Psalm 44
The Christian Experience of Dark Providence
Turn with me to the forty-fourth psalm as we continue to
work our way through the second book of the Psalms, from Psalm 42 all the way to
Psalm 72. I do need to pause and say that tonight our brother Ed Bowman is here
with us. And I don’t mean to embarrass you, Ed, but he’s right up front, and I
know that many of you are going to want to give him the right hand of fellowship
and welcome him back after a long struggle with his treatments for cancer. And
we’re encouraged by the reports that we’ve heard, and it’s just encouraging to
look on your face, my brother. And how appropriate that you would be here as we
look at Psalm 44 tonight.
Now, the last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at
Psalms 42 and 43 that form a complex of an expression of spiritual experience.
And Derek Kidner calls that collection of Psalms 42 and 43 “one of the most
sadly beautiful in the Psalter.” But when you move from Psalm 43 to Psalm 44,
you don’t get much relief. Now, when we move to Psalm 45 the tone will be
different. But we’ve actually taken a step further down into the valley as we
move from Psalms 42 and 43 into Psalm 44.
We’ve said all along that the Psalms teach us about
Christian experience, and they address the hard side of Christian experience.
The reason that we sang Psalm 44, that second version to that minor tune which
Dr. Wymond wrote this weekend, was because you
won’t find any hymns that address that kind of material.
It’s very difficult, isn’t it, to put our own words to the difficult
experiences that we’re undergoing? God has provided us words for those
experiences, and those words are found for us in the Psalms. And so once again,
we find this Psalm dealing with aspects of our experience– struggles, pain,
weakness, difficulties, tragedy, a sense of God’s forsaking us–these things
that are part of Christian experience, and showing us the way through them and
how to respond in those experiences. So before we come to hear God’s word read
and explained tonight, let’s look to Him in prayer to ask for His aid and help.
Our Lord and our God, we do
bow before You. And as we enter into the pit, into the dungeon of the
difficulty recorded here in Psalm 44, we pray that You would open our eyes to
see Your truth for our lives in those dark providences that we ourselves must
face and traverse in faith. We ask, O Lord, that You would give us a believing
heart, a trusting heart that would be enabled by the grace of Your Holy Spirit
to continue to pray to and to love You, to rest in You even when the lights have
gone out. We ask, O God, tonight that as we read the Psalm and as we hear it
proclaimed that our hearts would be made tender for our brothers and sisters who
are going through dark providences, that our hearts would be made strong and
believing for the trials which we must face ourselves or perhaps the trials
which we are facing this very night. And we ask, O God, that you would be
glorified in this–that even when all our questions cannot be answered we would
find our rest in You. These things we ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.
The forty-fourth Psalm, this is
God’s word:
“For the
choir director. A Maskil of the sons of Korah. O God, we have heard with our
ears, Our fathers have told us the work that You did in their days, in the days
of old. You with Your own hand drove out the nations; then You planted them;
You afflicted the peoples, then You spread them abroad. For by their own sword
they did not possess the land, and their own arm did not save them, but Your
right hand and Your arm and the light of Your presence, for You favored them.
You are my King, O God; command victories for Jacob. Through You we will push
back our adversaries; through Your name we will trample down those who rise up
against us. For I will not trust in my bow, nor will my sword save me. But You
have saved us from our adversaries, and You have put to shame those who hate
us. In God we have boasted all day long, And we will give thanks to Your name
forever. Selah. Yet You have rejected us and brought us to dishonor, and do not
go out with our armies. You cause us to turn back from the adversary; and those
who hate us have taken spoil for themselves. You give us as sheep to be eaten
and have scattered us among the nations. You sell Your people cheaply, and have
not profited by their sale. You make us a reproach to our neighbors, a scoffing
and a derision to those around us. You make us a byword among the nations, a
laughingstock among the peoples. All day long my dishonor is before me and my
humiliation has overwhelmed me, because of the voice of him who reproaches and
reviles, because of the presence of the enemy and the avenger. All this has
come upon us, but we have not forgotten You, and we have not dealt falsely with
Your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, and our steps have not deviated
from Your way, yet You have crushed us in a place of jackals and covered us with
the shadow of death. If we had forgotten the name of our God Or extended our
hands to a strange god, would not God find this out? For He knows the secrets
of the heart. But for Your sake we are killed all day long; we are considered
as sheep to be slaughtered. Arouse Yourself, why do You sleep, O Lord? Awake,
do not reject us forever. Why do You hide Your face and forget our affliction
and our oppression? For our soul has sunk down into the dust; our body cleaves
to the earth. Rise up, be our help, and redeem us for the sake of Your
lovingkindness.”
