Psalm 31:16,17 – “Crying Out”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁶Cause to shine Your faces upon Your servant. Save me in Your love. ¹⁷YHVH, do not let me be ashamed because I have called on You.

In these verses, David is still reeling from the “catalog of miseries” he enumerated in vv9-13. The context is still about living in a very difficult world, but like us, David has the wonderful resource of turning his eyes to the Lord and praying down His blessings even in the midst of this very difficult life.

David apparently had many people around him who hated him and worked actively to ruin him. I hope and pray that is never the case in my life -- and that certainly isn’t true for me now, but I feel very keenly David’s every word because I still have an enemy who I am very aware works relentlessly to destroy me and everything I love. David said of him in Ps. 143:3, “The enemy pursues me, he crushes me to the ground; he makes me dwell in darkness, like those long dead; so my spirit grows faint within me; my heart within me is stunned.”

Looking at life, I can’t find anywhere words that more clearly describe the difficulties I feel just living. I have an enemy who is constantly trying to crush me. The word in Ps. 143 translated “pursues me” is the picture of a bloodhound on my trail. But here is the good news: I have a God who is far greater and loves me! And so, with David, I will turn to Him. In v.16, David calls out very precious words, “Make Your face to shine upon me!” They are precious because they are actually taken directly from what we call the Aaronic Benediction. This is very specifically the benediction which the Lord gave to Aaron and the Jewish priesthood as a prayer of blessing on the people. It is found in Numbers 6:22-26:

The Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘This is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them:

The Lord bless you and keep you;

The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.’”

This benediction is particularly precious to me as I have often prayed it over my family. I noticed early in life that one of Job’s habits was to rise up early and offer sacrifices for his children (1:5). It says, “This was his regular custom;” and so I resolved often to do the same, to pray down the very words of this benediction on my family. I believe these are very powerful words – a blessing which perfectly expresses our hearts, but coming originally from His.

And so, as I read v.16, my heart is warmed by the very words, “Make Your face to shine upon Your servant.” I desperately need Him to do that for me today. I need Him to do that in my family today. We need Him to do that in our world today.

Then David says, “Save me in Your love.” “Save” is once again derived from the same Hebrew word from whence we get the name “Jesus.”  It was true then, even in the Old Testament, that saving was a Jesus-work! Our God is a saving God. When the Word became flesh, His name was to be Jesus “for He shall save His people from their sins.” Of course the saving is not only the work of rescuing us from an eternal hell, but it is also the on-going, daily, minute-by-minute work of delivering us from evil, of delivering us from ourselves, of forming Jesus in us.

It is also true that, even in the Old Testament, saving was a love-work. “Save me in Your love,” is David’s plea. “For God so loved the world …” “God is love.” Even in the Old Testament, David could say, “Because Thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise Thee,” (Ps. 63:3). It is so important that we see that this relationship we have with God is a love relationship. If it’s anything other than that, anything less than that, then we’re selling ourselves short. Especially when we have an enemy who hates us and works relentlessly to ruin us, it is essential to know this God who loves us – this One who loved me and gave His life for me. He alone is my shelter in the storm!

Then David adds again the words I already extolled back in v.1: “Let me not be put to shame.” I said back there, this is something I desperately pray for. I noted then that this is stated elsewhere as a promise: “He who takes refuge in Me will never be put to shame,” and that I was going to live my life claiming that promise. I’d like to report that the Lord has and continues to keep that promise to me. As my heart scans around my life, I see so many places where I could fail miserably and, if I let it, it can fill me with fear; but, while I myself may very well fail, I have a God. David says, “Because I have cried out to You.” “Let me not be ashamed, because I have cried out to You.”

I want to live my life “crying out to God.” Jesus said, “Without Me you can do nothing.” He didn’t say, “Little.” He said, “Nothing.” Without Him we can do nothing. And so, we sing, “I Need Thee Every Hour.” As I go to work, I need to be aware I can do nothing and be crying out to God to help me. As I talk to my wife, as I plant my garden, as I speak with the cashier at the grocery store, I need the Lord to help me think right, and speak right, and do right. I need Him to make me succeed, not fail, at whatever it is He has for me to do. I will continue to claim this promise, “He who takes refuge in Me will never be ashamed,” and I want to be able to say, “Because I have cried out to You.” I have … and I will. Lord help me to.

Yes, David lived in the same kind of world you and I live in. He had an enemy … and so do we. But we have a God named Jesus who loves us and gave Himself for us. May He be to us our Shield and our Exceeding Great Reward even in a very difficult world!

