Word of Salvation – May 2024

 

The Moods Of Faith

 

Sermon by Harry Burggraaf, B.D. on Psalm 3

Scripture Readings: Psalm 2; 2Samuel 15:13, 14; Psalm 3

 

Congregation there’s a lovely spot in Apollo Bay, where we often go, called Mariner’s lookout.  The Otway Ranges come right to the edge of the ocean and from Mariner’s lookout you get this grand 180 degree view of green rolling hills, rugged cliffs, the ocean spilling itself out on the rocks and the little town of Apollo Bay nestled in a green valley.  It’s a great place to go for fantastic views.  It’s also a place I often go to do business with God.

As you see the magnificence of God’s creation it isn’t difficult to burst out into song (when no one else is around): ‘My God!  How great Thou art!’, and just to thank him for who he is and what he has done.  But just as often I find myself there struggling with God; questioning faith issues; wondering about my life; even arguing with God.

If I had kept a Mariner’s lookout journal over the years it would read like a roller coaster ride – wonderful, exhilarating ups; awful, exhausting downs.

Psalm 3 is like a Mariner’s lookout journal.  It is king David’s Kidron Valley record.

David, that wonderful hero of faith, that giant of godly commitment, that ‘man after God’s own heart’, is at a crisis point in his life.  His family affairs are a mess.  He is in danger of losing the throne.  Things couldn’t be worse.  Most of us would know the story.

For years his son Absalom had been plotting to take over the kingdom from his aging father.

Absalom; incredibly handsome; Tom Cruise, Brad Pit, Heath Ledger had nothing on him.  “In all of Israel there was not a man so highly praised for his handsome appearance as Absalom.  From the top of his head to the sole of his foot there was no blemish on him”, says the author of 2Samuel.  He would have been on all the covers of Cleo and Woman’s Weekly, Who, Vanity Fair.  What a spunk!  The pretty boy of Israel.

Absalom; smooth as silk; public relations expert extraordinaire.  He had people eating out of his hand.  ‘Not getting much satisfaction for your complaints from my dad’s advisors?; well if I were king I’m sure we could come to some understanding.’  The Bible says, “he stole the hearts of the people.”  Scheming; clever; devious; engaging; generous if it would buy him friends.

I think you get an idea of the type of character he was.

David had had to flee for his life from his own son.  Away from Jerusalem, out of the palace, across the Kidron river, into the desert.  And here we have the record of David’s inner struggle, his dealing with God, one morning, on the banks of the Kidron creek.

Let me read it to you again – in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase.  Peterson wants to capture the raw energy and honest emotion of the Psalms.

Read Psalm 3 (The Message).

I sometimes think it would be wonderful if faith had no emotions.  If faith was always on an even keel; if we could sacrifice the points of exhilaration in order not to have the experiences of doubt and depression.  But life is just not like that.  Like life has its moods, I think faith has its moods as well.

In this brief Psalm we see David journey
– from the confusion of fear and anxiety
– to the confidence of God’s favour and protection
– from the consternation of fury and anger
– to the comfort of faith and trust.

Walter Brueggeman, the well-known Biblical scholar, talks about the various orientations of the Psalms:

– Psalms of orientation (life is great, a bed of roses; God’s in his heaven all’s right with the world),

– Psalms of disorientation (the road is bumpy; I’ve lost my way; scared; God is nowhere in sight; frankly life stinks) and…

– Psalms of reorientation (I’m through the fog; God has reached out and put me on a surer footing; I have a new vision and a new hope)

Psalm 3 moves through all those moods of faith….
– life stinks (vs.1,2);
– but God you really are there for me (vs.3-6);
– I’m just so confused and angry (vs.7);
– but you’ve come through and put me on a sure footing (vs.8).

Notice a little word between each of those moods or phases, or experiences.  The word ‘selah’.

It’s a musical notation; an instruction from the editor or the musician who put this prayer of David’s into song.

‘Selah’ is like…
– Pause (take this in; reflect on it; make it your own) or…
– Forte (crescendo; bring up the volume; trumpets and drums at this point).

Before we have a look at the Psalm in detail I need to make a point of clarification.  At one level this is an intensely personal Psalm.  It reflects David’s experience and journey with God.

However the Psalms have always been seen also as the Psalms of Israel, the covenant people of God.  They are the prayers and songs of the church militant; the church struggling with the realities of life before the final victory of the kingdom of God.  They need to be seen in the framework of God’s work of redemption and renewal in Jesus.

