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When All You Have is God
Near the end of Book 3 in the Psalms (43-89), several Psalms read like cries for help by writers at the end of their rope. In Psalm 86:14, for example, David writes: “O God, insolent men have risen up against me; a band of ruthless men seeks my life, and they do not set you before them.” While the exact circumstance is unclear, David knows there is a wide conspiracy against him, and his only hope is to turn to God. The Psalm opens with “Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.”
Likewise, when we feel desperate and don’t know where to turn, these Psalms remind us that God will never turn us away. On Psalm 86 John Calvin comments that “the more severely any one is oppressed, and the more destitute he is of the resources of human aid, the more inclined is God graciously to help him. That despair therefore may not overwhelm our minds under our greatest afflictions, let us support ourselves from the consideration that the Holy Spirit has dictated this prayer for the poor and the afflicted.” In other words, because these Psalms are in the Bible, we can be sure that, no matter the mess our own choices or the actions of others have put us in, God in His steadfast love will listen.
Throughout the Psalm, David writes reminders of the character and works of God as a contrast to both his circumstances and his feelings of futility. Like him we must always remember that our character is never so bad that God loving us is inconsistent with His character, and that our circumstances are never so bad that loving us is beyond His power to achieve.
When all you have is God, He is enough.
Even for the most desperate, there is always a way out, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 10:13 – “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” In Psalm 86, David does not just pray for a miraculous deliverance, but in verse 11, David looks for the way of escape: “Teach me your way, O LORD, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.” A united heart is one that feels no anxiety because it knows it is seeking God’s will and willing to act on it based on reverence for Him. God may urge us to merely wait for His deliverance, or prod us to actions we may not expect, but in all cases, He knows the way, because He is the Way. Only He can unite our hearts.
Bring your desperate anxiety to Him and let Him show you the way forward. When all you have is God, He is enough. When you feel your faith is weak because you can’t see or feel God in your life or the world around you, begin with “Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy,” and He will listen.
Learning Godly Fear
Does being forgiven by God cause us to fear Him less, or to fear Him more? Perhaps it’s both.
Psalm 130:4 tells us this about God: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” To one way of thinking, this seems backwards: why does knowing that God has forgiven us make us fear Him more? Shouldn’t we fear Him less when forgiven? It depends on what we mean by fear.
For me, getting Psalm 130:4 to make sense with the order of forgiveness and fear required a re-thinking of repentance. My conclusion was: the one who has not been forgiven has not repented, and the reason they did not repent was that they did not fear God. They did not understand Him properly. They might be afraid of God, but that’s not the kind of fear referred to in Psalm 130.
In contrast, the one who has been forgiven has repented, and they repented because they understood it was the best thing for them to do, out of a fearful respect for God. A proper understanding of God’s character makes us turn to Him with our guilt, rather than run away from Him. We should not be afraid of God, where we are motivated to be passive – avoiding mistakes that would anger the one we fear. We should fear God in that we revere Him and respect His authority, and therefore actively seek to please Him.
A lot goes into repentance. When we pray and ask for forgiveness, it’s often a simple prayer made with the proverbial faith of a child, but there are a lot of assumptions we make when we say that prayer. Every prayer of repentance directly or indirectly acknowledges some or all of these things:
1) God as the source of the law, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong
2) Him as the righteous judge who is personally offended by our sin
3) His omniscience, knowing we cannot hide our sin
4) His uniqueness, as there is no other God to turn to
5) His steadfast love for us, knowing He bore the cost of our sin, therefore enabling us to approach Him
6) His compassion for us, since He lived as a man
7) His power and willingness to heal us of sin
8) His consistency of character: that He is not arbitrary
If we don’t implicitly or explicitly believe these things, why would we repent and ask forgiveness from God? Why would we expect to get it? Exploring that set of statements could fill multiple volumes of theology books, but we don’t need that knowledge. In His grace, He honors our simple, heartfelt confessions. He paid the price for all our inadequacies – even when we don’t fully understand our own prayers or who we’re praying to. The Spirit pleads with the Father on our behalf[1]. Mercifully, our forgiveness is based on His faithfulness to us, not on our detailed theological knowledge. 1 John 1:9 tells us: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Even our faith is imperfect, but His faithfulness bridges the gap between our childlike faith and His omniscience. He knows all our doubts and all their answers. We come as we are, but with fearful respect, and are forgiven.
Only through acceptance of the cross, where Christ’s atoning blood was shed for us, can God in His Holiness commune with us. Only through forgiveness will the Holy Spirit come and live in us. Only by tasting of His goodness do we really know what He is like, not before. And if we never repent, we don’t learn what it tastes like, we only know what you’ve been told about God, and we might not have been told the truth.
Psalm 130:4 shows us that genuine repentance leads to forgiveness and gives us a better appreciation of who God is. As we experience Him more, we live Psalm 34:8 for ourselves:
“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”
[1] Romans 8:26-27
Bible in a Year: Week of March 25 – 31
Fellow travelers:
Below are the chapters to read this week if you’re following along in my Bible in a year schedule, divided into morning and evening readings. Follow along any way you want: just do the evening reading, flip the morning and evening, read it all. Whatever works for you and your schedule! It doesn’t have to be Bible in a Year for everyone.
This week, we finish another book (Exodus), and begin Leviticus on Easter Sunday. Leviticus, a guide for the priests and Levites of ancient Israel, mentions holiness more times than any book in the Bible, and continually reminds us of how high God’s standards are, even though with the events of Easter we no longer need to follow most of those Levitical practices.
Monday, March 25
Morning: Psalm 85, 1 Chronicles 7
Evening: Exodus 35
Tuesday, March 26
Morning: Psalm 86, 1 Chronicles 8
Evening: Exodus 36
Wednesday, March 27
Morning: Psalm 87, 1 Chronicles 9
Evening: Exodus 37
Thursday, March 28
Morning: Psalm 88, 1 Chronicles 10
Evening: Exodus 38
Friday, March 29
Morning: Psalm 89, 1 Chronicles 11
Evening: Exodus 39
Saturday, March 30
Morning: Psalm 90, 1 Chronicles 12-13
Evening: Exodus 40
Sunday, March 31
Morning: Psalm 91, 1 Chronicles 14-15
Evening: Leviticus 1
Doctrine in Action
In C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters, senior demon Screwtape writes fictional letters to Wormwood, a junior demon, on how to defeat his “patient.” In one of these letters, Screwtape advises: “As long as [man] does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance… Wallow in it… Write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which [Heavenly Father] plants in a human soul… Do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm [the cause of evil] if [it is kept] out of his will… The more often he feels without acting, the less he will ever be able to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
Christianity is not a soul-less doctrine, but a restoration of the right relationships between souls and their Creator, which should lead to action. Teaching should lead to love. In 1 Timothy 1:3-4 Paul writes to Timothy: “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.” In his commentary on the verse, John Calvin says that Paul “judges of doctrine by the fruit; for every tiling that does not edify ought to be rejected, although it has no other fault; and everything that is of no avail but for raising contentions, ought to be doubly condemned.”
Calvin’s note and Screwtape’s fictional letter remind me of the linked Monty Python video of philosophers philosophizing about soccer while simultaneously “playing” soccer.
Every doctrine and institution of the church should empower His people to live for Him. Are we playing the right game, and are we playing to win?
Driving Toward the Morning Sun 