Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Psalm, Psalm 142.
It’s worth remembering that the
Psalms were prayers or songs, offered for specific situations, in specific
times, in specific needs. Many people contributed to the book of Psalms. Many
were written by David, but not all. In other words, they were spoken or sung by
people very much like you and me. That’s why the Psalter is often called “The
Prayerbook of the Bible,” and very useful as a devotional book or source for
prayers.
Many of the Psalms we are
familiar with paint a comforting, steadying picture of God. Think of the 23rd
Psalm, for example, with the shepherd imagery, especially when facing our own
death or the death of a loved one. Psalm 46, with its rock and refuge image, is
comforting when we are facing difficulties. Psalm 103, “Bless the Lord, O my
soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name,” lifts our prayers and
praises to God for the goodness He showers upon us every day.
But there are some Psalms that
leave us a little uncomfortable. Some are uncomfortable because they leave the
prayer unanswered, or at least, not answered in a way we would prefer. Sometimes,
it’s because we’re not used to praying this way – for example, the psalms (see
7:1, 35 as examples) that call on God to strike down enemies and avenge His
name and the names of His people. I submit that Psalm 142 is one such uncomfortable
Psalm. This Psalm of David is uncomfortable because we are sitting with a man
who is calling out to God doesn’t seem to be answering. In fact, if you want to
be blunt and use plain language, David is mad – he’s mad at God.
A moment ago, I said some Psalms
leave us uncomfortable. I say that of this Psalm because it begs the question:
can a Christian be mad at God? Can a person express that toward God and remain
a child of God?
The heading of Psalm 142 gives us
a clue: “in the cave.” If you do some Biblical Columbo work to find out what
“the cave” is referring to, you’ll arrive at 1 Samuel 24. Briefly, David was on
the run from the angry, bitter King Saul who pledged to hunt and kill David on
the drummed-up charges of rebellion and insurrection. In truth, Saul was jealous
that the people loved and admired David, and those feelings were then magnified
when God rejected Saul because of his idolatry. On the run for his life, and
refusing to kill Saul whom he still saw as God’s servant, David was angry. He
implored God’s help only to be cornered, trapped in a cave. David was at the
crux of either being murdered under the pretense of leading a rebellious
mutiny, or having to take Saul’s life to save his own. It’s as if David is
saying, God, this seems to be at your hand. I’m upset, angry even, because I
keep making my case to you. Why aren’t you doing something?
We often think of prayer as clean
and neat – “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” or “Now the light has gone away;
Father listen while I pray,” or even the Our Father. That’s not always the
case. There are times in the life of the Christian when prayers are muttered
through tear-drenched and clenched eyelids and folded, pious hands are replaced
with balled-up fists pounding, pounding, pounding in anger and frustration. Have
you ever sat with a person whose prayer is raw and ugly, a verbal and physical,
yet still faithful catharsis of pain and hurt, all poured out to God and,
seemingly, against God? That is what
David is doing here, dumping it all in prayer to God, before God, against God.
It’s real, it’s raw, it’s ugly, and honest.
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| Full of Eyes Ministry Used with permission |
But, such a prayer is also grounded in faith. David isn’t just complaining – an empty venting of frustration. With a fainting spirit, David still clings to God and His promises: I know this about You; but my situation doesn’t seem to fit that truth. The rawness and the open hurt are dumped out at the foot of the One who promises to hear our prayers. More than that, they are dumped out at the foot of the One who promises to act upon them.
A moment ago, I asked if a
Christian can be mad at God and reflect that anger in prayer. I hope you have
realized by now that the answer is, “yes.” Among other things, the fact that
David prays this way, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to include it in the
Scriptures, gives us not only credence but permission to do so. You can be mad
at God and confront Him in prayer, but you do it humbly and with faith.
In the introduction to his little
prayer book on the Psalms, Dietrich Bonhoeffer categorizes the Psalms based on
their use. Psalm 142 fits in the category of “Suffering.” Bonhoeffer writes of
these Psalms of suffering:
The psalter
instructs us how to come before God in the proper way; all conceivable perils
are known by the psalms. They do not deny it; they allow it to stand as a
severe attack on faith. There is no quick and easy resignation to suffering;
there is always struggle, anxiety, doubt. If I am guilty, why does God not
forgive me? If I am not, why does he not bring my suffering to an end? There
are no trite, easy answers in the psalms to these questions.
If there are no answers, why do
we pray them other than as a cathartic exercise? Again, Bonhoeffer helps us
turn our eyes from our own situation, struggles, and sufferings, and instead,
to lift our eyes to look to Jesus.
