-If someone asks you the question: how are you? What’s the correct response? Isn’t it generally “I’m good, how are you?” It’s supposed to be an “as you’re passing” comment, right? But every once in a while, someone says something that catches you off guard and changes the trajectory of the conversation, so then you realize you need to stop moving and engage a little further.

-Or if that’s never happened to you, you know the difference between a conversation and a real conversation? You’re spending time with some friends, and then someone says something that takes everything to a whole different level, like this just got REAL! That’s a picture of what happens in this Psalm. The first section the Psalmist goes along like many previous Psalms praising God for the ways He’s worked in history, but then in vs. 9 things get REAL.

-What we’ll see in today’s Psalm is how God’s past work can lead to present hope in the midst of difficulty. And if you were here last week, this probably sounds really similar to Psalm 42-43 which we looked at last week! This is a similar reminder of God’s provision towards us today, and I really think these Psalms are timely for us because many people are asking about the goodness of God today, which is a shift from the training I got in church when I was growing up! Most of the defenses of Christianity I had growing up focused on the truth of our faith, and we need to understand the truthfulness of it, but friends, Christianity is also good and beautiful, and I think we need to grow in our ability to defend the goodness and beauty of Christianity, and that starts with us living out the faith we proclaim, and following the ways of living that we find in a place like the Psalms. 

-Let’s read it, and then as we work our way through it, I’ll show you what I mean, and to help us orient what we’re going to see in this Psalm, many of the commentators I read connected this to the book of Job. If you don’t know that book, it tells the story of a man named Job, and the Bible says he was a man of complete integrity who feared God and turned away from evil. God allows Satan to tempt Job by taking away his riches, killing his children, and then bringing a painful skin disease on Job. Job’s friends are convinced he had sinned against God, but Job constantly defends his innocence, and at the end of the book God talks to Job and asks him where he was when the world was created, if he can take the wild animals, if he can control the weather. And after getting the scolding of a lifetime from God, look at how Job responds: 

-That last verse is where I took the title of this sermon from: my ears had heard these things about God, but then Job got to experience and see the realities that God is God and he is not. But what if Job’s story didn’t end with an encounter with God? What if his comment stopped at “I had heard reports about you” but he didn’t get an answer to his prayers? That’s what we’re going to discover today.

READ/PRAY (pg. 495)

1. God’s Past Deliverance (1-8)

-The first thing the Psalmist does is bring to mind the ways God had provided for His people in the past, and that tells us that his ancestors have been the faithful ones who were obedient to God’s commands to teach and train their children. This is one of the joys we have of telling our stories to our kids. So with just this first verse, we’re already at a point for us to consider in our own lives.

-Do you share with your kids/grandkids/friends the ways God has worked in your lives? This verse assumes that people will be sharing with others how God takes care of them, and we so often neglect to share or dismiss God’s provision in our lives because we’re too busy comparing ourselves to other people. God doesn’t just work in our lives for us to enjoy his benefits, He works in our lives so that we can be an encouragement to others to remind them of how God has provided for us. When I was growing up my dad always called them “bricks in your foundation.” Friends, our faith isn’t a blind trust, it’s based on previous experience and precedent that God has been faithful in the past, which means we can trust Him to be faithful in the present, and will continue being faithful to us into the future. We aren’t asked to trust things without any evidence.

-When I lived in WY, we’d have Mormons stop by the house I lived in on a regular basis, partly because we had students from a local Bible school crash at our house in the afternoon and they’d debate the Mormons every time they stopped by. They stopped by once when they weren’t around and I got stuck talking to them and they asked me if I’d ever read the Book of Mormon (which I have read excerpts of) and they asked me what I thought of it, I said I thought it was a waste of time because there was no historical evidence to the claims in the book, and I was told (and I quote) “there are evidences, but that’s not the point of the book.” So I obviously took the bait and asked what the point was and I was told: “to affirm your faith.” If the only purpose of a sacred text is to give good “vibes” then don’t trust that book! Part of the reason we need to share our faith is because there are people like Mormons who will share about their vibes!

-And look at the things God had done for their ancestors before: God removed one group of people so that they could walk into the land, and they knew this was God’s work and not anything they did, it was all because of God’s blessing being on this people. And it wasn’t just for their ancestors, do you notice the change of tenses of the verbs starting in vs. 4, it goes from past tense to present tense. God had proven Himself previously, and for the people today. 

