severity of God: “Don’t think highly of yourself, but fear what could happen. For if God did not spare the branches he put there in the first place, he won’t spare you either. Notice how God is both kind and severe. He is severe to those who disobeyed, but kind to you as you continue to trust in his kindness. But if you stop trusting, you also will be cut off” (Romans 11:20-22). One of the most dangerous sins is the sin of presumption, because it leads us to sin carelessly and to take God’s mercy for granted. The fear of the Lord protects us from this sin, and leads us to a life of reverent obedience. “Blessed are all those who fear the Lord, and walk in his ways.”
People who fear the Lord, who know something of God’s holiness and majesty and who see themselves as they are before Him, don’t presume that God owes them something. They don’t come to God claiming things from Him. During the late 1970's, I remember hearing a lot about Christians who referred to themselves as “king’s kids.” As children of the king, they thought they were entitled to the best this world has to offer. King’s kids shouldn’t be driving old, beat-up cars. They should be prosperous and successful. A lot of these people got into trouble with their faith, and part of the problem was that they were cultivating a presumptuous spirit, rather than the fear of the Lord. That’s one extreme.
But those who do fear the Lord can go too far the other direction. I heard a missions speaker once tell a story about working with an older woman on the mission field. She had been there for many years, and he was young, enthusiastic, and excited about the prospect of being involved in the work of missions. They were working on a difficult project one day, and he blurted out, “I wonder what kind of reward the Lord will have for us.” And she answered him, harshly and full of disdain, “I don’t deserve any reward from the Lord.”
It’s true, of course, that we don’t deserve any reward from Him. But He delights in doing good things for us, and He rewards our efforts to serve Him, not because we deserve it, but because He is gracious. That’s the point of verses 2-4. The psalmist is illustrating the principle he stated in verse 1. God delights in giving good things to those who fear Him. If Satan doesn’t succeed in tempting us to see God as an overindulgent but helpless father, he’ll try to make us think of Him as an austere task master. A.W. Tozer said, “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.... The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service one of unspeakable pleasure.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 13-15).
God delights in doing good things for those who fear Him. We don’t deserve it, but He graciously rewards our efforts to please Him. The psalmist illustrates this principle in a way that would connect with people living in his culture: “You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons will be like olive shoots around your table.” Then he concludes that section with these words in verse 4: “Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord.” Or, here it is in the Jerusalem Bible: “Such are the blessings that fall on the man who fears Yahweh.” In other words, these are the kinds of things God delights in doing for those who fear Him.
Are these promises we can claim from God? If we’ve fulfilled the conditions, can we expect that God has bound Himself to ensure that our lives turn out this way? No, they’re not promises. This is a wisdom psalm, and its approach is similar to the book of Proverbs. The wisdom literature in Scripture makes observations about the way God has ordered His creation. For example, Proverbs 22:6 says, “Teach your children to choose the right path, and when they are older, they will remain upon it.” I’ve often heard this interpreted as a promise, that if we teach our children the ways of the Lord, He promises to keep them on the right path. So if they stray from the right path, it’s because we haven’t done our part. But that’s not the intention of this verse. The point is that God has so ordered His creation that if we teach our children the Lord’s ways, they won’t easily turn their backs on Him. That’s the way He has made us.
So our psalm is not promising that things will work out this way for those who fear the Lord. We, just like others, experience the trouble and grief of living in a world that has turned its back on God. But in fearing the Lord and walking with Him we’ve stopped trying to go against the grain of God’s created order. If you’re committed to learn how to fly without any mechanical assistance, you’re going to have a very frustrating and difficult life, because God didn’t create us with that ability. Sin is like that. It goes against the grain of God’s world. In following Jesus Christ we’re seeking to live in the way we were created to live, so purely on the natural level it’s more likely that we’ll be happy and content. But in addition to this, God is pleased with our feeble efforts to serve Him, and He delights in caring for us and bringing good things into our lives. The things the psalmist lists aren’t extravagant. But they’re part of the life we were created for, a life overflowing with God’s blessing, surrounded by His constant presence.
