David Bahn – Reflections

I know a few highly-reliable people. Steady. Dependable. Their word is their bond. I don’t have to wonder whether they’re making up something. But even the best of us once in a while slip up. We forget. We over-commit. We flake out. We get sick. Worse yet: we sin. We flat out don’t do the good we want. We do the evil we hate. We’re just like St. Paul, who lamented as much (Romans 7:15-19).

David wrote this psalm because he was not steadfast in his obedience. He was not reliable. He sinned. He committed adultery, murder, and false witness. We’re no different in regard to this. None of us is perfectly reliable. We’re not steadfast. We sin. We may not have committed the same kinds of sins as did David, but we’ve all sinned. We fall short of the glory of God.

So David called out to God, seeking his mercy and his steadfast love. And God is steadfast. Reliable. Dependable. Unwavering. Trustworthy. Absolutely constant.

The steadfast love of God has been such a precious thing for me. I too easily waver in my faith. My walk is too often a limp. My good intentions too seldom reach their goal. But the steadfast love of God is always there. He is faithful in every situation. He never disappoints. Rock solid. Immovable. The rock that his higher than me and every storm of life. Solid. Secure. Steadfast.

But it’s not just God’s steadfast wrath against sin, anger over injustice, judgement of our iniquities, demands for perfection in our life that we’re speaking of. It is God’s steadfast love. His kindness and mercy flow from the very being of his nature. For God is love. He has a huge heart for us. He showed it in sending Jesus to redeem us, to buy us back from our imprisonment to sin. He has good will toward us. He delights in our presence with him. He yearns for us to love him too.

We can make excuses for our sins. We can try to deny their true depth and destructive impact. We can pretend they’re not all that bad. We can even say, that God will forgive us since we didn’t mean to, or because it wasn’t all that bad, or that everyone slips up once in a while. But none of that avails before God.

The only thing we have going when we discover we’ve sinned and turn to God in repentance is his character, nature, grace and steadfast love. Thank God for his steadfast love!

It was pleasing to the eye. Good for food. Desirable for gaining wisdom. The forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was not some maggot-infested, half-rotten piece of fruit lying on the ground. It was appealing in every way…except for God’s prohibition: You shall not eat of it…lest you die. 

She was beautiful. Her husband was out of town. He was powerful. She might have gone willingly. But David called for her and she came. And that night when the men went out to war, and David stayed behind and saw Bathsheba bathing was a night that would bring great woe and sorrow to David’s soul. We don’t hear from Bathsheba, but I believe she carried grave pain about the events of that night. Adultery. Murder. Deceit. Every sort of entangling iniquity wound its way into their lives and the lives of others.

It was too easy. The bookkeeping methods, controls, checks and balances, procedures, and oversight were either simply bypassed, or completely overlooked. No one would know. Until the trail led to mis-balanced bank accounts, irreconcilable bank statements, and a complete meltdown of financial juggling schemes. The money was all gone. The perpetrator was found out. Trial. Jail. Family break-up. Ruined lives. Shipwrecked faith.

Surely you have a story of temptation insufficiently-seen for what it was, weakly-fought against, and too-quickly-given into. We all do. It may not be a whopper like the examples above. But we’ve all taken the bait of one kind or another. And we’ve discovered the sharp barbed hook hidden in the temptation’s delight.

We should have fought harder. We should have seen the lie. We should have believed God. We should have kept the faith. We should not have given in. We should not have had such a high opinion of ourselves. We should… We should not… But we didn’t. We did.

This psalm is for us all. It was David’s psalm of confession. We don’t treat the titles of the psalms in the same way as we treat the psalms themselves, but this title is important: A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. 

This Psalm is a cry to God for mercy. If grace is receiving something we do not deserve. Mercy is not receiving what we do deserve. And we deserve condemnation, judgment, and every evil consequence for our sin. But God in his mercy withholds more than we know from us in those areas. He does not treat us as we deserve. He relents, and does not willingly bring suffering or grief to anyone (cf. Lamentations 3:33).

