feeding . . . gathering . . . carrying. . . leading. (Isaiah 40:11)
Dear family,
We finished the opening three psalms of ascent on Sunday having followed the pilgrimage from the fear and insecurities of Meshech and Kedar to the experience of safe and stable community within the gates of Jerusalem and the house of the Lord. I then went on to look briefly at Psalm 123, which I will comment on for the purposes of this pastoral letter. Next message I will cover Psalms 124-126.
PSALM 123
There are no complications here. The psalm presents a single, focused thought that you can sum up like this: if you get into difficulty look to God for deliverance. Let me sum up the psalm in three quick points.
RIGHT PERSPECTIVE: What is noteworthy here is that despite the clear presence of trouble and trial, he does not begin with any mention of it at all. “I lift up my eyes..” (v1) This is the same beginning as Ps. 121. Four times “eyes” are mentioned. It’s all about who you are looking to, not what you are looking at. The NT companion text would be Hebrs. 12:2-3 “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus…Consider Him…” As the reader, your job is to watch the psalmist’s eyes and where he looks, your eyes will surely follow: “to you, whose throne is in the heaven…” Given the troubles, where would his eyes normally and naturally look? DOWN! He has chosen not to look within, not to look around but to look UP! When Spurgeon talked about how these eyes were looking, he used an avalanche of adverbs: “reverentially, obediently, attentively, continuously, expectantly, singly, submissively, imploringly.” That just about sums it up! Many years later, during WWII, the then pastor of Metropolitan Tabernacle, Graham Scroggie, said this about the focus of the psalmist’s eyes: “If we look at our God through our enemies, we’ll have a little God; but if we look at our enemies through our God, they will be as grasshoppers!” So where and how are you looking? If you tell me what you are seeing, I’ll tell you how you are looking. This is all about the response of faith. Once the enemy has persuaded you that God is not available, or God is absent, or God wasn’t there for you, it will be very difficult for you not to look with the right perspective, and you will not have a right perception of your circumstances. The enemy’s lie is that God is frankly not there to be looked to. He has vacated his throne in heaven. Forget it. You are not, and cannot be on his radar, in his heart. We need a right perspective.
RIGHT POSTURE: The psalmist immediately tells us his posture, his position, before God. The eyes are now focused on the hand. This is all about spiritual eye-hand co-ordination. “As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God” (v2) This is not about abject subservience. The point here is that it was the master’s hand that would, according to the way it moved, give a direction or an instruction. There is deliberate literary suspense here: as…as…well? So what….SO! It is deliberately trying to convey this experience of necessary waiting that is so demanding and unsettling, so inconvenient and stretching, so suspenseful, so uncertain while it is being played out. In this waiting, a relationship is established between our attention (our eyes) and God’s action (His hand) We’ve already seen in the first point that this psalm is a response of faith, so as long as the eyes are focused on the hand, then the look is faithful, expecting direction and response, not fearful, anticipating rejection or rebuttal. If the first point emphasized the faith, this point emphasizes the hope, the expectation of God. We need a right posture.
RIGHT PRAYER: The expectation is expressed in asking. “Have mercy on us O Lord, have mercy” (v3) Centuries before Jesus’ essential teaching on prayer which was all about asking according to our expectations of who God is as our Father, the psalmist here is discovering the same truth. . Here’s what one observer says about this point: “What the psalmist expects he asks for…And observe for what he asks. He asks for that which he has no right to demand, the grace of God…The psalmist does not present a complaint but a request.” This is so important. There are any number of psalms that are laments and complaints, and don’t get me wrong, these need to be authentically expressed, and God invites us to do so. God is not threatened by our whining and whinging (remember this is a wonderful British word: persistent and peevish complaint). But this psalm encourages us that we can intercept the extension of complaint, that inevitably leads to self-pity and to doubt and faithlessness, by being quick to turn our grief into an asking for grace; to turn our mess into an asking for mercy; to turn our inquest into a request. There is nothing in this prayer that talks about what he wants; it is simply a request for mercy (no less than three times) for however God would see fit to dispose his mercy toward him. This is trust in trial. It is not passive waiting it out, but an active waiting for…like those servants watching the hand of the master. This prayer is not wimpish. On the contrary, it is insistent, repetitive and persistent. I thought of a good bumper sticker slogan: when something is unfortunate, be importunate! Like that widow in Luke 18, the things that happen to us that are inopportune, are the very things that invite us to be importunate. You cannot miss the unabashed urgency here. This is how his feelings are expressed. Not in anger towards God, but in serious asking for relief and deliverance. Where are you directing your emotions in your trouble?
This is an “in extremis” situation. The word translated “much” in the NIV is understated. It is repeated for emphasis and is better understood as “filled-exceedingly” To put it bluntly, he was fed up, he had enough, more than he can take, reached the limit, couldn’t hack it any more, he’d had his fill. You get the idea. There’s not one of us who hasn’t said that or been there. The repeat of “endured” emphasizes that there is not much energy or resilience left for this contempt and ridicule. If this is a post-exilic psalm as most scholars think, then it really resonates with the kind of intense opposition that Ezra and Nehemiah endured in the restoration of Jerusalem.
It is the virulent enmity of this contempt that opposed Nehemiah in the form of Sanballat and Tobiah: “He ridiculed the Jews and said ‘What are these feeble Jews doing?...will they restore their wall?...will they offer sacrifices?...will they finish in a day?...can they bring burned stones back to life?’...” (Neh. 4:2) As you have all found out, the tactics of the enemy have not changed against the people of God who are committed to stand in the midst of trouble. He loves to apply his versions of psychological warfare and oppress the minds and thus the perspectives and the postures of God’s servants who are called to stand.
What are you feeble people doing? Is your weakness, or apparent lack of breakthrough being mocked, being preyed on?
Will they restore their wall? Is the possibility of change, of transformation, of revival, of recovery, of restoration being challenged?
Will they offer sacrifices? Is the power of your asking, the reality of forgiveness, the healing of wounds, the certainty of deliverance being questioned or even denied?
Will they finish in a day? Is there discouragement in the rate of progress, tempting you to question God’s involvement and timing?
Can they bring burned stones back to life? Is there doubt that the burned stones of past failure and destruction can be reused, redeemed, re-mortared. Can any good come out of this desolation that we see? What can be remade with the raw material that is our brokenness, our inadequate resources? The point about the burned stones is that the heat changes the composition of the bricks and thus weakens them. The lie of the enemy to those who are called to stand again is that the best is over. The best to hope for is a rearrangement of the burned bricks of past sin and failure. The ridiculing questions of the enemy continue to challenge the souls of men: can we succeed where we once failed? Can we love where we once lusted? Can we edify where we once tore down? Can we be reconciled where we were once divided? Can we be transparent where we once lived a lie? Can we stand where we once fell?
Like the psalmist, Nehemiah’s response was always prayer: “But we prayed to our God…Hear us O God for we are despised…” His response to intimidation was always intercession. Up till now the enemy’s posture was an arrogant, mocking standing in the face of the people of God. But the text says: “When all our enemies heard about this the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence.” (Neh. 6:15) We too need a right prayer.
Do you have a right perspective; do you have a right posture; do you have a right prayer? Check out Psalm 123 again!
Pastorally yours,
Stuart