Yes, they are intensely personal records of faith journeys; but… set in the overall understanding that God is king, that the Lord reigns.

You may or may not know that the book of Psalms is set into five sections.  Just as we speak of the five books of Moses, we could speak of the five books of Psalms.  The Psalms and the law are closely related.  Each books ends in a doxology, an exclamation of praise, that affirms that these are the Psalms of the church which believes that ‘the Lord reigns’.

– Book 1 is Psalms 1 – 41; the doxology is 41:13
“Praise be to the Lord God of Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.  Amen and amen.
“           Or as The Message puts it:
“Blessed is God, Israel’s God,
always, always, always.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes!”

– Book 2 is Psalms 42 – 71; the doxology is 72:19
“Praise be to the Lord God, the God of Israel…
may the whole earth be filled with his glory.
Amen and amen.”  And so on…!

Without this clear conviction, this foundational, rock bottom truth that ‘the Lord reigns’ the Psalms would just be the record of the spiritual journeys of individuals which might or might not turn out OK.

So Psalm 3 too needs to be understood within this redemption framework.

The confusion of fear and anxiety (vs.1,2)

“O Lord, how many are my foes!”

Hands up those for whom life is always plain sailing….!  There is never a storm on the horizon.  You have never felt overwhelmed by difficulties and challenges that you couldn’t manage.  I envy you, but I wonder if you’re telling the truth.

I think we can all identify with David.  What a mess he had made of his relationships and family life.  Great king!  Good at his job!  Not so good at his marriage or being a father.  In many ways this latest fiasco with Absalom had been his own doing.  Adultery; getting rid of another man in order to sleep with his wife; favouring one child over another; failing to discipline a son who rapes his sister.  It’s a sorry saga.  (You can read it in 2Samuel.)

I can imagine there’s a fair amount of pent up emotion in David’s anxious confusion.

The enemies were as much his own shame and sense of failure as the threat to his throne.  What do we do when we’ve made a mess of things?

What do we do when others have made a mess for us?  It’s not even our own fault.

An acquaintance whose business is under investigation for years because of theft and fraud by an employee.  None of his doing.  Yet the humiliation of questioning by the police and the probing of the tax department.  Loss of reputation….!  Shame and embarrassment….!  He certainly felt surrounded by enemies.

I was speaking to one of the mums at our school this week.  She wanted to apply for a teaching position we advertised.  Lovely Christian family.  Great kids at the school.  She explained she needed to find work because a few months earlier her husband had walked out of the marriage.  A desolation experience like David’s.  Shared with an immense sense of failure and shame and loss.

And it’s worse when others then stand around and criticise and make all sorts of unhelpful comments.  As David experienced:
– “Many are saying of me, ‘God will not deliver him!’”.
Rubbing the salt in the wound.  The sense of failure and loss and anxiety is doubly felt when others stand by critically or in self-righteousness.

That is why it is so surprising that the mood of the Psalm changes dramatically at verse 3 and David experiences…

The confidence in God’s favour and protection (vs.3-6)

“But you are a shield around me O Lord,
you bestow glory on me and lift up my head.”

I can sleep easy because the Lord sustains me.  I’ve got nothing to worry about.

Disorientation to reorientation!  How is this possible?

You realise the Psalms do this all the time.  There’s this incredible juxtaposition of fear and faith, despair and hope, loss and discovery, sadness and joy, confusion and confidence.

Let me give you just a few examples:

– Psalm 22:1 – desolation – to Psalm 23:1,6 security

– Psalm 102:1-3 – distress – to Psalm 103:1-3 salvation

These Psalms need to be kept together; never one without the other.  Take Psalm 23 – by itself it can lead to an easy-answer faith; even smugness (the Lord’s my shepherd; what’s wrong with you?)  It needs the realism of Psalm 22 – God why have you forsaken me, you seem so far away.  But without Psalm 23 this can lead to despair.

Psalm 23 models childlike faith.  Psalm 22 models fidelity, a learning to trust that even in dark times God still reigns and has not abandoned us.

Psalm 3 can best be understood in its juxtaposition with Psalm 2.

I bet you wondered why we read that Psalm….!  Psalm 2 is also about enemies conspiring.  But look at who the object of their attack is.  [Read verses 12.]