Amen. And thus ends this
reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May He add His blessing to
it.
Israel always sang after
battles. Israel sang songs of victory after great victories that had been
wrought by the Lord. Psalm 98 is one of those Psalms where Israel, the sons of
Korah, calls upon Israel to sing to the Lord a new song for He has done
wonderful things. But Israel didn’t just sing after battles of victory; Israel
sang in defeat too. This song is a song that Israel sang in the wake of
defeat. And it has something to say to us about our experience in this world in
the face of dark providences, and it has something to teach us about Christ’s
experience in this world, in the face of dark providences. And His experience,
in turn, informs us of how we are to look at our own experiences. Israel sings
this song as a song of mourning in defeat and a song of prayer and supplication
to God.
You know there are secular alternatives. We Southerners of all people
ought to understand that we’ve been singing songs of defeat for 140 years.
There are even secular versions, pop versions, you remember. Some of you are
old enough to remember the pop group Steely Dan who sang Deacon Blues:
“They’ve got a name for the winners of the world, but I want a name when I
lose. They call Alabama ‘the Crimson Tide,’ call me ‘Deacon Blues.’” That’s
their own version of a song of defeat. They wanted a song to sing when things
weren’t going well, when they’d lost, when everything was down. This song is a
song of defeat, but it’s also a song of trust in the Lord, and it provides us a
guide to Christian experience in the midst of dark and inexplicable
providences.
I’d like you
to see several things about the song before we launch into it. First of all,
you can detect pretty quickly three or four parts to this song. The first eight
verses, if you detached the rest of the Psalm, if you took off verses 9-26, the
first eight verses could be a song of victory. It could be a Psalm sung by
Israel in the wake of a tremendous victory won by the Lord their God. And so
that’s the first section of the Psalm in which the Psalmist–the children of
Israel–go back and sing thanksgiving to God for the victories that He has
provided for them in the past. Then when you get to the second section, from
verses 9-16, the scene dramatically changes. That’s why we couldn’t sing the
second half of this Psalm to “Immortal Invisible God Only Wise.” You can’t sing
“we were slaughtered and killed and crushed in the great field”: you can’t do
that to “Immortal Invisible God Only Wise.” You’ve got to have something in the
minor key, and so Dr. Wymond has provided that for us. Isn’t it amazing,
though, how in one psalm the tone can completely shift from a victorious,
confident trust in God to being humbled to the dust? And you begin to see that
in verses 9 to 16 as Israel recounts this shameful defeat that they’ve
experienced in battle.
Then, from
verses 17 through 26, we have a long complaint. And I want to suggest that that
complaint has two parts. And the first part of that complaint is a question.
and the second part of that complaint is a prayer. The first part of that
complaint you see in verses 17 to 22. And it’s basically the question “why?”
You see, there’s a reason why Israel sang in defeat, because Israel knew that
she needed to know what God was doing. And so she asks “Why, Lord, what are you
doing?” And then in verses 23 to 26, having asked that question why and not
having gotten an answer, she prays to the Lord for help anyway.
Those are the
four parts of the Psalm. Now let me show you one other thing. You’ll notice
that this Psalm shifts from the singular to the plural on two or three
occasions. For instance, look at verse four. Verse four is in the singular.
We’ve been singing in the plural from verses one to three, and you get to verse
four and suddenly it’s “You are my King, O God. Command victories for Jacob.”
It may well be that this psalm was sung antiphonally with the king singing the
singular portions and the army or the whole assembled people of God in this
service of worship and mourning responding to him. And so when you move from
plural to singular and back again and back again and back again in this song,
you’re seeing the song sung antiphonally from the leader to the people, from the
people to the leader. And we get the picture from this that the whole of Israel
is involved in this soul searching, from the highest in its leadership to the
very humblest. Let’s walk through the four parts of the Psalm together then
tonight.
I. God gets the glory in all “our successes”
First, let’s look at verses 1
through 8 where the Psalmist celebrates God as the One who has given victory to
Israel in the past. The Psalm begins by looking back. Now remember the whole
psalm is a song of defeat, and the positive tones of verses 1 through 8 need to
be read in that light. It’s not that things started off well and then went
downhill. From the very first verse, the Psalmist here is singing about a
crushing defeat, and so the optimism or the confidence or the praise and the
thanksgiving of the first eight verses need to be read for what they are. The
Psalmist is stoking himself up; he is talking himself into trusting God in the
most improbable of circumstances. He is having to force himself to go back and
remember what God has done in the past because what God is doing now is
inexplicable and frankly depressing. And so he has to go back and anchor
himself in something that God has done in the past.