-God led them to victories over their enemies, they know that apart from God’s mighty hand all their weapons would be useless. So because of God’s past deliverance, and protection of His people today, they respond with vs. 8. As I said previously, God doesn’t ask us to have blind faith, God invites us to remember how He has worked in our lives to draw us to Himself and because of God’s previous faithfulness we can trust that He’ll do the same thing in the future, and if you haven’t been a Christian for very long, that’s why God calls you into a community of people who can share how God has worked in their lives!

-We’re now at a word that is repeated regularly throughout the Psalms, so it’s time for my annual Babylon Bee joke. And the reason it’s so funny is because it’s probably not that far from the truth! Most scholars believe this is a note for an extended instrumental where the readers (or singers) are supposed to pause and reflect on what they’d just proclaimed together. So when we come to it in this series, we take a minute to intentionally pause and reflect on what we just studied. I’ll watch the clock so you don’t need to, but take a minute to reflect on your story of God’s provision in your life, and thank Him for it!

• God’s Present Desertion (9-16)

-If this Psalm just stopped after verse 8, it would be an incredibly positive thing, right? The Psalmist has just said that we boast in God all day long and will praise His name forever, but then he goes on to say that God has responded by rejecting and humiliating them. So the people are being faithful, and God is being unfaithful. Now I don’t know about you, but this reads like many of the stories I read of accusations against God today, generally said something like: how could a loving God send anyone to hell? Or how is it fair that God would be so exclusive? And that tension point is what we’re going to be sitting in for the rest of this Psalm.

-A couple weeks ago, I shared about an interview I listened to with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, but I read another interview with him this past week (he just released an autobiography, so he’s making the interview rounds right now). John was notorious for debating the guys who were referred to as “the new atheists,” guys you may have heard of like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (they had their moment and now it’s seen as kind of passed, especially when Richard Dawkins has started calling himself a cultural Christian). One of the questions Lennox was asked was the biggest challenge for Christians today, and he talks about what we see in this Psalm:

-I think he’s onto something, don’t you? The biggest issues we have to face as Christians today are related to pain and suffering, and I think that’s true. But another piece we have to remember is another thing Lennox says here, that those questions aren’t just a problem for Christians, it’s a problem that you have to do something with, and I fully believe that Christianity provides the best answer to this question and problem. That doesn’t fix all the issues in the world, but it gives us a different perspective to those problems, and that’s why we need a Psalm like this that helps us know how to voice our complaints with God, so if you are feeling abandoned from God and feel like you have no purpose to your life, just wait, because we’ll see some resolution in here.

-Look at all the ways this Psalmist is saying they have been rejected. In their wars, they’re the ones running in retreat, they’re being plundered, they’re being scattered among the nations, their neighbors mock and laugh at them and their enemies are heaping on the abuse. They’re the butt of every joke, they’re defeated in every battle, and the worst of all is that it doesn’t seem like God even cares. 

-Now, I’ve been made fun of for my faith before, I’ve been made fun of for being a pastor before, but I’ve never faced this level of suffering because of my faith where I wondered if even God had given up on me. And this is for someone who says that he is following after God! If this is how someone who follows God is treated, what hope is there for the rest of the world? Is God really good in a world where it looks like the enemies and evil wins? I feel like a great modern-day example of this is with technology, like one of original mottos of Facebook was “move fast and break things.” At least Google used to pretend to care about people, back when their motto was “do no evil,” but don’t worry, that’s no longer one of their mottos either! And both of these companies have gotten into AI, and the whole AI model seems to be: these programs are so smart it’s terrifying, so we need the government to make laws about it, but since you’re not making any laws, we’re just going to continue making them better and better, and those companies are making billions of dollars for their founders! We see evil prospering all around us today, don’t we? So how should we respond? Let’s keep looking at this Psalm:

• God’s Future Rescue (17-26) 

-We’ve seen one way we respond in the beginning of this Psalm, we intentionally remember God’s work in the past, but then the Psalmist goes on to demonstrate another aspect that God calls us to live out: being faithful in the present so that we can trust in God’s future rescue. Look at how this Psalmist continues here and pay careful attention to all the pronouns in this section!

-All these things happened to them, all the things that we read about in the previous section, BUT what did he do? They remembered God, they faithfully obeyed His covenant, their hearts didn’t turn back, their steps faithfully followed the ways God has commanded them to live, BUT God has crushed them. In most of the Psalms, the opposite is true: God is faithful and the Psalmist has to acknowledge and confess his sin, but not in this case!

