Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God! I will praise Him again- my Savior and my God! Psalm 42: 11, NLT.
Holy Father, as we draw close to the end of the study of this psalm, we ask that You will continue to be our teacher and our guide. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
“Oh God my rock,” I cry, “Why have You forgotten me? Why must I wander around in grief, oppressed by my enemies?” Their taunts break my bones. They scoff, “Where is this God of yours” (9, 10)? There is so much going on in this section of the psalm. Before we look at anything else, let us consider this lament, “Their taunts break my bones.” As a child growing up in the Republic of Panama, there was a saying that I heard repeated quite often, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me!” I believe you have heard me refute the veracity of that statement, because words do hurt; and how!
The psalmist is being human. He is baring his soul. He is making himself vulnerable. He is saying to his enemies, “Yes, you can hurt me with your words.” It is true, that our words can “make or break,” someone. How careful we must be with our words! Once they are spoken, they cannot be taken back. The wounds caused by our words can last a lifetime. Long after we have forgotten why they were spoken, we still remember what was said. And the memory oftentimes reactivates the pain. The next time we are about to utter words in anger, let us stop, think, and pray. If we do, I guarantee you, that many things will be left unsaid, and we will all be the better for it.
I believe that all of us, at one time or another, have felt forgotten by God. It seemed as if everything that could go wrong, was going wrong, and there was no sign of help in sight. “God, are You there? If You are, please help me!” Sometimes that is the cry of the soul. Yesterday, the psalmist felt God’s love being poured out over him. Today, He cannot find God! The beauty in all of this, is that God never loses sight of His children. Our eyes may be so full of tears that we do not recognize Him. Our hearts might be so overwhelmed with pain, that we cannot sense His presence. The taunts of the enemy may be so loud that we cannot hear His “sweet small voice.” But if we can only learn to see, sense, and hear, “in the Spirit,” we will be all right!
The psalmist wanders around in grief, while his enemies “oppress” him. In the same way the children of Israel wandered in the desert for forty years when they could have arrived in Canaan in eleven days; many of us may have a lot of wandering to do. If the Israelites had only learned the lesson of complete trust in God when Pharaoh’s army came after them, when they needed water, when they wanted food, how much pain could have been averted, how many lives spared, how much time saved! I pray that we will be quick learners. Forty years is a long time!
The taunt is the same as at the beginning, “Where is this God of yours?” You know my friends, what might seem to be a taunt, just might be a disguised request to see God in all His glory! The nations of old had heard all about what YHWH had done for His people in delivering them from Egypt. They had also heard how God had made time go backward as a sign of Hezekiah’s healing, and had gone to “see” this God. The Greeks in Jesus’ day, had heard about the great “One and Only” Jesus, and had come inquiring, “We would see Jesus.” If they should inquire of us, “Where is this God of yours? Would we be able to introduce Him to them?
We will continue tomorrow.