Rather than giving us what we deserved (judgment, condemnation, and hell), God in his mercy gave us Jesus, his gift of grace, forgiveness, and life. God not only withholds his wrath from us, he forgives. He saves. He gives life. This psalm has been answered, is being answered, and will be answered whenever we pray it. Thanks be to God for his mercy!

What gives you hope? What takes your hope away? What is your hope quotient? Is hope a good thing, or do you subscribe to the wisdom expressed by Morgan Freedman’s character in the Shawshank Redemption movie? “Hope!” He says, “Hope is a dangerous thing.”

Hope alone is a dangerous thing. But this psalm urges a different approach. I’ve referenced the Stockdale Paradox in a recent blog post. The idea is that surviving the most grave and daunting difficulties is possible if we face the brutal facts while holding on to hope. This is nothing new. It’s at least as old as this psalm. For this psalm begins with an expression of deep yearning, my soul pants for you, O God. This is an admission of the brutal fact that David is thirsty for God. He is in urgent need of God’s refreshment. He is calling out for God to come to him, be with him, and comfort him in time of need.

But right along with all that, notes of hope are sung. God’s steadfast love is confessed. God is his rock. He recalls times of praise on the way to worship. His final word is a call to hope:

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my salvation and my God.

A hope devoid of lament is shallow and easily set aside. It sets us up for catastrophic disappointment. Lament without hope is a prescription for depression. It robs us of the joy of God’s salvation. God calls us to both lament and hope, and this psalm expresses that beautifully. Let your cries of anguish, pain, discouragement, and lament call out to God. But in the end, join David in speaking of our eternal hope, found in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. This will be fully experienced on the Great Last Day when the salvation of God will be fully and completely revealed. Then hope will become reality.

These things I remember,
    as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
    and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
    a multitude keeping festival.

We easily overlook the two-way blessings of joining with others in worship. We easily think of the ways in which we are uplifted in our worship experiences. We especially appreciate when we sing a favorite hymn. We treasure those special moments when God speaks to us in a sermon. We delight in hearing our favorite Bible passages read. We are encouraged on Easter Sunday when the church is full and we hear the people sing God’s praises and confess their faith, and pray the Lord’s Prayer. These are good things. We should thank God for them.

But there is another side to all these things. If we are edified and encouraged by all these things, what about the others who are worshiping with us? Might they be encouraged in like manner? Do we not also have the opportunity to bless others when we sing the hymns, confess our faith, and pray? Do our smiles and friendly greetings also mediate courage and comfort to others in the Body of Christ? Of course they do.

Back to 8-year-old Tommy. It’s likely he was a blessing to the other boys and girls that evening as well. It’s more than likely that those who have experienced the pain of losing a dad or mom by divorce or death also needed the comfort he was seeking. This is a two-way blessing – given and received. Martin Luther calls it the “mutual conversation and consolation” of brothers and sisters in Christ.

Next time you go to worship, consider not only the needs you carry with you, the desire to be fed spiritually, the desire to be inspired, and the hope to meet God. Think also of the others who are gathering there. Seventy-five to ninety percent of the people who visit a church for the first time have just experienced a week they hope never to repeat again. Perhaps not that many regular church-goers carry those same disappointments, but some surely do. And if you are encouraged, look around for others who may need your smile, a friendly greeting, or to hear your robust confession of faith, and maybe even your sincere and humble confession of sins.

You might just be part of the throng of blessings given and received.

Bruce was a most amazingly gifted counselor. I was directed to him by a member of the church I was serving at the time. She said that she saw some amazing things happen in the counseling room as he probed, observed, waited, and commented. I decided to go see him because there were things in my life that I just couldn’t get beyond. Issues that were forever unresolved. And I too saw some amazing things happen there.