This psalm concludes with a benediction, in verses 5-6: “May the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life; may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem, and may you live to see your children’s children.” The psalmist is not just grasping after a blessing for himself. He’s not self-absorbed, watching out for number one. He wants to see God’s blessing on his fellow-pilgrims, and he is especially concerned for the well-being of the corporate body. A life blessed by God is not lived in isolation. We’re on pilgrimage as part of God’s Church, and our well-being is tied to the spiritual health of the body.
“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.” The way to experience a life of blessing--a happy life--is to cultivate the fear of the Lord. How do we do that? We don’t begin with our feelings, by trying to make ourselves feel a certain way. We begin by seeking to know God as He is, by cultivating a larger vision of God. And we need to be intentional about this, because our natural tendency is to reduce God to manageable proportions.
Spend time in God’s presence, worshiping and praising Him for who He is. You’ll probably need help with this, because our knowledge of God is very limited and our thoughts tend to revolve around our own needs. Sing hymns and choruses, especially ones that exalt God’s majesty. “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and “O Worship the King” are good choices to begin with. Try singing a hymn, then stop and pray through it, and then sing it again. This gives the words time to sink into your mind. Pray the Scriptures in the way I suggested a couple of sermons ago. And try using written prayers to fill your mind with higher thoughts of God. A Diary of Private Prayer, by John Baillie, is an excellent guide for prayer. It has morning and evening prayers for each day of the month. Using these will help you pray about things you wouldn’t think of otherwise and will help you develop a language for worship. The purpose of all these things is to cultivate a larger view of God, to learn to worship him with reverence and awe.
The effect of this is just the opposite of what the world leads us to expect. As we learn to fear the Lord, we become more aware of His presence and blessing on our lives. We’ve been delivered from the kingdom of darkness and made part of His eternal kingdom. Our sins have been forgiven, and we’re no longer living under His wrath. We look forward to eternity in the presence of God, the source of all good. And we have His promise to accompany us all through this earthly pilgrimage. We experience His blessing throughout our lives in more ways than we can number. Surely we, of all people on earth, have reason for happiness. Even when we endure suffering, we do so in the light of an eternal future that far outweighs even the most severe trials here on earth. “For the troubles we see will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:18, NLT). “All you who fear God, how blessed you are! How happily you walk on his smooth, straight road” (The Message). “All honor to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for it is by his boundless mercy that God has given us the privilege of being born again. Now we live with a wonderful expectation, because Jesus Christ rose again from the dead. For God has reserved a priceless inheritance for his children. It is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.... So be truly glad! There is wonderful joy ahead, even though it is necessary for you to endure many trials for awhile.... You love [the Lord Jesus], even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him, you trust him; and even now you are happy with a glorious, inexpressible joy. Your reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:3-6; 8-9, NLT).
We can give the impression, if we’re not careful, that the Christian life is a grim struggle from beginning to end, that true disciples, at best, are uncomplaining stoics who endure bravely the harshness of life in God’s kingdom. We may not be having a very good time, but we’re determined to stick it out till the end. The psalmist is certainly aware of the difficulties of life in this fallen world, but at the same time he claims that there’s no contradiction between godliness and happiness. In fact, he seems to assume that these two things go together.
The psalmist states his main point in verse one. This verse really summarizes the whole psalm: “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.” The Hebrew word for “blessed,” ashre, is often translated “happy.” Here’s how it reads in The Message: “All you who fear God, how blessed you are! How happily you walk on his smooth, straight road.” Or the New Living Translation: “How happy are those who fear the Lord.” The psalmist is saying that people who walk with God have good reason to feel happy about their lives. They’re not grim stoics who are determined to hang on till the end, no matter what. They’re people who are conscious of living under God’s blessing; they’re happy people. They endure suffering, because they’re living in a fallen world. But they’re conscious of how much they’ve received from God’s hand, of how much they’re continuing to receive each day from His rich abundance.
