Unseen Footprints
The depths
Where does prayer begin? For this
psalmist, prayer—like all genuine
theology—begins in pain. Prayer is
not reciting a formula learned by rote
and repeated at a prescribed moment:
“Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray
the Lord my soul to keep” or even,
“Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name.” Nor is it the
cozy communion of a self-satisfied
soul contemplating the comforts of a
well-ordered world where no one’s
stomach is growling, no one’s heart is
broken—a kind of syrupy sentimentalism
or a God’s-in-his-heaven-andall-
is-right-with-the-world mentality.
Whatever else you might think about
that kind of prayer, it’s a million miles
away from where the psalmist lives.
Look at his verbs: I cried out. I
sought and stretched out. I groaned
and was troubled. I mused and
pondered. I was dazed and could not
speak. All night long I was in deep
distress. For this supplicant, prayer
truly begins in pain.
What caused his pain? We don’t
know. Perhaps it was some national
crisis or catastrophe that had befallen
the children of Israel, as when the
Babylonian army marched into
Jerusalem and destroyed the temple
and carried away thousands of Jews
into captivity, leaving the nation
devastated. Perhaps this psalm
reflects the experience of the Exile,
the cajoling sneer and contempt of
the captors’ taunts: “Where now is
your God? Is he blind that he cannot
see? Is he deaf that he will not hear?
Is he paralyzed that he is not able to
move?” Or maybe it was a little more
personal than that: “Out of the
depths have I cried unto you,” says
the psalmist. “O Lord, hear my cry.”
Depths? What are the depths? The
depths are those times when a
mother or father hold an all-night
vigil between the day their child was
well and the day he will be well
again. The depths are when the
doctor comes in the room, takes your
hand, and says, “I’m sorry; there’s
nothing else we can do;” when the
roses have faded, the candlelight
flickers dimly in your marriage, and
she looks at you over a plate of leftover
Tuna Helper and says, “I don’t
love you anymore. I found somebody
else. I won’t be here tomorrow when
you get home;” when that unofficial
committee wants to meet with you
after a Sunday evening service to say:
“Oh nothing personal, pastor. We
love you; we just feel your ministry’s
no longer effective in this church.”
Those are the depths. Sooner or
later, all of us know these depths.
Prayer is born in these depths.
Track 22
There are four movements or
stanzas in this psalm. We’ve been
dealing with the first one—six verses
that we might call the troubles or the
depths. There are two images for the
depths in the Psalms. They recur
again and again. One is found here: “I
stretched out untiring hands.” It’s the
image of a person who is drowning.
The floods have come, swept over
his head, and he’s drowning. Another
example is Psalm 69: “Save me, O
God, for the waters have come up to
my neck. I sink in the miry depths,
where there is no foothold. I have
come into the deep waters; the floods
engulf me.” The other image is the
pit. The pit was a deep cistern where
a criminal was placed. Jeremiah was
put there once. He sank down into
the depths of the miry, muddy pit.
That’s the depths or the troubles—
that place where pain and
prayer come together. Why is that
the place where prayer is born? As
the Irish poet William Butler Yeats
put it:
Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
Sometimes God has to knock us
down before he can pick us up.
Track 23
The questions
The troubles in this psalm lead to the
second stanza, which I call the questions.
It appears that there are six of
them, but I’m going to argue there are
really seven. Notice the questions:
Will the Lord reject forever? Will he
never show his favor again? Has his
unfailing love vanished forever? Has
Unseen Footprints
Even in the depths where questions loom large, remember that God is at work.
BY TIMOTHY GEORGE
audio
DOUBT; PERSPECTIVE; GOD, FAITHFULNESS OF; TRIALS / PSALM 77 {ISSUE 290}
his promise failed for all time? Has God
forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger
withheld his compassion?
The background to these questions is
Exodus 34:5–6. As the children of Israel
were being prepared for the Promised
Land, God came in a cloud and spoke
through Moses:
The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate
and gracious God, slow to
anger, abounding in love and
faithfulness, maintaining love to
thousands, and forgiving wickedness,
rebellion and sin. Yet he does
not leave the guilty unpunished;
he punishes the children and their
children for the sin of the fathers
to the third and fourth generation.
This is an Old Testament creed or confession
of faith that is at the very heart of
the faith of Israel. In Psalm 77, each one
of these great characteristics of God is
called into question. The faithfulness of
God—”Will the Lord reject forever?”
