Strength For Today

Sometimes I ask God to help me to never again fall into sin. Never again commit the same sin.

Strangely, that prayer has never been answered. Or not so strangely. For I, like most humans I know, am human. I am frail.

This past Sunday as I wrestled with personal disappointment over my own frailty, I found myself asking God for help not for the next forty years, but for the next seven days. As the prayer was formed in my heart, I found myself encouraged.

God is big enough to help me for seven days. But when I seek forty years of perfection? I think I've been not asking God for help so much as I have been making God promises. Promises I cannot keep. I know I cannot keep such promises because I've made them on a series of occasions that stretch back for decades. I have shown God that I am not faithful.

But over the next seven days, I have a feeling that God is going to show me that He Is Faithful.

And in seven days we can do that prayer again.

Truth Is, Psalms (And Life) Can Be Deceptively Complicated (I of II)

I've been studying Psalm 34 recently, and I found myself alternatively chuckling and reflecting on an odd dynamic to this Psalm that is hidden in plain sight.

Psalm 34: 4-10
I sought the Lord, and he answered me;
    he delivered me from all my fears.
Those who look to him are radiant;
    their faces are never covered with shame.
This poor man called, and the Lord heard him;
    he saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him,
    and he delivers them.
Taste and see that the Lord is good;
    blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
Fear the Lord, you his holy people,
    for those who fear him lack nothing.
The lions may grow weak and hungry,
    but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

Now if this were an English class and we were to analyze the mood, the action, etc., I think it would be fair to say that the author finds God to be active and attentive to the pleas of his rather helpless charges down on Earth. Does that seem a fair assessment? Basically, if we want God's help, we should seek him, look to him, call to him, take refuge in him, and (for good measure) seek him again. And that's just what we see in verses 4 through 10.

Let's look at a few more verses...

Psalm 34: 11-13
Come, my children, listen to me;
    I will teach you the fear of the Lord.
Whoever of you loves life
    and desires to see many good days,
keep your tongue from evil
    and your lips from telling lies.

So the first rule of thumb for good living and a long life would appear to be truthfulness and a careful watch over your mouth. All well and good!

But here's where it gets just a bit silly. Run your eyes back to the top of this Psalm now and read the dedication.

Psalm 34
Of David. When he pretended to be insane before Abimelek, who drove him away, and he left.

So... David wrote this song after an event characterized by two things. First, David saved his own skin. Second, he did so by deceiving Abimelek.

Let that sink in for a bit.

So we have a Psalm that first celebrates how an active God gets helpless people out of tight spots, and then which proceeds to identify truthfulness as the key to having a long and good life. And who wrote it? A man who literally just saved his own life by means of a self-conceived, brilliantly executed, command-performance deception.

True, David might not have outright lied to Abimelek, but then again, maybe he did. Did he claim to be Napoleon? Abraham Lincoln? OK, maybe not those future personages, but perhaps Hammurabi? Did he say impossible things? Or did he just moan and froth at the mouth? We'll never know, but one thing David did not do is shoot straight with Abimelek. Far from it.

So what do we make of this curious dichotomy? I have no pat answers, but several questions come to mind.

When the Psalms exhort us to trust in God to save us... how does that play out with our active role in the matter?

When the Psalms exhort us to be truthful... when is it OK to fudge that commitment a wee bit. How much is a wee bit?

David has given us his answers. And maybe they're not perfectly right. Or maybe they are. For the record, I do see real value in that line, "Pray as if all depends upon God; act as if all depends upon you." It certainly seems fair to say that this was David's modus operandi, given what we've seen here. Where truth-telling is concerned, too, we all know that there are certain situations in life where it seems, before God, that deception is the best option we have out of a bad hand. Can anyone fault David for what he did to escape his predicament? Not me.

I find in this Psalm a reassuring reminder in the midst of my own daily dilemmas that life, even life as a child of God, is a complicated and murky business for us frail humans. God knows this, and, thankfully, is merciful. As the Psalm ends, it appears that David is comforting himself with the very same thought.

Psalm 34: 22
The Lord will rescue his servants;
    no one who takes refuge in him will be condemned.

(This reflection to be continued...)

Double-Blind Fanaticism

Blind fanaticism is a familiar enough phrase, and it's usually not much of a compliment, except perhaps among others of the same tribe. What does blind fanaticism look like in writing? Not entirely unlike some Psalms I've been reading recently. For fun–but also for a reason–I've re-worded one such Psalm as if it had been written in devotion to the Cubs, who finally had their moment of post-1908 glory when they won the World Series last fall.

Clap your hands, all you Cubs fans;
    shout for the Cubs with cries of joy.
For the Cubs are awesome,
    the greatest team in all the earth.
They subdued opponents,
    the entire league under their feet.
They won the championship,
    the pride of Chicago, whom they play for.
The Cubs have ascended amid shouts of joy,
    yes, amid the sounding of trumpets.
Sing praises to the Cubs, sing praises;
    sing praises to our Cubs, sing praises.
For the Cubs are champions over the entire league;
    sing to them a psalm of praise.

If you're not a rabid Cubs fan, those words make for pretty bizarre reading. I'm not a rabid Cubs fan. Being a Chicagoan, I could be forgiven for loving the Cubs, but I don't. I could care less about baseball, so the above paraphrased Psalm goes down my throat like a jagged rock.

But let's put it ourselves through it one more time, this time with feeling. We'll keep this one shorter:

May the owner of the Cubs be gracious to us and bless our team
    by signing up lots of stars
so that the Cubs can win all the games,
    and their awesomeness be recognized all over the world.