Notice how he describes these people. First, they’re people who “fear the Lord.” This is a common theme in the Old Testament. For example: “Happy are those who fear the Lord. Yes, happy are those who delight in doing what he commands” (Psalm 112:1, NLT). Or this, from the beginning of Proverbs: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Only fools despise wisdom and discipline” (1:7, NLT). Or, a little later in the same book: “Fear of the Lord gives life, security, and protection from harm” (19:23, NLT). How should we understand this idea of fearing the Lord? It really goes against the grain of the contemporary tendency to approach God casually, even flippantly. We want to see Jesus as our buddy, and we habitually speak to God in ways which ignore His infinite majesty and holiness.
There are two opposite extremes in this area. On the one hand, we can become so aware of God’s transcendence, so conscious of His absolute holiness, that we only approach Him with slavish, cringing fear. If we go too far in this direction, we won’t dare approach Him at all. Scripture clearly calls us to come boldly into God’s presence, as children who’ve been freely accepted through the perfect sacrifice of the Son. But our tendency is to swing from one extreme to another, and when we become aware that God accepts us fully and invites us to come boldly into His presence, we’re in danger of forgetting what it means to stand in the presence of the eternal, almighty God.
It’s helpful to notice how people in Scripture respond when they’re given a clearer vision of God as He is. When Moses saw the burning bush he was curious and moved closer to have a look. But then God spoke to him out of the bush: “‘Do not come any closer,’ God told him. ‘Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground.’ Then he said, ‘I am the God of your ancestors....’ When Moses heard this, he hid his face in his hands because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:5-6, NLT). Here’s how Daniel responded, when he was given a vision, in answer to prayer: “I, Daniel, am the only one who saw this vision. The men with me saw nothing, but they were suddenly terrified and ran away to hide. So I was left there all alone to watch this amazing vision. My strength left me, my face grew deathly pale, and I felt very weak. When I heard him speak, I fainted and lay there with my face to the ground. Just then a hand touched me and lifted me, still trembling, to my hands and knees. And the man said to me,’ O Daniel, greatly loved of God, listen carefully to what I have to say to you. Stand up, for I have been sent to you.’ When he said this to me, I stood up, still trembling with fear. Then he said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Daniel...’” (Daniel 10:7-12, NLT).
It’s tempting to dismiss this by pointing out that these are Old Testament characters. God dealt with these people in terms of the Law, but now He deals with us in grace. God revealed His holiness in the Old Testament, but now He reveals Himself as our loving heavenly Father. The fear of the Lord, from this perspective, is an Old Testament theme, which really has no place in the minds of Christians. The apostle John is often called the “beloved apostle,” because he had such a close relationship with Jesus, and because love is such a strong theme in his letters. In his account of the Last Supper, John refers to himself in this way: “One of Jesus’ disciples, the one Jesus loved, was sitting next to Jesus at the table” (John 13:23). He was conscious of being “the one Jesus loved.” And yet, when he saw the risen Lord on the island of Patmos, he says this: “when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. But he laid his right hand on me and said, ‘Don’t be afraid!’” (Revelation 1:17). Jesus Himself said: “Dear friends, don’t be afraid of those who want to kill you. They can only kill the body; they cannot do any more to you. But I’ll tell you whom to fear. Fear God, who has the power to kill people and then throw them into hell” (Luke 12:4-5).
The fear of the Lord is not an Old Testament theme. It’s a biblical theme. Those who are walking in persistent rebellion, who refuse to bow before God’s authority have good reason to be afraid. In 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” This sermon has been subjected to much ridicule and hatred in the modern world. But Edwards was doing nothing more than expounding the biblical teaching on God’s wrath against sin. He describes, at some length, the precarious position of sinners outside of Christ, stressing that the only thing keeping them from the fullness of God’s wrath is His mercy and good pleasure. He’s certain that if they could see clearly their position as sinners before a holy God, they’d be overwhelmed with fear and would flee to Christ for refuge. Here’s how he concludes the sermon: “Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: ‘Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed’” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, p. 12). Those who are continuing in rebellion, refusing to bow before God’s lordship, have every reason to fear. As the author of Hebrews says, “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).
