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But God, You...

 

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?  How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?

          Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

          But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will  sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me (Psalm 13)

            For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  (Ephesians 6:12)

 

          Today’s psalm brings together the questioning/accusing of God, and the two-sided woe-is-me but God is good of some of the previous psalms. It’s another of those cases when I think it wise to think in terms of who our foes really are. Paul says that our battle isn’t against people. It’s against authorities, powers, and spiritual forces of evil. Do ideas and ideologies fit into that list? The psalmist doesn’t write of wrestling with Canaanites, but of wrestling with his thoughts. That seems sufficient evidence to me.

          The answer, the psalmist says, is for God to look on him and answer him. It is for God to give light to his eyes. And the light that he finds within the song is God’s unfailing love and His salvation. But this leads me to wonder whether God did something loving or saving every time the psalmist was sad. David spent a lot of years on the run from Saul, so it’s not likely that God always calmed the storms in his life. Sometimes, He must have calmed the child, or let the child calm himself. That’s what I think is going on in this psalm.

          He gives voice to his feelings. He rejects them as the ultimate reality with the word “But.” He makes his calming choice, “I will trust in your unfailing love…I will sing.”

          I’m trying to build this habit. Yesterday, my blog prayer began with “You are the same God, the same Father, the same Lord Jesus, the same Holy Spirit You were when I was at my best and brightest today, or during the past week – whenever I was at a best and brightest point. You are still omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, wise, loving, compassionate, righteous, just, and all those other things that Scripture keeps telling me You are. And I am as I have been for – it seems – forever. Inconstant, wavering, vacillating, and neurotic.”

          Except, I was wrong. I’m not as I have been, because as I have been never gets to the “You are the same God.” And that is what the psalmist is talking about. We must interrupt our whining with, “But God, You…”

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