Uhgh. It screeches in my uninterested ears–I hate to think how it'd sound to a bitter cross-town rival White Sox fan.

Where am I going with this? Well, this is the thing. The above paeans to the Cubs are not faithful parallels to the Psalms they derive from. I changed key meanings and even left verses out. The versions below include corrections (in bold) to those errors and omissions. Just focus on the bold parts...

Clap your hands, every last baseball fan;
    shout for the Cubs with cries of joy.
For the Cubs are awesome,
    the greatest team in all the earth.
They subdued opponents,
    the entire league under their feet.
They won the championship,
    the pride of Chicago, whom they play for.
The Cubs have ascended amid shouts of joy,
    yes, amid the sounding of trumpets.
Sing praises to the Cubs, sing praises;
    sing praises to our Cubs, sing praises.
For the Cubs are champions over the entire league;
    sing to them a psalm of praise.
The All-Star game is a gathering of Cubs,
    because the entire league essentially belongs to the Cubs
    and the Cubs are to be greatly respected.

OK, so that was weird. And then this...

May the owner of the Cubs be gracious to us and bless our team
    by signing up lots of stars
so that Cubs fanaticism might become the norm everywhere,
    and Cubs victories be celebrated by every fan all over the world.
May baseball fans praise the Cubs...
    may all baseball fans everywhere praise them.

Enough! The first drafts were bad enough, but now we're in La-La Land. The entire baseball world simply won't become Cubs fans. Not gonna happen!

And that is precisely the point I'm trying to make, because the Psalms attempt an even less probable feat. Never mind baseball. Let's talk blood and guts rip-your-enemies-to-shreds ancient rivalries. Israel, a nation surround by many other despised and hostile nations, sure did put out a lot of weird cheerleading chants.

The above Cubs chants are reworked versions of Psalms 47 and 67, respectively, and any plain reading of those Psalms (provided down at the bottom of this reflection) conveys a clear conviction that the God of Israel is actually the God of the entire world *and* that this same God is going to bless the whole world just as he is blessing the nation of Israel.

Come again? Those are strange words, coming from a people that on ordinary days alternatively either looked down upon other nations as pagan scum or perhaps lamented the fact that those same other nations were routinely beating up on Israel. Given how Israel felt about their neighbors, the question must be asked: How exactly did the average Israelite understand Psalms like these? How did they (and how should we??) understand these paraphrased excerpts from Psalm 47:

Clap your hands, all you nations!...
(Yeah, you nations that God just crushed under our Israelite feet!)...
And by the way... All you nations? You're going to together with us as if we were all one big happy Jewish family!

Wow. My dear schizophrenic Psalmist! Are you still taking your meds? But speaking of meds...

I've lit upon the phrase "double-blind fanaticism" to describe all of this weirdness. In double-blind drug studies, not only are the recipients of the test drug unaware of whether they're getting the drug or a placebo, but also those who hand out the pills. Double-blind. Both the givers and the receivers are in the dark as to the contents of the pill. But the designer of the study is not.

Returning to our Psalms, I submit that, while God certainly knew the full story, both the authors of these Psalms and their intended audience were equally in the dark regarding portions of the Psalms we are discussing. Why would the very nations crushed under Israel's feet be inclined to jump up and joyfully worship alongside their conquerors? I find it hard to believe that anyone back then had a ready explain for how that would happen.

But set aside the question of how for a moment. Why would Israelites want such an outcome? Consider how New Testament Israelites felt about Samaritans and Romans and you've got a decent idea of what normal looked like back in those days. Most Israelites wouldn't even eat a meal with gentiles, let alone welcome their insertion into an expanded family of God.

So when the Psalmist suggests that all nations will gather as one family of Abraham, it's almost like a scene out of movie where a ghost channels words out of a person that the person wouldn't (and wouldn't want to!) ordinarlily say on their own. Israelite listeners would for the most part be perplexed by assertions like that, and I'm guessing the Psalmists who spoke them weren't feeling a whole lot more informed themselves.

Wonderfully, both the How and Why questions are answered in the light of Jesus Christ. Knowing as we do now that Jesus came to save all of humanity, those Psalms make perfect sense, and we see God's fingerprints all over them. A day was indeed coming when all peoples, foreigner and Israelite alike, would gather as one, worshiping the God of Israel.

But at the time? It surely must have been rather confusing stuff. And that returns me to my double-blind reference. In drug trials they do it that way so that nobody's expectations interfere with the outcome. I find myself wondering if it wasn't for similar reasons that God thought it best to keep both his Psalm writers and his people in the dark on a few matters that involved His coming Son.

Psalm 47
1 Clap your hands, all you nations;
    shout to God with cries of joy.
2 For the Lord Most High is awesome,
    the great King over all the earth.
3 He subdued nations under us,
    peoples under our feet.
4 He chose our inheritance for us,
    the pride of Jacob, whom he loved.
5 God has ascended amid shouts of joy,
    the Lord amid the sounding of trumpets.
6 Sing praises to God, sing praises;
    sing praises to our King, sing praises.
7 For God is the King of all the earth;
    sing to him a psalm of praise.
8 God reigns over the nations;
    God is seated on his holy throne.
9 The nobles of the nations assemble
    as the people of the God of Abraham,
for the kings of the earth belong to God;
    he is greatly exalted.


Psalm 67
1 May God be gracious to us and bless us
    and make his face shine on us –
2 so that your ways may be known on earth,
    your salvation among all nations.
3 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.
4 May the nations be glad and sing for joy,
    for you rule the peoples with equity
    and guide the nations of the earth.
5 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.
6 The land yields its harvest;
    God, our God, blesses us.
7 May God bless us still,
    so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.