8-2-2020 The Worth of God Psalm 44
Notes
Transcript
Introduction:
A 90 year old couple was having problems remembering things, so they decided to go to their doctor to get checked out to make sure nothing was wrong with them. When they arrived at the doctor’s, they explained to the doctor about the problems they were having with their memory. After checking the couple out, the doctor tells them that they were physically okay but might want to start writing things down and make notes to help them remember things. The couple thanked the doctor and left. Later that night while watching TV, the old man got up from his chair and his wife asks, "Where are you going?" He replies, "To the kitchen." She asks, "Will you get me a bowl of ice cream?" He replies, "Sure." She then asks him, "Don’t you think you should write it down so you can remember it?" He says, "No, I can remember that." She then says, "Well, I also would like some strawberries on top. You better write that down cause I know you’ll forget that." He says, "I can remember that, you want a bowl of ice cream with strawberries." She replies, "Well, I also would like whip cream on top. I know you will forget that so you better write it down." With irritation in his voice, he says, "I don’t need to write that down I can remember that." He then stomps into the kitchen. After about 20 minutes he returns from the kitchen and hands her a plate of bacon and eggs. She stares at the plate for a moment and says, "I knew you were going to mess it up… You forgot my toast."
Sometimes we are better at forgetting than remembering— and it is even more true when it comes to the works of God in our lives.
Transition:
Is it worth the effort to recall regularly the works of God in your life? What price are you willing to pay? Some time ago, I preached a sermon titled that and it was centered around the worth of God in the life of Adoniram Judson & his very personal sacrifices to witness to the Burmese people. When you world is crashing down on you, and you have done everything right yet things keep getting worse, what do you do?
If YHWH is all that He says He is, and you truly believe and love Him, then what you do is buck up and press on with even more fervency knowing that He is worth any and all the effort that you can muster.
As we continue our journey through the Book of Psalms, we must consider the words of the sons of Korah especially in one of their poems written to God—Psalm chapter 44.
Scripture Reading: Psalm 44:5-25
5 By you we push down our enemies; by your name we tread down those who rise up against us.
6 For I do not trust my bow, and my sword cannot give me victory.
7 Rather you have saved us from our enemies, and have humiliated those who hate us.
8 In God we boast all the day, and we will give thanks to your name forever. Selah
9 Surely you have rejected and disgraced us, and have not gone out with our armies.
10 You have caused us to pull back from the enemy, and so those who hate us have plundered for themselves.
11 You have given us as sheep for food, and among the nations you have scattered us.
12 You have sold your people cheaply, and did not profit by their price.
13 You have made us a taunt to our neighbors, a derision and a scorn to those around us.
14 You have made us a byword among the nations, a shaking of the head among the peoples.
15 All day long my disgrace is before me, and the shame of my face covers me,
16 because of the voice of the taunter and the reviler, because of the enemy and the avenger.
17 All this has befallen us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant.
18 Our heart has not turned back, and our steps have not turned aside from your way.
19 But you have crushed us in a place of jackals, and have covered us with deep shadow.
20 If we had forgotten the name of our God, or had spread out our hands in prayer to a foreign god,
21 would not God discover this, for he knows the secrets of the heart?
22 Rather, on account of you we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for slaughter.
23 Wake up! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake! Do not reject forever.
24 Why do you hide your face? Have you forgotten our misery and our oppression?
25 For our soul is bowed down to the dust. Our body clings to the ground.
This Psalm seems to start off so good, and then it is if doubt creeps in. But how could we blame them? Israel has been defeated in one of their battles for no apparent moral infraction of their own, they don’t know if they will win the war, and now they face death and feel like innocent “sheep to be slaughtered”. Have you ever felt like this? “God, You know I am trying my hardest to do this the right way, but yet it seems as if You are the one resisting me. This work is for You, I have done nothing wrong, why would You allow it to be destroyed? Israel has the innocence of a child here.
