For the director of music. A psalm of David. How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? …. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me. Psalm 13:1-2,5-6
I love the fact that this psalm begins with the four-fold complaint, “How Long?” yet concludes with, “he has been good to me.” It’s the irony of life, the pendulum that swings incessantly. We revel in our blessings, then we grieve our losses. Back and forth, back and forth, the pendulum swings. “How long?” is actually a theme found throughout the Psalms. And it is a reality just about anyone who has lived on planet earth for any length of time can relate to. It is at once a complaint and a sobering question. The complaint is against God allowing us to go through trials. The question is, “When will the trial end?” The universality of this question is rooted in the reality of what takes place in Genesis 3. Adam and Eve were enjoying the land God prepared for them in Genesis 2. But in the very next chapter, doubt led them to question whether or not God really had their best interests at heart. And sinful self-interest led them to turn from God’s rule in their lives. With what result? The Fall, which meant not only removal from the garden and difficulty in labor (in work and giving birth), but inherited sinfulness rendering all of us guilty of and enslaved by sin. This is the ultimate source of our need to ask the question, “How long?” For we still enjoy this unbelievable creation that God has prepared for us and countless joys besides. Yet we also contend with the repercussions of sin in our own lives and the unstoppable, painful realities of tragedy, sickness and death. And so, the pendulum swings from Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” to Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” Of course, mankind has found ways to deal with the question, “How long?” We pursue pleasures to distract us from life’s pain. We create narratives to camouflage life’s pain. We self-medicate to numb us from life’s pain. We pour immeasurable resources into our quest to keep from experiencing life’s pain. But if we were honest, we would have to admit that none of these worldly means truly answer this question. Yet, the real answer is right here within the confines of this short psalm. The psalmist, David, answers his own complaint with a statement of trust in Yahweh. “But I trust in your unfailing love.” David reveals that the answer to “How long?” is not in immediate relief from trials, but in the ability to trust in the love of God—the unfailing love of God—in the midst of trials. What is profound about the answer to our deepest, darkest doubts is that it was the disavowal of this truth that got us into this mess in the first place. Adam and Eve did not trust in God’s unfailing love—and this lack of trust, lack of faith, doubt—led them to sin. The temptation to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would never have been tempting if it were not for the fact that our original parents doubted that God was seeking their best. It was the inability of Adam and Eve to trust in God’s unfailing love that started this pendulum swinging. Nonetheless, we find in David’s trust in God’s unfailing love the answer to the question, “How long?” It does not mean that we will stop asking this question. In fact, nowhere in Scripture is this question condemned. In truth, when we are in the thick of life’s greatest trials, it is an unbelievably appropriate question to ask. The real trick is where we go to find the answer. Do we turn to pleasures or creating narratives or self-medicating or pain-avoidance schemes for the answer? Or do we draw near to our Maker? Do we look to Yahweh God as both the source of strength when faced with this question and the ultimate answer to this question? The more we grow in Christ, the more we learn to place our trust in our Maker, the less the impact of life’s pendulum on our experience of hope, joy and peace. It’s true, the pendulum will go on swinging until that day when Jesus returns and puts everything right. But it doesn’t mean that our emotional and spiritual lives have to be forever swinging. And this is the very reason David wrote this psalm for us—that we might learn to trust in God’s unfailing love so that no matter what this world throws our way, we might say with the psalmist, “he has been good to me!”
0 Comments
|
Dan GannonDan has ministered at Renton Bible Church, with his wife Debbie, since 2003. Archives
June 2022
Categories |