But what about those of us who’ve been reconciled to God by His free gift of grace? Paul says there is now “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1), so we don’t live in dread of God’s wrath. For us, the fear of the Lord means worshiping Him with reverence and awe. “Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be destroyed, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe. For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:28-29). Eugene Peterson does a good job of explaining what this means: “The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have toward him: will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will be always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle? But then we are not dealing with the God of creation and the Christ of the cross, but with a dime-store reproduction of something made in our image, usually for commercial reasons. To guard against all such blasphemous chumminess with the Almighty, the Bible talks of the fear of the Lord--not to scare us but to bring us to awesome attention before the overwhelming grandeur of God, to shut up our whining and chattering and stop our running and fidgeting so that we can really see him as he is and listen to him as he speaks his merciful, life-changing words of forgiveness” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 116).
This fear of the Lord is more than just an inward feeling. It affects the way we live our lives. The psalmist adds a second phrase, which fills out his meaning: “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.” Those who fear the Lord obey Him. Fear of the Lord and obedience are inseparable from each other. Proverbs 8:13 says, “All who fear the Lord will hate evil.” Or Proverbs 14:21: “The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, turning a man from the snares of death.” Here’s one more, from Leviticus: “Show your fear of God by not taking advantage of each other. I, the Lord, am your God” (25:17).
One of Satan’s strategies is to corrupt our understanding of God. He did that with Eve in the garden: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). He persuaded her that God was only watching out for Himself, trying to keep her from becoming like Him. And very often Satan tries to make us think about God in ways that undermine our reverent fear of offending Him. Surely He won’t care that much if we sin! He’s just waiting to forgive us–where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more–so we can go ahead and do what we want, then ask forgiveness right away. Paul urges us to remember both the kindness and the severity of God: “Don’t think highly of yourself, but fear what could happen. For if God did not spare the branches he put there in the first place, he won’t spare you either. Notice how God is both kind and severe. He is severe to those who disobeyed, but kind to you as you continue to trust in his kindness. But if you stop trusting, you also will be cut off” (Romans 11:20-22). One of the most dangerous sins is the sin of presumption, because it leads us to sin carelessly and to take God’s mercy for granted. The fear of the Lord protects us from this sin, and leads us to a life of reverent obedience. “Blessed are all those who fear the Lord, and walk in his ways.”
People who fear the Lord, who know something of God’s holiness and majesty and who see themselves as they are before Him, don’t presume that God owes them something. They don’t come to God claiming things from Him. During the late 1970's, I remember hearing a lot about Christians who referred to themselves as “king’s kids.” As children of the king, they thought they were entitled to the best this world has to offer. King’s kids shouldn’t be driving old, beat-up cars. They should be prosperous and successful. A lot of these people got into trouble with their faith, and part of the problem was that they were cultivating a presumptuous spirit, rather than the fear of the Lord. That’s one extreme.
But those who do fear the Lord can go too far the other direction. I heard a missions speaker once tell a story about working with an older woman on the mission field. She had been there for many years, and he was young, enthusiastic, and excited about the prospect of being involved in the work of missions. They were working on a difficult project one day, and he blurted out, “I wonder what kind of reward the Lord will have for us.” And she answered him, harshly and full of disdain, “I don’t deserve any reward from the Lord.”
It’s true, of course, that we don’t deserve any reward from Him. But He delights in doing good things for us, and He rewards our efforts to serve Him, not because we deserve it, but because He is gracious. That’s the point of verses 2-4. The psalmist is illustrating the principle he stated in verse 1. God delights in giving good things to those who fear Him. If Satan doesn’t succeed in tempting us to see God as an overindulgent but helpless father, he’ll try to make us think of Him as an austere task master. A.W. Tozer said, “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.... The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service one of unspeakable pleasure.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 13-15).
God delights in doing good things for those who fear Him. We don’t deserve it, but He graciously rewards our efforts to please Him. The psalmist illustrates this principle in a way that would connect with people living in his culture: “You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons will be like olive shoots around your table.” Then he concludes that section with these words in verse 4: “Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord.” Or, here it is in the Jerusalem Bible: “Such are the blessings that fall on the man who fears Yahweh.” In other words, these are the kinds of things God delights in doing for those who fear Him.