A little girl was observed by her pastor standing outside the preschool Sunday School classroom between Sunday School and worship, waiting for her parents to come and pick her up for "big church." The pastor noticed that she clutched a big storybook under her arms with the obvious title, "Jonah and the Whale." Feeling a little playful, he knelt down beside the little girl and began a conversation. "What’s that you have in your hand?", he asked. "This is my storybook about Jonah and the Whale," she answered. "Tell me something, little girl," he continued, "do you believe that story about Jonah and that whale to be the truth?" The little girl implored, "Why of course I believe this story to be the truth!" He inquired further, "you really believe that a man can be swallowed up by a big whale, stay inside him all that time, and come out of there still alive and OK? You really believe all that can be true?" She declared, "Absolutely, this story is in the Bible and we studied about it in Sunday School today!" Then the pastor asked, "Well, little girl, can you prove to me that this story is the truth?" She thought for a moment and then said, "Well, when I get to Heaven, I’ll ask Jonah." The pastor then asked, "Well, what if Jonah’s not in Heaven?" She then put her hands on her little hips and sternly declared, "Then YOU can ask him!"
According to the prophet Ezekiel, God reacts to and restores His profaned Name, profaned by the actions and the condition of his people in exile. He does so by acting on behalf of his people, doing what they cannot do. In Ezekiel 20 and 36, God reminds Israel that he has always acted for the sake of His own Name, even when the visible circumstances demanded another strategy. God’s actions in history have always been directed toward Himself, for His own sake, and the prophets and psalmists know that YHWH’s directed actions are the best that Israel can ever hope for or imagine.
In Psalm 44, God listens to Israel speak, but He Himself never speaks at all. He just acts. That is so typical of our own life experience. We see God’s actions that often defy reason and resist explanation. Yet Psalm 44 lays out a way of resolving the mystery: we interpret God’s actions in terms of his “unfailing love.” We, as parents, sometimes are acting in our children’s best interests when it appears to them that it is for our own sake only, not theirs. Similarly, when every other picture of God fails, we have to throw ourselves on God’s unfailing love, for “God is love” (1 John 4:8). When we cannot understand what is happening in our lives, and why, especially when it does not seem to be related to moral failure, as with Israel (44:17–18), we can see a parallel between Israel’s dilemma and ours.
Yet even when the phrase “for your sake”..
Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!
is resolved in the chord of “your unfailing love,” the mystery still remains, and we trust not in the mystery but in God’s “unfailing love,” which is God’s greatest revelation and His greatest mystery.
Transition:
But what does this mean in the real world? When God acts for his own sake (not for ours), how does that benefit us, if at all? First we remember His work in our live and give Him praise for it:
I. Praise to God (vv.5-8)
I. Praise to God (vv.5-8)
The psalmist acknowledges that Israel’s past victories came directly from the Lord, and he praises the Lord.
Through you we push down our foes; through your name we tread down those who rise up against us.
“we push back our enemies […] we tread down our foes.”
The word translated “push down/push back” occurs in poetic sections of the Bible in reference to smiting Israel’s enemies. The verb “tread down” is used of trampling Israel’s enemies. The verbs are Hebrew imperfect, suggesting a review of Israel’s past practices: “Through your name we would trample our enemies.” The imagery is that of an ox that gores its way forward as it also tramples those in its path.
For I do not trust my bow, and my sword cannot give me victory.
“I put no trust in my bow, my sword.”
Literally, “Indeed, I do not trust in my bow.” The first word, “For/indeed”; this word brings an emphasis to the fact that the speaker does not trust his bow. The bow was usually made of wood or an animal’s horn. The sword was the most common weapon of ancient Israel and made of bronze or iron; most likely this is the short, straight-bladed sword.10
In God we boast all the day, and we will give thanks to your name forever. Selah
In this poem now, we come across the first, and only “Selah” — This is certainly a pivotal pause
Transition:
I. Praise to God (vv.5-8)
I. Praise to God (vv.5-8)
This Selah is the transition into the rest of the Psalm, into the pain of Israel:
I. Praise to God II. Pain to Israel (vv.9-22)
I. Praise to God II. Pain to Israel (vv.9-22)
Up through verse 8, the poem sounds like a victory celebration, but with verse 9 the present and perplexing reality sets in, “but now”—that is, the present situation defies our understanding of what we know about God from the past.