-So he doubles down on his innocence, if they had forgotten God’s name (not literally but forgetting to call out to God) and worshipped another god, God would have known because He knows everything and then hold on to vs. 22 because it comes up in the NT, but the Psalmist here is saying that because of God they are being put to death and being slaughtered like sheep.

-And this Psalm ends with a final plea to God to wake up and rouse Himself into action. And the words are intentionally contrasted with the Psalmist, who had been faithful in following after God and hadn’t forgotten to obey and worship the one true God, but God has forgotten His people, and their abuse means they’re crawling around on the ground like snakes. And the last verse of this Psalm reminds God of His character, where if He won’t respond to all the needs of the Psalmist, won’t He at least remember His chesed, His covenant faithful love? I try to point out that Hebrew word every time it comes up in the Psalms because it’s really hard to translate into English. The best summary I’ve found is in the Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones where she says it’s God’s “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.” If that is true about God, won’t He respond to His people suffering and hurting? 

-One of the realities about being a human in this world is we tend to view the world as though it’s a meritocracy, if we do good we’re supposed to receive good, and if we do evil we’re supposed to expect that to return to us. But that’s not Christianity, that’s kharma which comes out of Easter mysticism. And we even see this Psalmist assuming that’s the way the world works. He says he’s been faithful, he’s obeyed God, which means God should be responding with blessing and protection, right? At one level he’s right, God had promised that if His people were faithful to the covenant then blessings would come, but sometimes trials are also meant to be purifying and refining, helping to draw us closer to God instead of alienating us from Him.

-Derek Kidner, a British pastor, who has written one of the best concise commentaries on the Psalms I’ve found (I read him every week when I preach through the Psalms), summarizes his thoughts on this Psalm by saying: 

-Suffering might be a battle scar rather than a punishment. Have you ever noticed how after enduring through suffering, you can see how God provided for you through it? I’ve got scars on my body that I can tell you some stories about! I can’t forget them, but I’ve also lived to tell the stories of what happened for me to get those scars. I know you all have stories of things that have happened in your lives that can be seen as battle scars now, ways that God allowed you to be refined and purified to become more holy, things that God has permitted to cause you to take steps closer to Him. When I’ve talked to you about those times in your lives, you wouldn’t necessarily want to live through them again, but you also wouldn’t trade them for the growth that happened through it. And Kidner goes on to say that a reverse (or a loss) as well as a victory might by a sign of fellowship. Think of Psalm 23, where David says that even when he walks through the valley of the shadow of death, he knows God is with him. Friends, just because you’re suffering doesn’t mean God has abandoned you, so if and when you suffer, continue calling out to God.

-And for us to understand how we apply this Psalm to our lives today, we need to look at how Paul uses it as the turning point of his Epistle of Romans. We just saw in the comments from Kidner that the feeling of desertion from God isn’t always true, and that’s exactly what Paul is talking about in this passage. If God is for us, on our side, supporting us, who is against us? The implied answer is no one! And if He gave His own Son to us, why wouldn’t He give us everything else, too? Therefore, there’s no accusation against us, no one to condemn us since God is the one who does both of those things, but if God is on our side, then there’s no condemnation, no accusation, and no separation. Think of the things that could come to those who are following God: affliction, distress, persecution. Doesn’t that sound like what we read about in Psalm 44 earlier? And Paul says it could get even worse: famine or nakedness (losing everything) danger or sword (the state or war) and then he connects it to this Psalm that we just read.

-Church, maybe Jesus actually meant it when He said that following Him means daily picking up our cross and following Him, but Paul helps us to understand that even in the middle of any kind of suffering, God is still with us because nothing can separate us from God’s love, so then Paul goes on to remind us that even as our lives are being poured out we are more than conquerors because God will never leave us. Do you believe that?

-So one of the things we’re supposed to be able to do as we follow Christ is to be able to look at suffering through a different lens because God redeems even suffering in our lives. I remember hearing someone say that every Psalm ends on a positive note, but that’s just false, and we saw this Psalm end on a negative note, feeling alienated and abandoned by God! And sometimes our live don’t end on a positive note, sometimes life is just hard! But we have 2 ways we can respond for those of us who are in Christ, the first is what we saw here: cry out to God! He has promised to never leave you and never abandon you, so even if you don’t feel Him, He is there with. Second, cry out to the church. When you’re hurting, tell others! Don’t keep it hidden, don’t keep it to yourself, God has brought us into a church to bring comfort and encouragement to us when we’re down.