Like the time I was lamenting being overlooked by my reckoning at a conference I was attending. He said, “You mean God and you wasn’t enough.” Struck a deep chord in me. Or the time we were talking about some particularly difficult times in my younger years and how God did or did not intervene. He said, “God isn’t a wimp. He could have stopped that. Do you know what he wanted from you then?” He went on to help me understand that God desired me to turn to him and find comfort from him in those hard places. Quite a challenge to be sure. There are more examples I could list, but when I read these verses,

Deep calls to deep
    at the roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves
    have gone over me…

…I think of Bruce. He had a deep well from which he drew the wisdom of God. And God spoke deeply to me through Bruce. His was no surface faith. His was the Mariana Trench of deep truths of God, and I was deeply impacted by the wisdom, love, and grace he shared with me.

David speaks here of being overcome by the breakers and waves of God, even as he expresses appreciation for the depth of God’s steadfast love, pure wisdom, profound grace, and far-reaching truth. St. Jerome once said that “the Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for theologians to swim in without ever touching the bottom.”

There’s good reason for us to consider both extremes of that quote. We far underestimate the profound implication of Jesus’ death and his promise of eternal life if we relegate the Christian faith to a simple transaction: you-believe-in-Jesus-and-you-get-to-go-to-heaven. By the same token, however, if you think that the Christian faith is too inaccessible and because you cannot understand it’s mysteries, it should be relegated to the philosophical debate academies, you are missing the simple truth that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. 

Deep calls to deep. God is calling us to a deep love for him, a deep faith in his goodness, a deep love for one another, and a deep desire to be with him and experience his salvation. That is worthy of deep thought, deep thanks, and a deep desire for more of God.

I’ve been thinking about the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (cf. John 4:1-42). She apparently had some degree of spiritual perception and understanding. She knew that it was not proper for a Jew to speak to her, a Samaritan woman. She knew there was a difference in understanding about proper worship practices and places. She also knew that Messiah was coming. She is not a pagan. She was a sinful woman. But who cannot understand why she was forced into that lifestyle given those times and the choices she had just to survive. I don’t want to paint her as purely a victim here. We don’t really know her story other than that she had been married five times and was living with a man to whom she was not then married.

We do know she was thirsty. She came to the well to draw water. Jesus would offer her living water. She would wonder how to get it so she would never have to come to this well again. Jesus would tell her he knew more about her than she ever supposed. And when she was caught out by him, she sought to gain some freedom by questioning him about other things: where and how to worship, what the Messiah would reveal, and ultimately left her bucket to tell everyone her truest thirst had been slaked. Fully. Delightfully. Graciously. Profoundly graciously.

I wonder if she had ever prayed this psalm. Did she realize she was longing for the presence of God in her life even more than she yearned for a peaceful trip to the well? Did she understand that God had not forgotten her? Did she somehow know that there was more to the mysteries of religion than where and how to worship? Did she pray in the middle of the night for God’s steadfast love? Did she wonder if the people of that town would ever stop taunting her? Did she somehow hold on to hope in the face of all these things?

We don’t know the answers to those questions. But we do know that whenever we face taunting, isolation, fear, sleeplessness, and deep discouragement, God is only a prayer away. We’re in good company if we lament our hardships and our sins, and seek God’s steadfast love. Whether it’s the long way around we take to avoid the taunts of others, the anxious and sleepless moments of dread as we think about possible future happenings, or guilt and shame over past choices and present temptations, we can pray this psalm: with David. With the sinful woman at the well. With the tax collector in the temple (Luke 18:13). And getting to the end of the psalm, we can pray:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
    and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my salvation and my God.

Amen.

Mick Jagger couldn’t get it: he was never satisfied. The leech, sheol, a dry land, and fire (according to Proverbs 30:15-16) never get enough. Or as Blaise Pascal famously said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every [person] which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.” That is the sentiment of Psalm 42. The image of a deer panting for streams of water is a powerful way to express a yearning for God, and not anything else.