Psalm 31:14,15 – “Cashing in Our Chips”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁴But I have trusted upon You, YHVH. I say, “You [are] my God.” ¹⁵In Your hand [are] my times. Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from ones pursuing me.

These two verses, Psalm 31:14,15, are perhaps one of the greatest illustrations of faith in the Bible. Were these simply statements of faith, they would certainly be beautiful things; but they are expressed in the context of the preceding five verses, which I have earlier described as a “catalog of miseries!” These words do not represent the idle expressions of a man enjoying his prosperity. They come from a person in the very midst of abject suffering.

“All the world seems marshaled against me … but I trust in You.” Ah, sweet faith. Here, truly we see one of the very glories of faith itself – its calming, re-assuring, peace-giving power when “all around my soul gives way.”

It is interesting that David has made this very statement, “But I trust in You” earlier in the Psalm, in v.6, with one very important difference: In v.6, he referred to the Lord in the 3^rd person. There, David said, “I trust in the Lord.” Now in v.14, David’s heart moves to the 2^nd person and he says, “I trust in You.” “In You.” This is after the horrors of vv.9-13! Note there is nothing like troubles to move our hearts from a distant, 3^rd person relationship with God to, instead, a very intense personal 2^nd person relationship. In trials He becomes no longer “Him” but “You.”

Interestingly we see this very transition in the old familiar 23^rd Psalm. In the first 4 ½ verses, everything David says of the Lord is in the 3^rd person: “The Lord is my Shepherd … He makes me to lie down in green pasture … He restores my soul.” But then in v.4, David finds himself walking through “the valley of the shadow of death,” and suddenly he can say, “… I will fear no evil, for You are with me …” and the entire rest of the Psalm speaks to the Lord in the 2^nd person – to You.

And look again what David says in our Psalm today: “But I have trusted in You, Lord. I say, “You are my God.” My times are in Your hand. Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and those pursuing me.” The “trust” is the same word as back in v6, bataq, which means to recklessly put our faith in Him. When all around my soul gives way, what do I do? I fall recklessly into the arms of my God!

And then notice the simple little statement, “I say, ‘You are my God.’” You are my God. You are my God. You are my God. You are my God. Is not this simple little statement the very cornerstone of peace itself? If I know He is my God, then I can have peace through every storm. I may (will) struggle to keep hold of that peace, but, when I know He is my God, then I know I have a haven. I know there is a place of peace for my heart even in death itself – because He is my God.

And this is where grace wins the day. If my relationship with God is at all dependent on my good efforts, then, when I get hit the hardest, I will find myself wondering if He really is my God, or if I’ve simply failed too much, or perhaps He’s finally given up on me. Grace shouts, “NO, no, no! The blood of Jesus rent the veil!” Jesus’ blood was the ransom for all of my sin. I am not a convicted criminal. I am a dearly loved child. Grace cut off the Law’s bony pointing finger and set me in my Father’s lap. Now He is mine, not because I’ve deserved it, but rather for the very reason that I don’t!

Grace allows this poor, miserable ever-failing beggar to know He is mine. Grace means I can say with confidence, “You are my God.” Even in the midst of the most awful griefs, I can hear Him say, “I will never leave you nor forsake you”-- and know it applies to me. It means He is speaking to me when He says, “Come boldly unto the throne of Grace, that you may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” And why is that? Because I’m so great? NO, no, no! It is because Jesus is so great and His blood is my righteousness! This simple little statement, said with the confidence of grace, “You are my God,” is, I would suggest, a cornerstone of peace itself. And it is ours.

That same grace and confidence allow us to go on then and say, “My times are in Your hand.”

What times? My times. These times – whatever that may mean. Into His hand we commended our spirit (v.5) and now we’re “cashing in our chips.” “In His hand” sometimes our times are peace and joy and the wonderful warmth of knowing His blessings. But sometimes, like the disciples, Jesus sends us across the lake, only to find ourselves in a dreadful storm fearing for our very lives. “My times” include the catalog of miseries of vv.9-13 – and when I find myself there, I can say, “Deliver me from (literally) the hand of my enemies.”

If my times are in God’s hand, then when the enemy says to our soul, “Don’t you know I have the power to either free you or crucify you?” we can reply with Jesus, “You would have no power over me if it were not given you from above.” “I’m not in your hand, I’m in God’s!” And in His hand we say, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”

What a precious wonderful gift is faith!

Off you and I go today into “our times.” We know not this morning what that means, only that we’ll be in the Lord’s hand.

Faith says, “That is enough.”

