Ever-Present Help

 For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. According to alamoth. A song. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. (Psalm 46:1)

 

Thinking of yesterday’s question of power and victory, today’s passage was the one offered by Biblegateway.com. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs also comes to mind.

 

 

Being a scientist, of course the closest he could come would be to say that spiritual needs are part of self-actualization. In a sense, I agree with him. Our continued physical existence as individuals depends n physiological and safety needs being met. You can work your way up the pyramid and see that each of these things is vital to a thriving life. But I don’t think the pyramid is the right picture. It gives too much the impression that these things are in competition with each other. Each also seems to me to have an “us v them” component. Physiological and safety needs are “Me v nature” and “me v others.” Love and Belonging and Esteem to be “Me/Us v them” and Self-Actualization is back to “Me v everything.” Others might say it’s not as antagonistic as all that – and it may not be, but at its essence, it seems to have that quality to it.

I don’t know what picture would better illustrate our needs, but one of the key issues with this theory is that lack of connection with the universe or the God who created and upholds it. For now, I’ll suggest that there should be a circle around the pyramid that is labeled “Spiritual.”

When the passage above talks of God being an ever-present help in trouble, we tend to think in terms of something like Maslow’s hierarchy. The need felt is moved to the bottom and grows out of all proportion. That is the thing we need most in life. Some well-meaning people proclaim that  until we solve a person’s needs according to Maslow’s hierarchy, we can’t begin to address their spiritual needs. A poor, hungry, unloved person cannot possibly put aside those needs to find God. And while it seems clear that in a philosophy that excludes the spiritual, there is a certain logic to this.

But what of God’s perspective? What if the spiritual is by far more important than anything in the pyramid? Imagine a person stumbling into an emergency room, gasping for breath, holding his chest with one hand and, nearly collapsing at the desk as he shoves his other hand, bloody from an admittedly nasty cut. As the doctors rush him in and start administering treatment for a heart attack, he keeps complaining (until sedatives knock him out) that he is bleeding to death. Can’t the idiot doctors see it?

This is what we do too often. I’m bleeding financially! I’m bleeding emotionally! My health is bleeding! Fix these things? Who cares about the fact that I’m having a spiritual heart attack because I’m spiritually anorexic? Who cares if some sin is separating from God? Why doesn’t He fix my finances?

When Scripture tells us that God rescues us, that He is an ever present help in troubles, we need to ask Him to reveal to us what our needs really are. I suspect we, and the world, are far needier than those who cry about how needy we and it are understand. And there will be reasons why God addresses our needs in the order He does.