[These] psalms
have to do with complete fellowship with God; Jesus accompanies us in our
prayer, for he has suffered every want and brought it before God. There is no
suffering on earth in which he will not be with us; and on this basis the
psalms of trust develop.
In other words, as you pray these
words, you aren’t standing alone, as if yelling into the wind. Jesus prays this
Psalm with us and for us. When Jesus took upon Himself the sins for the world,
He also took upon Himself the very wrath of God. Although the Scriptures do not
record Him saying it, these verses very well could have been prayed by Jesus at
any moment in His life and in His ministry, but especially during Holy Week as
the Jewish leaders’ conspiracy against Jesus came to its climactic head:
3 When
my spirit faints within me, you know my way! In the path where I walk, they
have hidden a trap for me. 4 Look to the right
and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one
cares for my soul.
Because Jesus has taken our
place, and He knows our hurts, struggles, and weaknesses, He prays honestly for
us. Therefore, we can pray honestly to Him. He knows our complaints; He endured
them for us. The challenge for us, then, is not to let our prayers turn from
lament and suffering to ingratitude, where we demand answers – more than that,
we demand the answers we expect, we think we deserve.
With humility, but with faith, we
pour our hearts and hurts to God for the sake of Christ, who bore our hurts for
us.
There is a wonderful Robert
Redford film called Brubaker. Redford plays a prison warden, name
Brubaker, who goes undercover into the prison that he is to lead and fix. He
sees how awful the prison really is, from the conditions, to the food, to the
brutality delivered to inmates via the guards and staff. The beginning of the
movie is dark – literally and metaphorically. After fifteen or twenty minutes,
you want to go take a shower with every light turned on in the bathroom in the
middle of the day.
David’s imagery is very much like
the beginning of that film, even using the language of a prison. Driven into
the cave, it is at best a prison; worse, if Saul, et.al, find him in there. David,
with the might of King Saul chasing after him, feels the weight of being the
hunted and then being trapped. God, where are you! Hope runs thin; joy
is absent. He prays:
6 Attend
to my cry, for I am brought very low! Deliver me from my persecutors, for
they are too strong for me! 7Bring me out of prison…
I’ve visited and corresponded
with people in prison, and what I witnessed is that very quickly, hope fades
and the seriousness of the situation takes its toll, emotionally, physically,
spiritually. If you pardon the mixed imagery, it’s like the machine in the Pit
of Despair in Princess Bride, sucking the very life from you. It would
have been easy for David to have left the sufferings and laments in such a pit.
In the movie, while he is
undercover, Brubaker sees that a prisoner’s life is literally at risk, so he reveals
his true identity. As he begins to institute his reforms – and it takes a
little bit for you, the viewer to realize this – the darkness gives way to
brighter and brighter scenes. Brubaker’s changes give the inmates hope, life,
and light. He is, in effect, their savior – even while remaining incarcerated.
David does such a thing with his
Psalm, allowing light to shine into the darkness by bracketing his sufferings
between words of hope and promise:
5 I
cry to you, O Lord; I say, “You are my refuge, my portion
in the land of the living.”
Then, after his cry of despair
which we spoke to above, David adds
“…that I may give thanks to your name! The
righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me.
David’s hope remains in the
promises and mercies of God. Although David may feel as if in prison, God
remains his refuge. Although the persecutors are arguing their case, David is
surrounded by the righteousness of God.
These words give us great comfort
when facing the many troubles and difficulties in this life. The list of such
things is long. Your list is different than your neighbor next to you, but
equally as heavy and burdensome. This Psalm could certainly be prayed under
such circumstances.
The deepest, darkest dungeon,
though, is when satan tries to convince us that our sins toss us into a pit
from which there is no escape. Worst of all, he tries to convince us that we
are in solitary confinement, alone with our sins and no one to help, just
waiting to die. The wages of sin is
death, after all.
“The righteous will surround me,”
David prayed. Allow me to turn that slightly: “The righteousness of Jesus will
surround me.” Surrounded in His love, in His righteousness, in His holiness, we
are never cast off, cast away, cast down, down, down to the depths of spiritual
prison. He has rescued us from the pits of despair by entering into it,
suffering in our place, dying on the cross, and lifting us up, restoring life
in its fulness to us.
If today, Psalm 130 with its high
praise is where your life and prayers rest, thanks be to God. Sing it, pray it
loud, But if you are suffering, if you are frustrated, even angry at God, don’t
let satan tell you that you shouldn’t feel that way. Instead, pray this Psalm
of David. Pray it through Christ Jesus, who hears our prayers, suffered with
us, died for us, and rose with the pledge to never leave us nor forsake you in your
sufferings.
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