That calls God’s election of Israel into
question. “Will he never show his favor
again?” His hesed or compassion—”Has it
vanished forever?” Has his promise failed
for all time? Has God forgotten to be
merciful? Is there something wrong with
his memory? Has he in anger withheld
his compassion?” One-by-one, the
psalmist is questioning the great attributes
of the covenant God of Israel.
Track 24
I want to ask this question of you:
Why are these questions in the Bible?
Don’t they seem inappropriate? There
are two answers. First of all, they’re in
the Bible because we do not serve an
antiseptic God who is removed, remote,
untouched, or untouchable. We serve a
God who came into the very depths of
our human condition and, according to
the Book of Hebrews, was put to the test
in every conceivable way that we can be
put to the test—with the exception that
he never sinned. This means Jesus was
not a stranger to questions: “My God,
my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
• illustration • The second reason
these questions are in the Bible is that
there is no pathway to Easter Sunday
that does not lead through Good Friday.
[When I was a student at Harvard
Divinity School, I learned preaching
from Dr. Gardner Taylor, a pastor in
New York City.] I’ll never forget those
lectures. I remember him telling us a
story from when he was preaching in
Louisiana during the Depression.
Electricity was just coming into that part
of the country, and he was out in a rural,
black church that had just one little light
bulb hanging down from the ceiling to
light up the whole church building. He
was preaching away, and in the middle
of his sermon—all of a sudden—the
electricity went out. The place was pitch
dark, and he didn’t know what to say,
being a young preacher. He stumbled
around until one of the elderly deacons
sitting in the back of the church cried
out, “Preach on, Preacher! We can still
see Jesus in the dark!” Sometimes that’s
the only time we can see him—in the
dark. The good news of the gospel is
that whether we can see him in the dark
or not, he can see us in the dark.
Track 25
I said there were seven questions. A
lot of modern translations render verse
ten as the introduction to the rest of the
psalm. This is how the NIV translates it,
for example: “I will appeal to the years of
the right hand of the Most High.” But
there is a variant way to read this in
Hebrew, and I think it’s the better way.
Verse ten is not to be read as the introduction
to the rest of the psalm but as
the conclusion to the first part of the
psalm, and as a seventh question. This is
how the New English Bible translates it:
“Has God’s right hand lost its grip?”
Does it hang powerless and withered,
the arm of the Most High? Or as the
New American Bible has it: “Has the
right hand of the Most High changed?”
This is the presupposition of process
theology: that God changes and does
the best he can with what he has.
Ultimately he’s not in control of these
forces that swirl about and within. He
can feel our pain, but he can’t really
make it go away. This is why I write so
much against the openness of God
theology. It has a diminished view of
God, a view that God doesn’t really
know the future. They say, for example,
that God doesn’t really know who’s
going to win the World Series. I will
concede God may not care a lot, but God
does know. He knows who’s going to
win the election. He knows everything
that has happened, is happening, and
will happen. The right hand of God has
not lost its grip!
Track 26
The confession
I call these next two stanzas the confession.
The confession begins in verse
eleven, and the key word is remember. This
is the turning point of the psalm. The
psalm began with the pain that leads to
questions and despair and then comes to
the turning point: “I will remember the
deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember
your miracles of long ago. I will meditate
on all your words and consider all your
mighty deeds.” The surest way to reconnect
when you’re in the depths is to
remember how good God has been to
you. There’s a song that comes from the
African-American tradition: “If it had not
been for the Lord on my side, where
would I be? Oh, where would I be?” That
song has some gospel. Where would we
be if it hadn’t been for the Lord on our
side? That’s what this psalmist is talking
about: I will remember; I will meditate; I
will think about who God is, what he has
done, and his faithfulness in days gone
by, and I will let it sink into my soul.
The psalmist says he will remember
all of God’s mighty deeds, his works
among the nations and the peoples. God
is at work everywhere in this world, and
don’t you ever forget it. He is the one
who raises up kings, potentates, and
princes and puts them down again.
Whoever is elected President of the
United States, God Almighty will still be
God Almighty.
Track 27
• illustration • It’s when we remember
this that we come back to ourselves. I
don’t see movies very much, but one I
remember seeing with my wife is The
Notebook. It’s a love story about Noah and
his wife Allie. Most of the movie is about
their young love together and how they
met, but every now and then, the movie
tells the other end of their life, showing
them in their old age. Allie has developed
Alzheimer’s, and she’s in a nursing
home. Noah doesn’t have to be there,
but he insists on staying with her. Some
years before, she had written down the
story of their love in a notebook. Every
day, Noah comes, they have lunch
together, and Noah takes out the notebook
and reads Allie the story of their
love. As he reads the story, her eyes will
open every now and then, and she comes
back to him for a few minutes.
