Psalm 44: Godly Lamentation

Introduction

Let’s open our Bibles together this morning to the 44th Psalm.

Today marks the beginning of a new short series I am calling “Difficult Passages”.

I plan, if God is willing, to take the next three months and look at passages that may present some difficulty to us in understanding them.

Now, you may guess that they will not all be difficult for the same reason;

But all of them present their own challenges in understanding what we are to do with them in our lives today.

Some, like our text for this week, don’t necessarily present a theological problem for most of us here,

But run counter to the spirit of the age.

A couple of ground rules from the beginning of this series are in order:

1. We here believe firmly that Scripture is clear on those things which we should know, but it is not equally clear in every passage.

So we will quite often use other clearer passages of Scripture to illumine these difficult ones.

2. Scripture is the best interpreter of Scripture.

Since every word is from God, beginning to end, we can trust every word.

But we will often find what is revealed in shadow in the Old Testament is brought into sharp focus with the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And in the light of His great fulfillments of the prophecies and promises of God, we find much that was, in the time of its writing, harder to understand;

But now in the light of Christ, we can understand the meaning quite clearly.

What that means in the interpretations we will discuss is that we will most often allow New Testament passages help us to understand Old Testament passages;

But rarely will we dive back into the Old Testament to make a New Testament passage clear.

It might happen - perhaps a New Testament passage quotes an Old Testament passage, but it is hard to see in our English translation.

But a pretty solid rule in Scriptural interpretation is to allow the clearer passages from a fuller revelation help us understand the dimmer ones from before the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.

So what that means for us is that we will typically allow the New Testament passage to interpret the Old.

So with that short introduction, let’s read Psalm 44.

[READ PSALM 44]

Now you may have noticed that this psalm is kind of a downer.

It’s one of those psalms that scholar and theologians have called “psalms of lament”.

And put simply, a “lament” is an expression of grief or sorrow.

Like when someone cries at a funeral;

Or weeps when someone they love moves away;

Or writes an angry, bitter poem or song when they break up with their boyfriend or girlfriend.

Grief comes in all different forms.

There is an entire book of the Bible that is a collection of laments: Lamentations.

And it’s not the book that people are called on to read at festive family gatherings.

If you have read through the book of Psalms, and I hope you do regularly,

You will find many of the psalms are given to a lament at some point.

Whether the psalm was born out of personal tragedy,

Or the consequences of sin,

Or the rising of one nation against another in war,

Many of these psalms deal with expressing grief before God.

I chose this as a “difficult passage” because we don’t like that today.

We avoid grief, both in ourselves and in others.

Have you ever felt the temptation to stay away from someone BECAUSE they were going through a difficult time, and you don’t have any good advice for them?

We want the Christian life to be one of smooth paths and minor inconveniences;

Certainly nothing that would cause us to lament.

And there are churches, great, big churches, that only pick the happy passages out of the Bible;

The ones that tell you that you are an overcomer;

That you are a great warrior against sadness and doubt;

That you can have your best life now.

But I am grateful to God for these lamentation psalms.

I am grateful He gives us a pattern to follow when everything in our lives is haywire.

How lost would we feel if all the Bible was hearts and flowers, but we live in a life of struggle and sin and grit;

Where sometimes just putting one foot in front of the other is a heroic task.

We do not live in Paradise yet;

This world is no heaven.

And if your life has been untouched by loss or betrayal or crushing grief,

You are either very young or you have been quite fortunate so far in God’s providence.

But the time of trouble is coming for all of us.

The book of Ecclesiastes, another of the troubling books, assures us of this:

Ecclesiastes 3:1–4 “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;”

No one’s life will be all joy, all dancing, all celebration - going from one victory to the next.

Even our Lord, the perfect and sinless God-man, didn’t live that kind of life.

But how many people are lured by the promise that if you have enough faith, you will get past all the troubles of this world?

That with enough faith, you won’t FEEL the pain of loss or betrayal or grief.

My friends - listen:

Don’t believe those words, spoken by the mouthpieces of the Serpent.

Because what they are telling you is that YOU can control what happens to you,

And you can control the things that would quickly overwhelm you.

My heart goes out to people who, every day, have bought into that lie and then are crushed by sin or loss.

And their bitterness is that much greater because they feel like THEY are a spiritual FAILURE;

That if they were a REAL Christian, they wouldn’t mourn;

They wouldn’t hurt;

They wouldn’t weep;

That if they trusted God more, they would be on an even keel, sailing through this sea of trouble as if there was no storm.

And then we get to Psalm 44.

There’s no happy ending here;

The plea is unresolved.

It ENDS with:

Psalm 44:26 “Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!”

But we never see God show up in this psalm.

There are other psalms where we see the faithful and hopeful declaration at the end of the lament - but not here.