Psalm 31:9-13 – “Yikes!”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁹Be gracious to me, YHVH, because it has become distressed to me. My eye is wasted away in agitation, my soul and my belly [too], ¹⁰because my life is wrung out in grief and my years in groaning. My strength fails in my iniquity and my bones waste away. ¹¹From all of ones being my enemies I have become a scorn and to my neighbors especially and a terror to ones knowing me, ones seeing me, in outside they flee from me. ¹²I am forgotten like one dead, [gone] from the heart. I am like a perishing vessel, ¹³because I heard a slander of many: “Terror all around!” In their conspiring together against me, they plotted to take away my soul.

Yikes! What a catalog of misery!

I think one of the unfortunate misperceptions of Christianity is that if you’re a born again person, you won’t have to suffer – at least not much – that basically you’ll be “happy all the day” with maybe an occasional sort of difficulty from the Lord to help you grow. I remember one Christian young woman who got blasted with an unthinkable sorrow – she said to me, “I thought, if I served the Lord, things like this would never happen to me.”

What we all need to do is get our theology from the Bible – not from Christian songs or our litany of clichés. What would the Bible tell us? Look at the passage before us. This is David and look at the rest of the Psalm – this is a man who does trust God, who is sincerely living his faith. David was the “man after God’s own heart” and yet look how he suffered at the hands of Saul. Add to his story the suffering of Job – the “good and upright man.” Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. We have Psalms like 6, 13, 22, 38, 88, and 102. Paul tells us he and his friends were “under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life” (II Cor 1:8) and of course he had his “thorn in the flesh.” Beyond all of that, consider the sufferings of our Savior Himself, the “man of sorrows.”

The passage before us only reminds us what the rest of the Bible often warns us: “In this world you shall have trouble …”

I think I can say this and any thinking born-again person will agree, that actually this passage is all too familiar to my heart. Yes I have faith. Yes I love God. Yes I am thankful for so much blessing. But the fact is life is hard – and sometimes it is very hard – and there is a side of me even now that wants to chime in with David, “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in trouble! My eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and body with grief.”

I could work my way down through David’s catalog of miseries but I think rather I’ll just make two observations. First, I notice that in these five short verses, David says “me” or “my” some twenty-one times. It is perfectly okay for him (or us) to do that as he is pouring out his heart to the Lord, but, that said, still, I’d like to suggest that when we turn our eyes inward, all we can really expect to find is our morass of sin and misery. It really should be no surprise when we’re stuck on “I, me, my” that all we find is gloom and despair. “I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing.”

But all of that leads to my second observation, that it simply is true that “our hope is in the Lord,” and that “the joy of the Lord is our strength.” Once again, there is never anything wrong with you or I pouring out our hearts full of misery to the Lord. He’s a big God. He can take it. “He knows our frame, that we are but dust.” But we will only find hope and strength as we turn our eyes to Him and do exactly what David will be doing in the very next verse, saying “But I trust in You, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’”

What a blessing we have – that we can turn our eyes away from ourselves and our miseries and instead look to a heavenly Father. I rather suspect all human beings suffer one way or another pretty much continually. The difference for us believers is that we have a Rock, a “Shelter in the Time of Storm.” We can sing, “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear; What a privilege to carry, everything to Him in prayer.”

Life is hard. Sometimes it is very hard.

I’m so thankful we have a God to trust!

Psalm 31:7,8 – “Rememberer”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁷I will rejoice and be glad in Your love for You saw my misery. You knew the troubles of my soul, ⁸and You did not deliver me into a hand of an enemy. You set my feet in a spacious place.

Wow did this passage minister to me this week! As I started the week, I was facing several very ugly situations at work. I was expected to oversee the startup of a wastewater treatment plant I didn’t design and in a community where the current administration doesn’t even want it to run. That same community wanted me to attend a meeting with them on Wednesday evening where we expected to be drilled with hard questions from an antagonistic group. And as soon as that meeting was over, I would be expected to attend a Board meeting in another community where apparently there was considerable opposition going on. Beyond that, another community would be receiving bids on a job I feared would come in hopelessly over budget. And there was more.

So as I sat reading this passage with all of that before me, things looked pretty bleak. I basically just sat for a long time with Psalm 31 open in front of me praying through its thoughts and promises.

And what wonderful thoughts and promises they are!

“I will be glad and rejoice in Your love...” Words fail to express the profound comfort it is to live loved. What an unfathomable joy it is to know this God who loves me – always, no matter what, even though I fail Him constantly. People turn Christianity into all sorts of other things, especially a “religion” of rule-keeping, or a system of “beliefs,” etc. But I have learned it is none of the above, but rather it is an intensely personal and constant love-relationship between me and this God who loved me and gave Himself for me. And as I sat under the specter of this week of horrors, I knew somehow, someway He would love me through it all.