Are these promises we can claim from God? If we’ve fulfilled the conditions, can we expect that God has bound Himself to ensure that our lives turn out this way? No, they’re not promises. This is a wisdom psalm, and its approach is similar to the book of Proverbs. The wisdom literature in Scripture makes observations about the way God has ordered His creation. For example, Proverbs 22:6 says, “Teach your children to choose the right path, and when they are older, they will remain upon it.” I’ve often heard this interpreted as a promise, that if we teach our children the ways of the Lord, He promises to keep them on the right path. So if they stray from the right path, it’s because we haven’t done our part. But that’s not the intention of this verse. The point is that God has so ordered His creation that if we teach our children the Lord’s ways, they won’t easily turn their backs on Him. That’s the way He has made us.
So our psalm is not promising that things will work out this way for those who fear the Lord. We, just like others, experience the trouble and grief of living in a world that has turned its back on God. But in fearing the Lord and walking with Him we’ve stopped trying to go against the grain of God’s created order. If you’re committed to learn how to fly without any mechanical assistance, you’re going to have a very frustrating and difficult life, because God didn’t create us with that ability. Sin is like that. It goes against the grain of God’s world. In following Jesus Christ we’re seeking to live in the way we were created to live, so purely on the natural level it’s more likely that we’ll be happy and content. But in addition to this, God is pleased with our feeble efforts to serve Him, and He delights in caring for us and bringing good things into our lives. The things the psalmist lists aren’t extravagant. But they’re part of the life we were created for, a life overflowing with God’s blessing, surrounded by His constant presence.
This psalm concludes with a benediction, in verses 5-6: “May the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life; may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem, and may you live to see your children’s children.” The psalmist is not just grasping after a blessing for himself. He’s not self-absorbed, watching out for number one. He wants to see God’s blessing on his fellow-pilgrims, and he is especially concerned for the well-being of the corporate body. A life blessed by God is not lived in isolation. We’re on pilgrimage as part of God’s Church, and our well-being is tied to the spiritual health of the body.
“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.” The way to experience a life of blessing--a happy life--is to cultivate the fear of the Lord. How do we do that? We don’t begin with our feelings, by trying to make ourselves feel a certain way. We begin by seeking to know God as He is, by cultivating a larger vision of God. And we need to be intentional about this, because our natural tendency is to reduce God to manageable proportions.
Spend time in God’s presence, worshiping and praising Him for who He is. You’ll probably need help with this, because our knowledge of God is very limited and our thoughts tend to revolve around our own needs. Sing hymns and choruses, especially ones that exalt God’s majesty. “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and “O Worship the King” are good choices to begin with. Try singing a hymn, then stop and pray through it, and then sing it again. This gives the words time to sink into your mind. Pray the Scriptures in the way I suggested a couple of sermons ago. And try using written prayers to fill your mind with higher thoughts of God. A Diary of Private Prayer, by John Baillie, is an excellent guide for prayer. It has morning and evening prayers for each day of the month. Using these will help you pray about things you wouldn’t think of otherwise and will help you develop a language for worship. The purpose of all these things is to cultivate a larger view of God, to learn to worship him with reverence and awe.
The effect of this is just the opposite of what the world leads us to expect. As we learn to fear the Lord, we become more aware of His presence and blessing on our lives. We’ve been delivered from the kingdom of darkness and made part of His eternal kingdom. Our sins have been forgiven, and we’re no longer living under His wrath. We look forward to eternity in the presence of God, the source of all good. And we have His promise to accompany us all through this earthly pilgrimage. We experience His blessing throughout our lives in more ways than we can number. Surely we, of all people on earth, have reason for happiness. Even when we endure suffering, we do so in the light of an eternal future that far outweighs even the most severe trials here on earth. “For the troubles we see will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:18, NLT). “All you who fear God, how blessed you are! How happily you walk on his smooth, straight road” (The Message). “All honor to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for it is by his boundless mercy that God has given us the privilege of being born again. Now we live with a wonderful expectation, because Jesus Christ rose again from the dead. For God has reserved a priceless inheritance for his children. It is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.... So be truly glad! There is wonderful joy ahead, even though it is necessary for you to endure many trials for awhile.... You love [the Lord Jesus], even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him, you trust him; and even now you are happy with a glorious, inexpressible joy. Your reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:3-6; 8-9, NLT).
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