And so, in the first four verses we get this
remembrance: “O God, we have heard with our ears, Our fathers have told us the
work that You did in their days, In the days of old. You with Your own hand
drove out the nations.” And so the song
begins
in verses 1 through 4 by recounting what? God
driving out the Canaanites, and God planting Israel in the promised land of
Canaan. They’re remembering what God has done; not what they have done, not
what they have accomplished through their own might and strength, but what God
has done in their experience. They’re remembering past victory. You know it’s
the same thing in the Marine Corp Hymn. How does the Marine Corp Hymn start?
“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…” What’s it all about?
It’s about helping men be ready to fight. How do they start off? By
remembering what their forbearers have done in the past. Well, this is even
more directed, not so much at the forbearers, but at God. The fight now is
enabled as the people of God look to the past and remember what God has done.
So it begins by remembering past victory.
Now, you see this from
verse 4 all the way down to verse 8, as the king first leads them in a prayer
that God would give them victory, you see here a call to wartime living. The
Psalmist, because he has experienced defeat, is under no delusion that he is not
at war. He knows he’s at war. He knows very well that he’s at war; he just got
his clock cleaned. So you don’t have to talk him into believing that he’s at
war.
And this psalm helps to
remind us that we ourselves are at war and are at need of God’s help. His
prayer in verse 4 is: “You are my King, O God; command victories for Jacob.”
This psalm is a psalm of Christian experience, and by the way, that’s proven by
something that we’re going to see later tonight in Romans chapter 8. We’re being
reminded here to live with a wartime mentality. We are at war with the world
and the flesh and the devil. And our battle is not with human rulers and
leaders and nations, but with powers and principalities, with rulers in the
heavenly places. That’s the war that we’re involved with. It involves a battle
against sin inside of us, a battle against temptation outside of us impinging
upon us, a battle with the opposition of the world, a battle with the false
desires of our hearts. It’s a comprehensive battle, internal and external.
We’re in the middle of that battle, and this psalm reminds us of that. And it
reminds us, by the way, that God is the One who gives victory. In all those
battles, it is not our means; it’s not our personal resources. Those things are
not the things that bring victory.
One of the reasons that you
can tell, in the midst of the hard questions, that the heart of the psalmist is
right is the way that he starts this psalm off. It’s not that Israel had a
great army; It’s that they had a great God. That’s why they’re in Canaan.
That’s why they’d won these victories in the past. And he is unabashed in his
proclamation of that truth. God gets the glory for all the past successes of
Israel. And so God gets the glory for all the successes in our lives. If we
had been more than conquerors in some day past, it’s not because of our
greatness; it’s because of God’s greatness. And so this Psalm begins by
pointing to God as the One who gives victory and God who is the One who has
indeed provided victory in the past in order that we might remember that in the
midst of present difficulties.
II. Christians sometimes
experience dark providences.
Look secondly at verses 9 through 16,
where now the psalmist is experiencing a shameful defeat: “Yet You have
rejected us and brought us to dishonor, and do not go out with our armies. You
cause us to turn back from the adversary; and those who hate us have taken spoil
for themselves” and on and on and on. This is a
description of a crushing defeat, but it’s a description of a crushing defeat
that’s very interesting, isn’t it? Because the focus of this is not so much on
the defeat, as on God having been the author of that defeat. You have done
this; You have done this; You have done this.
In Psalm 44, we have on the
national and corporate levels, the same kind of struggle that Job had on the
individual level. Now think about this for a moment. Job’s struggle is not
that he wonders whether God is out of control or whether his life is out of
God’s control. Job does not spend time from Job 3 to Job 41 questioning whether
God is in control. He does not spend time from Job 3 to Job 41 wondering if God
is sovereign. Job’s struggle from Job 3 to Job 41 is precisely that he knows
that God is sovereign, and he feels as if God is against him, even
though he loves God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength, and he
doesn’t understand what is going on. And that is exactly what is going on
here. Don’t you see it in the language of verses 9 to 16? “You’ve done this
God: You’ve destroyed us; You’ve crushed us; You’ve sold us cheaply. At least,
O Lord, if you’re going to send us to slavery you could have gotten some money
for us.” The Psalmist is speaking about dark providence here; those times when
it seems as if God Himself is against or has forgotten us. And Christians
experience those dark providences too.