Who are they conspiring against?  The Lord and his anointed.  This is a so-called Messianic Psalm.

God meets mockery and insult and attack against him by establishing Jesus as Lord.

Verse 6 “I have installed my King on Zion…
I will make the nations your (Jesus’) inheritance.

In fact Jesus is God’s laughter at sin.
Verse 4 “The one enthroned in heaven laughs.” I like that picture.

We see all the anger and unbelief and anxiety and pain and loss in the world, also yours and mine, and God, as it were, throws Jesus and the cross at if with a chuckle and says ‘try that on for size”;  “I have installed my King on Zion… kiss the Son lest he be angry… blessed are all who take refuge in him.”

And it is because the Lord Jesus, reigns that David can be confident that God’s shield surrounds him and he can sleep confidently.

It’s ironic that the actions of Absalom against David of course were an attack on the kingdom of God.  David was God’s anointed ruler, the predecessor of Jesus the King, and Absalom’s actions threatened the coming of the Messiah.  So there were larger things at stake than just David’s personal welfare.

So there is confidence because the Lord reigns.

The image I especially like in this section are those words “you bestow glory on me and lift up my head.”

Often the worst aspect about things going wrong in your life, or failing, or making a mess of things is the way it affects your sense of self, your sense of identity and value.  You feel like crawling in a hole, hiding, lowering your head.  And the image here is that God takes our face gently in his hands and raises it and says ‘it’s OK, you can look me in the eyes; there’s nothing to be ashamed of; Jesus is my appointed son, your saviour, he has taken away your shame.’

Isn’t it strange how after this change in the mood of the Psalm from fear and shame to confidence in God’s favour and protection, the author then lashes out in anger.

The consternation of fury (vs.7)

“Arise O Lord… strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.”

‘Sounds more like a Kung Fu film than the Bible.  It’s the type of thing you expect to hear in the school yard.  ‘I hope you get hit by a truck.’  ‘I hope someone smashes your face in and cuts your throat.’

Of course in one sense it’s an understandable human reaction.  If someone threatens us or has hurt us deeply we want to lash out.  But very few of us would dare to invite God into our fury.

The so-called cursing, or imprecatory parts of the Psalms are a bit of a problem to most people.  We struggle with how to explain it.

* Some people, like CS Lewis felt that they expressed spiritual immaturity which is corrected by the New Testament.

* Others say they express righteous anger over evil.  We have a right to be angry when people hurt others and ask God to do something about it.

* Others see them as a sort of spiritual therapy where we use words of anger rather than actually do deeds of revenge.

It’s like a teacher working in a school where many of the students experience violence and abuse; she invites the students to compose their own ‘cursing psalms’.  One little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry’.  He describes how he hates it when his father yells at him and hits him and he wants to throw his sister down the stairs, then to wreck his room, then to wreck the whole town.

The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’

As David writes it’s almost as if he becomes aware of the renovations needed in his own ‘messy house’ before it can become a place where God might dwell.

It’s like a little boy lashing out in anger in all directions and his dad steps in the way and just embraces him in a huge bear hug.  Absorbs the anger and dissipates it.  The little boy goes quiet in the comfort of a dad he can trust.

And that’s how this Psalm finishes.

The comfort of faith and trust (vs.8)

“From the Lord comes deliverance.
May your blessing be on your people.”

David comes into the comfort of faith and trust.

Phillip Yancy, in a really insightful chapter on the Psalms in his book ‘The Bible Jesus Read’, suggests that what happens in this Psalm, as in many others, is that the emotions of faith are aligned with the doctrines of faith.  The emotions of our faith will vary with the circumstances and, I suspect, our personalities.

Sometimes we will experience doubt and anxiety; we will feel lost and alone, we experience failure, shame, guilt.

Sometimes we will want to lash out, get our own back, see justice done, and we may even want to call God in on it.

It is then that we need to align the emotions of faith with the doctrines of faith – the knowledge of Psalm 2 – that no matter how great the opposition, how deep the failure, how devastating the sin, God scoffs at it, he laughs at it because “he has installed his King on Zion”.  Jesus reigns, and so we need fear nothing.  We can sleep easy because he is in charge.

Believe it – no matter what your feelings say.  From the Lord comes deliverance.

Selah – bring on the trumpets.  Forte – make it loud and exuberant!

Pause – and reflect to make that comfort yours.