But you have rejected us and disgraced us and have not gone out with our armies.
“But”
The whole tone of the psalm switches with these three letters. The same can happen with us—what feels like an instant, our whole world changes. We read the Word. We hear testimonies. Yet we can find ourselves saying, “Yeah, that’s great for them, but my case is different, I am really suffering here”
This is physical suffering. The Israelites are defeated, how do I know? next verse...
You have caused us to pull back from the enemy, and so those who hate us have plundered for themselves.
“Those who hate us have plundered for themselves”
This detail gives us the picture of defeat, since plundering followed defeat. Our enemy has used our own stuff against us, Morale gets even worse here:
You have given us as sheep for food, and among the nations you have scattered us.
defenseless sheep scattered among the nations— this is Israel’s consequences of disobedience to the covenant from Leviticus 26:33
And I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw a sword behind you; and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a ruin.
Morale is still worse:
You have sold your people cheaply, and did not profit by their price.
They feel they are of no value to God—
Here God is acting like he is on the enemy’s side. Isaiah adapts this expression to speak of redemption: “You were sold for nothing, and without money you will be redeemed”
3 For thus says Yahweh: “You were sold for nothing, and you shall be redeemed without money.”
In Israel’s psychological suffering, they cannot see this and it gets worse:
13 You have made us a taunt to our neighbors, a derision and a scorn to those around us. 14 You have made us a byword among the nations, a shaking of the head among the peoples. 15 All day long my disgrace is before me, and the shame of my face covers me, 16 because of the voice of the taunter and the reviler, because of the enemy and the avenger.
They are mocked by their neighbors
“I don’t understand, Lord,” the psalmist writes. “We’ve heard about what You did for Your people, yet we’re struggling. It doesn’t make sense.”
Here is their perplexity:
All this has befallen us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant.
we had not been false to your covenant. According to the Torah, a breach of the covenant would result in punishment (Deut. 4:25–31; 6:13–15; 8:19–20), but obviously they were unaware of any such breach.
18 Our heart has not turned back, and our steps have not turned aside from your way. 19 But you have crushed us in a place of jackals, and have covered us with deep shadow. 20 If we had forgotten the name of our God, or had spread out our hands in prayer to a foreign god, 21 would not God discover this, for he knows the secrets of the heart? 22 Rather, on account of you we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for slaughter.
The sense is that they have not been unfaithful “even though” God has crushed them.
Frank Derek Kidner comments: “In the heart-searching of verses 17–22, the important fact begins to emerge that disaster is one thing, and disgrace quite another. The defeats which seemed to prove God’s withdrawal in wrath, now suggest only His refusal to be hurried or to do what everyone has expected of Him. The psalm is exploring the baffling fluctuations that have their counterpart in Christian history: periods of blessing and barrenness, advance and retreat, which may correspond to no apparent changes of men’s loyalty or methods.”
--Kidner, Psalms 1–72
Transition:
I. Praise to God II. Pain to Israel (vv.9-22)
I. Praise to God II. Pain to Israel (vv.9-22)
So we see Israel exposed and vulnerable and so based on the Praise of past works, based on the pain they are experiencing, they bring a final cry to our Lord:
I. Praise to God II. Pain to Israel III. Petition to Recompense (vv.23-25)
I. Praise to God II. Pain to Israel III. Petition to Recompense (vv.23-25)
The psalmist calls upon God to redeem His people.
Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!
The psalmist refers to God by the substitute name for Yahweh (’adonay). Note that the covenant name Yahweh does not occur in the psalm at all, perhaps because God’s absence as Israel’s helper is so prevalent in the psalm as not to merit the use of the name of Israel’s God. Even so, the presence of Israel’s Lord hovers over the prayer and gives boldness to the final petition “because of your unfailing love” (hesed).