Take your hymnals out and
turn to the back of the hymnal where the Confession of Faith is
recorded. Look to page 858, and look at the bottom of the page, right hand
corner, chapter 8 on “Assurance of Grace in Salvation,” section 4. “True
believers may have the assurance of their salvation in various ways shaken,
diminished, and intermitted; as by negligence in preserving of it, by falling
into some special sin which wounds the conscience and grieves the spirit, by
some sudden or vehement temptation, or by God’s withdrawing the light of His
countenance and suffering even such as fear Him to walk in darkness and to have
no light.” And that is exactly what Israel as a nation is experiencing,
and it is that that is troubling them even more than the victory, even more than
the defeat at the hands of their enemies.
III. Christians are not
guaranteed answers to God’s secret will.
In verses 17 through 22, they respond to
this, and they ask “Why Lord? We’ve been faithful, and we’ve still been
slaughtered. Why?” Notice what they say: “All this has come upon us,
but we have not forgotten You, And we have not dealt falsely with Your
covenant. Our heart has not turned back, And our steps have not deviated from
Your way, yet You have crushed us.” The children of
Israel are not claiming to be sinlessly perfect. You understand that. They
even intimate that when they talk about God knowing our hearts later on. They
know that they can’t fool God. If they had, in fact, been following another
way, it would have made no sense for them to protest that they had not been
because God knows their hearts. So the fact that they here corporately confess
– “Lord we haven’t been going after idols; we haven’t been seeking after other
gods. We haven’t been rejecting the way of Your covenant. We’ve been
faithfully trying to follow you. We’ve sought You. We’ve prayed to You. We’ve
prayed this thing through, and we’ve been crushed by You,” – indicates to us
that though they are not perfect, certainly not sinlessly perfect, yet they are
indeed sincere in this particular protest to God. They have been faithful to
him, relatively speaking. And yet, they’ve experienced this dark providence.
And you know what? They don’t get an answer. There’s no answer here. There
are some hints, aren’t there? “For your sake, O Lord, we’ve been slaughtered.”
I wonder if some of you
have found yourselves in just this circumstance. Maybe you’re a godly
Christian, and you’ve been seeking to honor the Lord in your marriage, and it’s
a difficult marriage. And you’ve come home one day, faithfully resting on the
Lord for years, seeking to serve your spouse, and you’ve been met at the doors
with these words: “I’m leaving.” Maybe you’re a faithful gospel minister. It’s
a true story: forty years in the ministry, looking forward in a few months to
retirement with his wife. And just a few months before that retirement, she
contracts cancer, and the doctor says, “She has two to three months to live.
Set your house in order.” Looking forward to retirement, everything’s opening
up, finally we’re going to be able to spend all that time together that we’ve
looked forward to; gone. Or maybe you’re a seminary student, and you’re serving
in the church, and you’re seeking to prepare to serve for the Lord, and cancer
is the word from the mouth of your physician. Or maybe you’re a Christian, an
elder, a Sunday School teacher, and your pastor has been killed in a tragic
automobile accident, and six years later your granddaughter is killed in an
automobile accident, and three years later your grandson is killed in an
automobile accident. Lord, what are You doing? And there’s no answer.
That’s where the Psalmist is.
But I want to say one
thing, my friends: it is vitally important for you to understand that Jesus
Himself prays the prayer “Why” and receives no answer. When you have no answer,
you are not in a deeper pit than your Lord Himself was. For when He cries, “My
God My God, why have You forsaken Me?” and there is no answer, He is, in fact,
in a place that you have never been and never will be. How do you put together
the sinless Son of God, who has come on a mission of redemption asking, “Why” at
the climactic point of the act of redemption? How do you put all those things
together? You can’t see to the bottom of that truth. And yet He prays, “Why?”
And He doesn’t just pray it to be in community with David in Psalm 22; He prays
it because it is true. Why?
And it’s vital for you to
remember when you have no answers that your Savior has been in a deeper pit than
you will ever, ever be. And it’s also so important for you to remember that the
Apostle Paul will go right to this Psalm in the midst of that glorious passage
in Romans 8. You remember when he’s talking about “all things working together
for good for those who are called according to God’s purpose, for those who love
God”? You remember what he says? Turn with me to Romans 8. He’s encouraging
the Romans in the midst of their persecution, and he says this in verse 35, “Who
shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or
persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? Just as it is written:
‘For Thy sake we are being put to death all day long. We are considered as
sheep to be slaughtered.’ But in all these things, we overwhelmingly conquer
through Him who loved us.” Calvin says this: “Lest the severity of the cross
should dismay us, let us always have present to our view this condition of the
church: that as we are adopted in Christ, we are appointed to the slaughter.”
What did we sing tonight?