Sometimes, however, I wish it was more true of me. It’s so easy to yearn for things other than God. From food to fun or money to recognition, it’s far too easy to misplace my yearnings. This psalm is, therefore, a challenge and an aspiration. It is a reminder of my truest and most important need, as well as a way for me to focus on a better desire. Rather than a hot fudge Sundae, the acclaim of people, or a lottery win, I need God’s presence. And so do we all.

It should remind us that we are not yet fully in the presence of God. He is with us at all times. Jesus promised as much as he gave the Great Commission (Matthew 28:20). God is with his people, and has promised this again and again. (cf. Joshua 1:9; Isaiah 43:2,5) But we too often wander from his presence. We lose sight of him and his ways. We willfully disobey him. We ignore his blessings. We undervalue his love.

The worst suffering of Jesus was endured on the cross when he cried out in anguish in the face of God’s abandonment. (Matthew 27:46) This psalm is a prayer of yearning for the opposite. One day that prayer will be fully and perfectly answered. In those times of anxiety, fear, and loneliness, we can pray this psalm with the confidence that God is with us. We can draw near as be gather with other believers in the name of Jesus. We can celebrate the real presence of Jesus in the Lord’s Supper. We can call on God in prayer, confident that he hears us and answers our prayers. And we can bend our yearnings toward the fullness of God’s presence in every moment of every day.

I was preaching in the Arkansas Depart of Corrections Varner Unit. This high-security state prison for men is located about 30 miles from where we lived at the time. Our church offered to bring our choir to perform our Easter cantata there. The chapel was full to capacity. More than 200 men – all in white overalls – sat tightly-packed in the pews. There were Amen’s and other expressions of agreement and encouragement throughout my sermon. One man sat on the front row and every now and then shouted out, “Think about it!”

It’s not a man sitting on the front row calling out think about it here, but rather an obscure word. The word selah (סֶלָה,) occurs three times in this psalm. The meaning is not controversial, but  it is unclear. Some say it’s a liturgical term, calling for a musical interlude, or some liturgical action. Others suggest it is a call to pause and reflect. A friend said, in jest, “It’s what David said when he came to the end of a verse and couldn’t remember the next line!” I like the idea of selah being an invitation to pause and reflect – to think about it.

The first occurance of selah is at the end of the second strophe of Psalm 32:

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
    through my groaning all day long.
⁴ For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
    my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah

Guilt renders us anxious, and we can groan, and even waste away under its weight. I have previously shared how fear did that to me many years ago. We are to see God’s hand in our times of anxiety, fretting, fear, and restlessness. Certainly we must see the hand of God in times of unresolved guilt, calling us to repent. While it could be the devil stirring up false guilt, or even bringing up previously-forgiven sins, it can also be God wanting us to experience a deeper sense of peace through an honest confession of our sin. His desire is not to cause us pain for pain’s sake, but to drive us to confess our sins and find his mercy and forgiveness. Think about it.

Then comes the second invitation:

I acknowledged my sin to you,
    and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
    and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

Clearly this shows that God’s desire is to give us peace, relief from shame, and to forgive our sins. In the acknowledgement of our sin we find truest peace. Jesus put it this way, “…the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) God sets us free when we stop pretending we’re good enough to approach him, and acknowledge our sin and seek his forgiveness. Think about it.

Then comes the third:

Therefore let everyone who is godly
    offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found;
surely in the rush of great waters,
    they shall not reach him.
⁷ You are a hiding place for me;
    you preserve me from trouble;
    you surround me with shouts of deliverance. Selah

We are all urged to confess our sins to God. We are all urged to acknowledge our need for his deliverance. We are all to recognize and avoid the dangerous torrents of destruction that come to those who do not repent, and to rejoice in God’s deliverance. Think about it.

Think about it. We suffer if we don’t confess our sins. God forgives the sins of those who acknowledge their transgressions. He delivers us from the catastrophic destruction that comes upon those who do not repent. Pause and ponder these things. Think about it!