Here the psalmist has screamed his invitation to God, his plea to God - and then, silence.

Nothing else is written in this song.

So why would the Holy Spirit give us such a psalm?

To give us some example of what NOT to do?

We will have some difficult passages that do exactly that.

But for this psalm, I don’t think that’s the case at all.

I think this psalm is a wonderful example of faithful suffering.

Or suffering faithfulness.

And not just suffering for some great wickedness:

Look at how the psalmist describes his conduct in verses 4-8:

[READ Psalm 44:4-8]

I’m willing to give the psalmist the benefit of the doubt here.

I think he was faithful, even devout.

There is as much call for this psalmist to receive grief from the Lord as there was for Job.

Job was admittedly a devout man - and he suffered.

So we can say for the sake of the text that the psalmist, and perhaps even the people around him, were undeserving of this great calamity along with the wicked.

And then in verse 9, we see:

Psalm 44:9 “But you have rejected us and disgraced us and have not gone out with our armies.”

The first 8 verses of this psalm were the reasons WHY the psalmist trusts God:

His salvation in the past.

His sovereign choice.

His surpassing power.

His love of His people.

Even His justice, when God punished the wicked around them.

And now, beginning in verse 9 and going to the end of the psalm, there is the tale of what God has done to His people.

And it all leads to this pitiful plea in verses 23-26.

[READ Psalm 44:23-26]

When you read it, does that sound like FAITH to you?

It SHOULD sound like faith,

But for many of us, it’s a long, LONG way from how we deal with tragedy.

We toughen up;

We dust ourselves off and stand up again, grim determination in our eyes.

When life attacks us, we attack back.

And, for many of us, we NEVER let anyone know the struggles we are having.

We never admit our weakness or our fear or our doubts.

We tell ourselves that wouldn’t be a good look for a Christian - to have fears or doubt.

We tell ourselves we just need more faith.

And when we’ve gotten more faith, that extra mustard seed,

THEN we’ll be able to weather the storm.

And until then - we have to fake it, pretend we have everything together when we are in pain.

Christian, please hear me: YOU aren’t enough.

You were never meant to be enough.

You weren’t CREATED to be enough.

From the very beginning, man and woman were created to be DEPENDENT on God.

And that was the first sin - when man, Adam, decided HE wasn’t going to depend on God for something as simple as knowing right and wrong.

And since then, we have been reluctantly dependent on God for everything.

And we have groaned about it;

Complained about it;

Fought against it.

God is not more pleased with you when you handle problems on your own;

When you are strong enough to stand on your own two feet.

God isn’t sitting there cheering you on as you do things on your own - NO!

God is more pleased with your humble dependence on Him than in your steadfastness apart from Him.

Full Stop.

He didn’t create you to operate without Him;

He made you to be entirely dependent on Him.

When the psalmist cries out “WAKE UP!” to God, the Eternal Creator is not threatened or offended.

The tears of the faithful are a more eloquent prayer than the lectures of the mighty.

Everything about this psalm is full of faith;

He trusts in God’s sovereignty;

He trusts in God’s justice;

He trusts in God’s power;

He trusts in God’s predestined will;

He trusts firmly in God’s steadfast love.

He is crying out from our weakness as “Frail children of dust”

And he is crying out to the One who is mighty, who is our King.

It’s no accident that verse 22 is quoted by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans:

It seems we have come to the 8th chapter of Romans often of late - but I make no apology.

We cannot avoid it this week because it is dealing with EXACTLY the same question as the psalmist.

But Paul is doing so with even greater light and understanding than the psalmist had.

[READ Romans 8:31-39]

Neither the psalming nor the apostle make any attempt to EXPLAIN the painful providence of God.

But Paul here brings us comfort in our painful times with these thoughts:

1. God is for you.

If you are His, God is with you.

Not “will be with you” - IS with you. IS for you.

And everything He sends to you is good.

2. If God sent His Son to die on a cross to save you, what would He withhold from you?

Can you cry out for bread and He give a stone? Of course not.

God isn’t cruel.

If the trials and pains you go through make you more dependent and closer to Him, that is a good outcome.

Psalm 42:5–6 “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? ... My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you...”

3. Your sin is GONE in Christ - you are completely justified before Him.

4. Christ is interceding for you with blood that cries louder than the blood of Abel did.

5. There is nothing in this world that can make a hairs-breadth separation between you and the God who brought you in.

6. Even though we are being killed all the day long, we are more than conquerors through Him.

But be sure to understand, it doesn’t mean we don’t FEEL the blows and the pains;

The promise is that those things cannot DEFEAT us.

When all these trials and troubles are gone, WE will still be standing in Christ.

2 Corinthians 4:7–15 “But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.”

7. Nothing, not even sin, can separate you from God now.