“Jesus, I my cross have taken.” Do we mean that? When you’re adopted into the
Master’s family, you must be prepared to go the Master’s way. And the Master’s
way is the way of the cross, and so when we are adopted into this family, we are
adopted to experience the same persecutions and the same trials and losses and
crosses that our Master had to endure when He lived here for us.
We’re guaranteed no answer,
but there is this word for your sake. You know, just this week a friend was
telling me about the testimony of a health professional who’s working for one of
our doctors in this congregation. I’m not going to divulge any of the names for
sake of sparing embarrassment, but one of our congregation members has been
going through cancer treatment. And the doctor with whom she has been working
has a part-time help-professional working with him who had come back out of
service after a short period of not working in that health profession, and that
person is working part-time. And that person said, you know, it has been worth
it if the only thing I ever get to see is the way that person has gone through
this treatment for cancer. I don’t know what God is doing in the life of that
person, but I know that God has been glorified in that person in her suffering.
“For Thy sake” – that’s the only hint we get in this Psalm – “For Thy sake.”
I don’t know what God’s
purposes are in your life. Chances are, you don’t know what God’s purposes are
in your life, but you do know that He will get glory from you. He will get
glory, and you will revel in His getting glory in you.
IV. Christians apply to
the Lord in prayer as if they were attempting to wake the dead.
The Psalmist ends pretty boldly: Wake up,
Lord! Help, Lord! Wake up! “Don’t reject us forever” (verses 23 to 26).
That’s a fairly bold prayer, especially in light of the fact that it’s coming
from the nation whose prophet Elijah had once said to the prophets of Baal
“perhaps your god is sleeping. Speak a little bit louder; maybe he’ll wake up.”
And he boasted, “the Lord our God, the Lord of Israel, He slumbers not nor
sleeps.” But the Psalmist says, Wake up! Is it irreverent?
Was it irreverent when
Jesus said to His disciples, let me tell you how to pray. You need to pray to
God like you’re an importunate widow, and He’s an unjust judge. That’s how you
need to pray to God. And you need to beat His door down until He answers you,
until He answers you not because He cares about you, but because He’s worn out
by your praying. Was that irreverent of Jesus to say when He told that story?
No. He’s teaching us that Christians are to apply to the Lord in prayer as if
we were trying to wake the dead. And that’s exactly what the Psalmist is doing
here: “Arouse Yourself, why do You sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not reject
us forever.”
You see, the very fact that
the Psalmist is going to the Lord in prayer after what he has described in
verses 9-16 is a proof of his faith in the prayer answering God of Israel. But
the way in which he does it is to assail the very gates of heaven.
You know how this psalm
basically breaks down? Let me give you an outline of the logic of this psalm.
Lord, You helped us in the past; we need Your help now, but You’re not helping
us now. Indeed, it seems as if You have abandoned us even though we have been
faithful to You. So help us, please. That’s the logic of this psalm! The
believer is experiencing what feels like the rejection of God, and here’s his
response: Lord, don’t reject me. Help me now, please, like You have in the
past. And how does he end? Look at the 26th verse: “Redeem us for
the sake of Thy lovingkindness.” Ok, you’ve got one thing that you can claim of
God, and you go to Him in prayer. What’s it going to be? Well, in Psalm 51,
when David didn’t have a hope, he asked for God to hear his prayer because of
His lovingkindess – not David’s lovingkindness but because of God’s
lovingkindness. And how does this Psalm end? “Remember us, O God, because of
Your lovingkindess.”
Now, bear that in mind, and
turn back with me to Romans 8. Paul has just quoted this Psalm in verse 36:
“For Your sake, we are being put to death all day long. We are being considered
as sheep to be slaughtered.” And then he says, “that in all these things we
overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us; for I am convinced that neither
death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to
come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be
able to separate us from the love of God.”
That’s where we go. That’s
where we go when the lights go out. That’s where we go when we feel like sheep
being led to slaughter. We go to the lovingkindness, the love and grace of God
shown to us certainly in Jesus Christ. Now, this Psalm shows us the Christian
experience of a dark and inexplicable providence. And there are many, many here
tonight who have been there and are there, and there are none of us who will not
be there. When we’re there, where do we go? To the past and God’s victories
and to the lovingkindness of God, our only hope. Let’s pray.
O Lord, we’re amazed at how
You have anticipated the deepest questions of our souls in Your word. And
You’ve already begun to answer them, not maybe in the ways that we were
expecting, but in better ways, more helpful ways. We need the faith to
believe. You can supply that. We ask for it. Keep us trusting. Keep us
clinging. Keep us holding on even in the valley of the shadow. And get glory
out of it. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.