“… for You saw my misery. You knew the troubles of my soul,” He knows. The God of the Universe knows. He sees it all. Maybe no one else is even aware of what I’m up against or how scared I am or how much I’m dreading the week before me. But God does. He knows.

It’s interesting too that this is written in what is most naturally a past tense. Hebrew doesn’t really have “tenses” as we know them in English, so I can’t camp too hard on this point, but, if in fact David is speaking in a past tense, what he’s doing is reminding himself that he’s been here before. He’s been here before and what did he find then? That the Lord knew. “Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.” The older we get as believers the larger and larger becomes our bank of memories of all the times we’ve been here before, of all the times we faced seemingly impossible challenges, only to see our wonderful Lord intervene and turn it all to our good.

In around 1900, William Nicoll recorded the words: “Trust should not be hard to those who can remember.”

Yes. We’ve been here before and the plain simple undeniable fact is that the Lord has been good. He is faithful. He’s always come through somehow, some way. He has “dealt  bountifully” with me and I can be certain He will do so again. In another place, David said, “I will recall the years of the Most High.” Same thing. Encouraging himself by remembering how good the Lord has always been in the past.

One of my favorite memories to bring up is when Sennacherib had surrounded Jerusalem. Hezekiah took the message of his threats to the temple and “spread them out before the Lord.” It was an absolutely impossible situation and one of intense fear. The Assyrians were perhaps the most cruel people who ever lived. When they conquered a city they made a sport of torturing its people to death, impaling them on poles to watch them die, skinning them alive, and many other unthinkably merciless cruelties.

And what happened? “That night the Angel of the Lord slew 185,000 of the Assyrians” and they packed their bags and high-tailed it back to Nineveh, where Sennacherib’s own sons murdered him even as he was worshipping his god.

 “Trust should not be hard to those who can remember.” “… for You saw my misery. You knew the troubles of my soul,” He knows.

As in Hezekiah’s case, “You did not deliver me into a hand of an enemy” and “You set my feet in a spacious place.” It is the enemy I’m facing. In every community the devil is doing his murderous work, sowing discord and seeking to utterly discourage people, to turn them on each other and leave them hopeless. But I go to work every morning knowing that I serve the God who loves people, who wants to do them good, who wants them to be able to live “peaceable, quiet lives.”

I knew going into this week, that was exactly the battle I faced, and, like He always does, the Lord proved true to His Word. He did not let the enemy prevail and instead “set my feet in a spacious place.” As I worked through the startup of that plant I did not design, the Lord helped me to understand it, so I really was able to help them start it up. For the better part of two days we worked through all the various issues and I tried to listen attentively and understandingly to the community’s objections and worries and fears. I went to the meeting with them where we expected to get peppered with hard questions and the Lord instead turned it into a very encouraging meeting, where one man even stood up and commended the community for the work they’ve done. By that point, they had actually begun to believe I really was there to help them and they went away actually encouraged and hopeful that things are going in a very good direction!

Then I went on to the Board meeting with the community where there was considerable opposition going on. As those people raised their objections and asked their questions, the Lord enabled me to calmly, kindly, confidently answer every single question. By the time they were done, they all looked at each other and said, “We see no reason to put this off any longer,” and voted unanimously to move ahead.

My community receiving bids where I feared they’d come in hopelessly over budget actually got worse before it got better. Right at 5:00 the evening before, I got a call that left us all feeling this would turn into a complete debacle the next morning. Knowing the Lord was in it and would somehow do us all good, I just encouraged everyone to “let the chips fall” and when they do, “we’ll pick up the pieces however we have to.” Friday morning, instead of a complete debacle, the bids came in just under the budget and looking very much like the Village can not only do what they originally planned but actually much more!

And so the week ended not at all as I feared, but with the Lord doing great things encouraging people, pulling them together, and making them hopeful!

Instead of delivering me into the hand of the enemy (where he would crush the very life out of me), the Lord brought me out into this spacious place of hope and possibilities!

I like something else Nicoll said, “ … They who are enclosed in God’s hand have ample room there; and unhindered activity, with the ennobling consciousness of freedom, is the reward of trust.”

“Trust should not be hard to those who can remember.”

Yes. “I will rejoice and be glad in Your love.” This coming week brings with it a whole new array of challenges, fears, and threats. Even as I face each one, may I be rejoicing and being glad in Your love. May I be a good rememberer!