Why do you hide your face? Have you forgotten our misery and our oppression?
Has God forgotten?
For our soul is bowed down to the dust. Our body clings to the ground.
“our bodies cling to the ground”
Literally, “our belly clings to the ground.”
So What?
So What?
What is God worth to you?
The psalm ends with the key word of the covenant relationship,
Rise up! Be a help for us, and redeem us for the sake of your loyal love.
“your loyal/unfailing love [hesed].”
It is in the covenant that they have lost their perspective, and it is in that relationship that it has to be recovered.
Job, before his theological crisis, could say only, “My ears had heard of you,” but after the voice of God out of the whirlwind, he could say: [(Job 42:5)]
By the ear’s hearing I heard of you, but now my eye has seen you.
“Now my eyes have seen you”
In comparison, our psalmist can say only, “We have heard it with our ears” (Ps. 44:1), but his spiritual reserves are now betting on the final word of the psalm, the “unfailing love” of God (44:26). In fact, despite the daunting circumstances that have left much unexplained, the psalmist resorts to the mystery of God, expressed in one simple phrase, “for your sake” (44:22). This phrase takes a slightly different form than the phrase popularized by the prophets, especially Ezekiel, “for the sake of my name” (Ezek. 20 and 36). This short phrase sums up God’s activity on his people’s behalf, the actions he will take to restore His name among a languishing people who have, by their actions and humiliated condition, profaned His name. Our psalmist’s faith and that of other psalmists join the prophets in declaring that God acts “for His own sake.” This faith has come in our present psalm to the brink of disaster, when the psalmist throws himself on this small phrase with a huge meaning, “for your sake.”
Kidner aptly comments: “This psalm is perhaps the clearest example of a search for some other cause of national disaster than guilt and punishment. It comes within sight of an answer at the point of its greatest perplexity: ‘Nay for thy sake we are slain.’ ”20
Sometimes this is the only and, if we trust the eyes of faith, the best answer we can give.
A gift greater than fairness
A gift greater than fairness
The sentiments shared by the psalmist in Psalm 44 are similar to those shared by Habakkuk as the prophet wrestles with God’s fairness. The matter at issue for Habakkuk is how God can use a godless nation like Babylon to bring discipline on Judah, a more righteous nation. And as the prophet continues to wrestle with his thoughts, something incredible happens. At the end of his book, Habakkuk concludes with these words:
Though the fig tree does not blossom, nor there be fruit on the vines; the yield of the olive tree fails, and the cultivated fields do not yield food; the flock is cut off from the animal pen, and there is no cattle in the stalls,
Yet I will rejoice in Yahweh; I will exult in the God of my salvation.
Yahweh, my Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer; he causes me to walk on my high places. To the choirmaster with stringed instruments.
This passage in Habakkuk ought to encourage us & our brothers & sisters who can relate to the struggle of the prophet and the psalmist.
In Conclusion:
We may conclude with Paul’s use of this psalm in Romans, when he asks: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” He answers his question by quoting Psalm 44:22, recognizing that the psalmist has resolved the mystery of why we suffer “as sheep to be slaughtered” when we have done nothing wrong: it is to make us conquerors through “him who loved us” (Rom. 8:35–37). When we do not understand God’s actions in our world and cannot figure out God’s work in our own lives, we throw ourselves on the “unfailing love” of God “that is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” from which nothing in all creation can separate us (Rom. 8:39).
When God acts for his own sake, he is doing what is best for us.
It is okay for a believer to have brief moments of questioning, and even some doubt, but it is indeed brief
Jesus said in John 10:27-29
27 My sheep listen to my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 And I give them eternal life, and they will never perish forever, and no one will seize them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can seize them from the Father’s hand.
We are secure in the love of God IN Christ Jesus our Lord (39b).
1. You are not wrong to wonder whether God has forgotten you or unfriended you – for a short time.
2. But when those doubts arise, you must remind yourself of the truth of God’s Word.
3. Nothing, no, nothing can separate the believer from the love of Christ.