27
Give the deepest parts of yourself to God. That’s the exploration. We sing, read, hear, preach the psalms and take the words up as if they are our own, believing that they will give voice to our own inner turmoil, fears and joys. It’s as if God is putting words in our mouths- words that get to what we want to express but cannot express. This Psalm carries both sides of the experience, both incredible disorientation, but also hope breaking through.
Steve Brown (a preacher who says things that preachers aren’t supposed to say) said, “Religion is for people who are afraid of Hell. Christianity is for people who have been there.”
These psalm words aren’t written by insensitive religious people who are trying to goad you into getting your act together so that God might smile at you. They come from people who have tasted humanity at its worst. It is the most human of books.
Jesus was the Psalm singer. When he talked with God, he used the words of the Psalms. He was intimately acquainted with the deepest human experiences, and knew the full weight of our brokenness, and these words gave the best, richest expression to that experience.
Psalm 27 is not a happy little song that is out of touch with reality. It is a song from Hell. It comes from someone who has tasted the bitterness of life. And yet…this hope, this light, springs up in the middle of it.
You have a man who is writing this song from a place where he sees no way out. He can’t envision a way out of his misery. It seems like there are dual pressures on his soul. He feels it from the outside, “armies encamped around him…,” etc. And on top of that, “his father and mother have forsaken” him. Our first parents, Adam and Eve brought a strain into our human existence. When they rebelled against God, he cursed them. It was his mercy, but it was also very painful. He told Eve that “in pain she would bring forth children.” He says to the man that he will work in “painful toil”. In all the parts of your life, your dealing with the world, your work, and in your relationships there will be sorrow. Eve knows pain not just in the physical delivery of her children, but in raising them, one son murdering another. In the Genesis chapters that follow their story the world becomes increasingly violent. Armies encamp against me…. He feels the weight of a violent world. My father and mother forsake me…. He feels the tearing fabric of his relationships, of families, and of communities. Intense external pressure.
Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not…. This is the internal pressure. “Surely all these bad things that are happening are God’s judgment against me for the things I’ve done.” That shame is always spinning around in our heads. “I know he’s going to cast me off.” Assailed inside as well. I’m my own worst enemy.
Sin doesn’t compartmentalize. It touches everyone and every place and every part of me. It bleeds into everything that I do. “Even my righteous deeds are like ‘menstrual rags’”, Paul says.
These aren’t the words of a moralist. This is a guy who feels like he is in Hell, and doesn’t see a way out.
A year ago I took the kids to Disney. Whether you want to believe it or not, Disney is a magical place. It’s amazing, rides, shows, food. All of it. There is no joy to a parent like placing your children on a ride where they will be launched at 75 mph, brought to the point where they are sure they are about to die, to scream, then be saved at the last second…then to talk about it for hours. What a joy to terrorize your kids that way! It’s an astounding place.
After a few hours I start to wonder what it must take to make a place like that work. What does it take to pull off Disney World? The infrastructure must be incredible, behind the scenes and under the surface. What’s it take to give a family just five or six hours in a day where everything bad is pushed back?
There’s a ride they don’t advertise there. It’s called the “Monorail of Terror”. It’s the train that opens about 2:00 in the afternoon, and takes people back to the parking lot. At that time, every child under five who has been in the park for four or five hours begins to unravel. It is filled with the screams of the children who have just had too much Mickey. Their poor stunned parents are just trying to get to the car. You can hold it off for a few hours, but then it all collapses back in. Even Uncle Walt can’t stop it.
It’s not that there are no joys. It’s just that you can’t hold the fallenness back. It’s always pressing in.
We all have elaborate mechanisms, all of us, to clear out space, to cope. We all create ways to get some relief from both external pressures and internal pressures. That’s what a lot of our behavior is. Just trying for a few minutes to get some relief or peace. My friend says we all construct scaffolding around our lives to hold them up. It works pretty well for the most part. But these grinding pressures begin to pull it down. Pieces of it begin to get pulled out until finally it collapses. That’s when you see no way out. That’s when you’ve got nothing.
Think about the Hurricane Katrina victims who lost everything. There’s not a house, there’s not a tool, not a phone. All they can do is sit on the curb with nothing…nothing but need. Your only hope is mercy.
You know where this Psalm writer lives and he knows where you live. This isn’t foreign territory for you, is it?
But then he starts singing this: For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock.
He doesn’t say he has done these things. He says he will. He’s still in Hell, but there is this hope for the future springing up. I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! How do you get there when your sitting on the curb with nothing?
He doesn’t say he has done these things. He says he will. He’s still in Hell, but there is this hope for the future springing up. I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! How do you get there when your sitting on the curb with nothing?
He is hoping that he will be relieved from his traumas. I think he has seen the sorrow of the whole world and is singing this hopeful song for himself, but also for everyone. “Thy kingdom come!” We’ve seen desolation, inside and out, but we are believing that Jesus will come and make it right, and not just in the by and by, but now. Tangible expressions of the goodness of God now.
One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.
We met the idea of “meditating” in Psalm 1. When we’re afraid we turn away from God. But this man has a posture shift. I will face God. In all my Psalm 27 experiences I will open to him.
Tim Keller has said that Christianity is not a philosophical system. It has one, but that is not what it is. It’s not a moral system. It has one, but that is not what it is. Bottom line, Christianity is Jesus. It’s him. “Your face, Lord, will I seek”. A change in posture, opening to him.
We may take issue with some of the things that come with Christianity, like some of those pesky commandments. We may not like some of those things. But it’s not really that we don’t like those things. It’s that we don’t like Jesus.
The Psalmist wants one thing. God. What do I want? Just to gaze at him. That’s what I was made for. My one hope would be that I get him. I can take the rest if I get him. If I can have this one thing, it will be everything. Jesus is everything, or Christianity is nothing.
Even in Hell he is overcome by this sweet thought. My father and mother may forsake me. But the Lord will take me in. Here’s T.S. Eliot:
The end is where we start from
we shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
We start with God and we end with God. No matter where your explorations take you, they take you back to him. And even Hell is bearable.