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Consider some material things that your life is strongly built around. How could they possibly be obstructing your relationship with God? How could they possibly serve to enhance your relationship with God? Ask God to inform your mind and heart.
All who take refuge in you will be glad;
they will sing out their joy for ever.
In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman shows why the worlds of the West and the Middle East find it difficult to understand one another. One reason is that, in Middle Eastern life, the quality of forgiveness, or the refusal to act in response to being wronged or offended, can easily be taken for weakness, and can even lead to further attack.
Again and again the psalmist comes before God to plead a case, and the issue is almost always the same. Enemies surround him. He feels that he has done no wrong to deserve this. He beseeches God for help and, in the same breath, calls down the wrath of God on those who afflict him. “Those who lie in wait for me … there is no truth in their mouth; there is destruction in their heart. Their throat is an open grave … Declare them guilty, O God.”
Encountered repeatedly, this pattern becomes troubling to our modern ears. We begin to ask if perhaps the psalmist is projecting his own faults on to others. But something else in the pattern brings us up short. We find it here in the lines, “You are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, and evil cannot dwell with you. Braggarts cannot stand in your sight … You destroy those who speak lies; the bloodthirsty and the deceitful, O Lord, you abhor.”
The reason for the psalmist’s intense hatred of all that he regards as evil is not his imagined personal purity, but his blinding vision of the purity of God. Anything that offends this purity also offends the psalmist as a believer in this God. To him the universe makes no sense if God is other than this kind of absolute purity.
For the psalmist, certain things follow from this view. Either one is the friend or the enemy of this God. And the enemy of this God is therefore one’s own enemy, toward whom one can hurl every condemnation with a sense of absolute justification. This is the world of the psalmist. It is one in which we can partially but not wholly live. Nevertheless it is a world that has much spiritual insight to give us.
This psalm calls us to come before God, not casually as our Western minds so often do, but with the thought, “I will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you.”
Again, this psalm offers a beautiful and grace-giving promise that we tend to ignore in our frenzied and driven activism: “All who take refuge in you will be glad; they will sing out their joy for ever.” These are the gifts of this psalm.
What is your understanding about the nature of God? How committed are you to those virtues that you attribute to God? Ask God for greater understanding and commitment to realize those virtues in your life. Pray that all people may seek the will of God.
The Lord has heard my supplication;
the Lord accepts my prayer.
The more we read the psalms, the more we become aware of their deep intensity. Whether it be joy or fear, depression or anxiety, or any other human emotion, these emotions are never felt mildly in the world of the psalms. Nobody in the psalms ever says, “I feel rather depressed today” or “I’m a little worried about such and such.” Instead one cries out, as the psalmist does here, “I drench my bed and flood my couch with tears” or “My spirit shakes with terror.”
Unless we remind ourselves of the tendency in Eastern life to use language that to us seems exaggerated, we can be persuaded that these people lived with constant and dreadful intensity and stress. As a consequence, we may find it difficult to identify with the language of the psalms, and they can cease to speak to us about our human condition.
Obviously the psalmist is under great stress and, equally obviously, this has been going on for some time. We hear the cry, “How long, O Lord, how long?” From our own experience we identify with his distress. We know very well that the most steadfast courage can be worn down if there seems no end in sight to what is afflicting us.
We can only guess at the demons the psalmist wrestles with. The language seems to point to a period of actual sickness. “I am weak; heal me, Lord, for my bones are racked.” He is beginning to feel the dread that comes over us all when a malady continues and nothing seems to shake it.
Dark fears emerge from within, fears we hesitate even to name. “In death no one remembers you; and who will give you thanks in the grave?” This ultimate fear is forced into words because the psalmist’s resistance has been weakened over weeks and months. The cry,” [I am] worn away because of all my enemies,” suggests that the pain and sickness are finally threatening life itself.
But, as so often happens in the psalms, giving vent to fears, expressing deepest feelings, has an immediate effect. If we listen again to the verses of this psalm, we hear the word “Lord” ringing through its cadences like a resonant chord, but always in the background. Suddenly this chord assumes dominance and floods the soul with its assurance. “The Lord has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lord has heard my supplication; the Lord accepts my prayer.”
And what do we see? Enemies are routed. It is they who now quake. Healing takes place. Life pulses back.
Recall a time when you have suffered. Ask God to be with you. Give yourself permission to feel and accept the suffering. Be kind and gentle with yourself. Ask God to feel the depth of your suffering with you. Ask God to be with all who suffer.
Awake, O my God, decree justice …
O Lord, judge the nations.
among the many gifts of parenthood—and also grandparent-hood—is to witness, and to receive the utter trust of, a small child. We know sadly that the level of trust declines as time goes by, never entirely disappearing but lessening as life inculcates some wariness in all of us.
We need this image of early years to comprehend the level of unwavering trust in God expressed by the psalmist. It is hardly possible to read the opening line, “O Lord my God, I take refuge in you,” without feeling a trust that is absolutely sure of itself and holds nothing back. If most of us are honest, we will admit to a twinge of envy.
But trouble is at hand. The psalmist is not specific. Whatever has happened, certain relationships have gone wrong. There are those who wish recompense of some sort, and they are prepared to be unpleasant in the pursuit of it. Rightly or wrongly the psalmist believes he is innocent: “O Lord my God, if I have done these things … then let my enemy pursue and overtake me.”
But if he is indeed innocent, then he requires not only protection. He insists on recompense. “Rise up against the fury of my enemies,” he demands of God. “Awake … decree justice … Give judgement for me … establish
