Sat, 3 September, 2005: Today’s Bible readings.
17 All this has come upon us,
though we have not forgotten you,
and we have not been false to your covenant.
18 Our heart has not turned back,
nor have our steps departed from your way;
19 yet you have broken us in the place of jackals
and covered us with the shadow of death.
20 If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign god,
21 would not God discover this?
For he knows the secrets of the heart.
22 Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
In verses 1-8, the Psalmist reviews how God has fought for His people in the past and won for them glorious victories. These are attributable not to the strength and the sword of Israel, but to God Himself. God is the one who saves His people from their distress and the success they have seen in the past came directly from Him.
But then, the Psalmist describes the current position they found themselves in as a nation. In verses 9-16, he shares the sense of how they have been abandoned by God and left desolate and vulnerable to their enemies. It is a dramatic turn of events as the Psalmist calls to mind the glorious past and then relates the current distress. If their success in the past was due to God’s work on their behalf, then their current lack of success must be due to God having left them.
In verses 17 to the end, the Psalmist then seeks for a reason why God has abandoned them so. As a nation, they have been faithful to Him and are not engaged in idolatry and rebellion against Him as they have been at other times. If they had been in flagrant sin against Him, their situation would be understandable. But why are they facing their current distress? The Psalmist asks and answers his own question. It is for your sake we are killed all the day long. In this case, it isn’t the sins of Israel that causes the distress, but it is God’s own sovereign purpose that they go through this hard time.
What do we learn from this?
Not all the bad that happens to us is directly due to our sin. Here we see that God’s people were faithfully serving Him, but for some reason, God has not chosen to bless them with the same victories and success as He had blessed His people in the past.
For His own purposes, God chooses that His church should sometimes go through times of rich blessing and at other times dryness and famine. For His own purposes, God will allow His church to labor faithfully with little or no visible growth. Why do we see some churches faithfully preach the Gospel to dwindling congregations while down the street churches that water down the Gospel and entertain the people are growing by leaps and bounds? Why? For His glory and our good.
The lack of apparent blessing in a person’s life or in the life of a church is not necessarily an indication of God’s disfavor. Rather God, for His own purposes, chooses sometimes to allow His people to suffer. But their suffering is always under His great promise of His working it all out for His glory and their own good. That is why Paul can quote this very Psalm when he wants to make the point this very point.
31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died–more than that, who was raised–who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
When God calls His people to suffer, He is actually conquering the circumstances through us.
Where is Christ in this passage?
Paul tells us in the Romans passage where he quotes Psalm 44 that Jesus Christ as the basis for our confidence that God works out our sufferings for good. It is because of what Jesus Christ has done that we can be confident that although we might have to go through times of difficulty, if we are in Jesus Christ, nothing will separate us from His love for us.