That’s what the Bible is. The Bible is
God’s covenant love story for his people
through all the ages. When we’re in the
depths and it seems that the Lord has
rejected us forever and his mercy is gone,
we take out the notebook and we read, “In
the beginning, God created,” and “he
delivered my people out of Egypt with a
mighty hand,” and “God so loved the
world that he gave his only begotten Son.”
When we read, we come back to reality,
and we know who we are because we
know who God is, what he has done, and
that his unfailing love will never perish.
Track 28
The conclusion
There’s a final stanza I call the conclusion.
You have this thunderstorm psalm
here: the waters saw you, the depths
were convulsed, thunder was in the
whirlwind, lightning lit up the world,
the earth trembled and quaked, your
path led through the sea, your way
through the mighty waters, and—here’s
the sermon title—your footprints were
unseen. Unseen footprints. We often
don’t immediately see how God is at
work in the circumstances that are
swirling about us when we’re in the pit,
sinking in the depths and wondering
where God is. But the witness of the
Holy Scriptures and the people of God
through the ages, is that God has never
left his people alone, and that he guides
through all the torturous pathways of
life even though his footprints are
frequently unseen:
• illustration •
I fled him, down the night and
down the days;
I fled him down the arches of the
years;
I fled Him down the labyrinthine
ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst
of tears
I hid from Him, and under running
laughter.
Up vistaed hopes, I sped
And shot, precipitated,
Down titanic glooms of chasmed
fears.
And I fled Him and I fled him,
And I ran from those strong feet
that followed, followed after.
That’s Francis Thompson’s The Hound of
Heaven. He was an alcoholic on the
streets of London. He was a drug addict
in the gutter, utterly lost, running. But
behind him, invisibly and imperceptibly,
came those strong feet that followed,
followed after.
Track 29
• illustration • [There’s an Apocryphal
story called Bel and the Dragon.] It’s a
story about Daniel in Babylon. Bel was
an idol that “consumed” a lot of food—
40 sheep a night and all kinds of wine
and grain. However, it was the priests in
charge of keeping the temple of Bel who
were really eating all that was being put
out. The king asked Daniel, “Why don’t
you sacrifice something to the god Bel?”
Daniel laughed, saying, “That’s no god!
He’s an idol. He can’t eat anything. He’s
as empty on the inside as he is on the
outside.” “That couldn’t be true,” the king
said. He called all the priests together
and said, “Daniel says Bel isn’t eating the
food you put out. What’s happening?”
The priests replied, “Why don’t you seal
off the building and not let anybody in at
night? Bring all the food in, and the next
morning you can tell us whether or not
Bel has eaten all the food.” All the while,
they had a little secret door in the back
of the building. They were going to
come in, sneak out the food, and the
king wouldn’t know.
Daniel was on to their tricks, so he
took some dust and ashes and spread it all
around the floor. Sure enough, the priests
put all the food out—the 40 sheep and
everything else—and they locked the
door. During the night, the priests came
in and did what they always did—they
took away the food and ate it. The next
morning the king came and said, “Is the
door locked?” “Yes!” the priests replied. “Is
the seal still on the door?” “Yes!” said the
priests. “Looks like old Daniel is a liar, isn’t
he?” Daniel then said to the king, “Ha!
Look at the floor. See their footprints all
over the place? That’s what happened to
that food! The priests came in at night
and snuck it away and ate it. Bel is an idol!
He’s not a god! You don’t need to give him
any food! Look at their footprints!”
You can see the Devil’s footprints, but
the footprints of our God are unseen.
They lead through the sea, through the
depths where we know he goes before us,
where he walks beside us, where he lives
within us, where he has promised never
to leave us nor forsake us. Isn’t that how
the song concludes? “You led your people
like a flock by the hand of Moses and
Aaron.” What does that recall? It recalls
Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I
shall not want. He maketh me to lie
down.” Yes, in green pastures sometimes,
but also along the ravenous cavern.
Always, though, he leads his people to
that land where there will be no more
tears, no more sorrow, no more death.
There will be no more pits. There will be
no more mire and muck to sink into. But
we shall forever bask in the presence of
our great and living God.