A reflection on Psalm 91
Sagrada Familia
I have …
… a God who covers his children
like a mother hen,
and whose feathers
become a fortress that is
a refuge from danger,
evil
and all that destroys.
… a God who lifts me up
beyond the harm
and hatred swirling ’round me.
… a God who gathers me
in his arms
and gives me
more,
far more,
than I deserve.
… a God
whose son is,
right now,
busy making a home for me,
forever.
“If you’ll hold on to me for dear life,” says God,
“ I’ll get you out of any trouble.
I’ll give you the best of care
if you’ll only get to know and trust me.
Call me and I’ll answer, be at your side in bad times;
I’ll rescue you, then throw you a party.
I’ll give you a long life,
give you a long drink of salvation!” Psalm 91:14-16 (The Message)
One of my daughters pointed me to ‘The Message’ translation of Psalm 91. As a family we are in need of a party right now and here we find God promising us one. In the NIV and KJV it speaks of “honouring” us. I like the “party” idea better. It has a sense of joy and celebration and also echoes forward to the story of the prodigal son and the party his dad throws for him.
When you read Psalm 91 it becomes obvious that there is nothing in our own strength that we can do about our broken human condition. All we can do do is “dwell”, “rest” and seek “refuge”. God however “covers”, guards”, “lifts up” and “protects”. God is active in His care for us and all we can do is flee into His arms. But that is what we must do – fall helplessly into His arms. It is not easy. We are by nature arrogant and stubborn. Like a little child we stand stubbornly stamping our feet, arms crossed defiantly thinking we know best.
Our heavenly dad says, “Come to me my little child. I will hold you and because you have obeyed my call to fall helplessly into my arms, we will have a party.”
I don’t know about you, but a party with God sounds brilliant!
I don’t consider myself a vengeful person but I do have a tendency to want to see justice. When a wrong is done I want to the person suffer the consequences of their actions. After all, “a tooth for a tooth” or “an eye for an eye” is a good OT principle. A friend points out that we will end up with with a lot of blind and toothless people.
However, grace of course, means that I will not have to suffer the eternal consequences of my sin. My divorce, or murder or embezzlement may have temporal consequences – a broken and confused family or a gaol sentence but it will not see me separated from God for eternity if I have come to Him in faith.
So the people I admire are those who have been affected by serious consequences due to the sin/unlawful actions of others but their first response is not revenge, or even justice but have a concern for the eternal salvation of the wrong doer.
I admire them because I am not a person who immediately thinks that way. I have an understanding of grace and our own brokenness yet there are aspects that I haven’t fully grasped yet. The enormity of what Christ did for me on the cross is a fact that I acknowledge but there is an a key truth to his sacrifice that I still struggle to comprehend. Otherwise, why is it that I want to see others get their just desserts. It is just that I don’t want to suffer my own!
And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore. Hebrews 11:12
Anglesea (Australia) on a Summer’s day.
Today, before one of our daughters returns to sea-less Switzerland, we went to the beach. It was 30 degrees C and we hired a boat to paddle for a while. Quite idyllic.
However, the thing I hate about beaches is the sand – it gets into everything. For God however it is an object lesson. Grains of sand remind us that His promises are boundless. He promised Abraham a family – a spiritual family. That family is now spread throughout the whole world. From that family the Messiah came. Every Christian believer is beholden to that patriarch from 4000 years ago.
So I might find sand annoying but God tells me through each scratchy grain in my shorts, that his promises are amazing. Yet I still hope the beaches by the Sea of Crystal are nice cool, manicured lawns.
I wasn’t going to write any more about the burglary and house fire my daughters had recently but I want to finish with two photos of posters in one bedroom that survived. They say it all!
“Be Strong and Courageous” Joshua 1:9
This is a reminder to me to be aware of what I post as I may be called to live it out!
Due to recent events piled on others that have occurred this year and the consequent numbness of heart and mind, I was looking through my photos of 2012 searching for one that encapsulated the year. I came across a photo that I had used in a blog on an earlier occasion in the post: “The Providence of God.”
In this blog I reflected on how my wife’s parents met. Out of two struggling lives God created a loving family in a distant land. The place in this photo is the rest home with its message written in the lives of my wife and her sisters.
At this moment that photo summarises my thoughts: through our pains and struggles God can accomplish much. The darkness of the moment will be removed with the glory that is to come.
“De Hezenberg” near Hattem and Zwolle in the Netherlands.
Dad playing the violin – strings tensioned.
“How can God be sovereign, be in control and still give man freedom to choose? How can God be three yet one? How can Jesus be God and man? Will God condemn people who have never had the chance to hear the gospel?” … and many, many more. Hence the frustrated professor. The Bible has many imponderables – conundrums that we simply have to accept by faith. Our tendency is to choose a side and try to justify it. Wesley and Whitefield were friends but took opposing views on the sovereignty of God and the free agency of man. We have those, like Wesley, who follow Arminius’ line and make man the master of his own spiritual destiny and you have the hyper-Calvinists who won’t act because God is sovereign and in charge after all so all they need to do is sit on their sanctified behinds. It makes mission a non – priority too.
My (non) answer to these dilemmas is what I have called the “theology of the violin”. If a violin string is not under tension you cannot get a note out of it. I know because my dad played the violin and when he wasn’t watching I would “fiddle” with it. (Pun intended!)
These conundrums are like that. Say, for example, we choose man’s freedom over God’s sovereignty, then our problem is that we have an impotent God waiting for Johnny or Mary to make a “decision” for Him. He won’t act unless we choose first. This doesn’t fit with many examples in Scripture from the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart (another of my dad’s stumbling blocks) to Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. On the other hand, if we have a God who is sovereignly in control and gives us no real choice, we become automatons – robots. We have no real life of our own. Yet the Bible calls us, often, to repent and believe.
In Scripture however, these two sides are held in constant tension – like a violin string. We are called to repent and believe and, yes, the Holy Spirit is instrumental in this, and God is sovereign over every hair on our head. We see the same in some of the other examples I mentioned earlier and in many other places in the Bible. Our act of faith, knowing how immense our God is, is to accept that both sides of the string are true. Loosen one end of the violin string or the other and we find our belief or doctrine will not play a tune that glorifies God.
I have written previously about my father’s experience as an “conscripted” worker forced to work in Germany during World War 2. In the photo below, my dad (on the left) stands with two friends at a tram stop in Berlin in 1943.
At a tramstop: Berlin c1943
From the photo it is difficult to believe there is a horrendous war going on at the time it was taken. Almost four years of war have already been gone through, yet daily life, it seems, is going on as normal. Within the next two years allied troops would storm Berlin and it would become a divided city until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The people of Germany may have had an inkling, but certainly no knowledge of, what was going to happen in the future. As best they could, they were living life as normally as possible.
We may have a variety of responses to this. They must have been blind, or foolish or wilfully ignorant. Or, maybe, they were caught in a trap of their leader’s making and they felt powerless to do anything about it.
So often we live like that too. Men are good at denying symptoms of a disease until it is too late. Parents see behaviour in their children that should alert them to dangers but continue pretending that everything is ok. Or most seriously, we know there is a spiritual dimension to our lives but we fail to respond to it.
The other day I reviewed a book by Francis Spufford “Unapologetic”. What I liked about it was the struggle that he revealed as he dealt with those spiritual questions. He didn’t push that “spiritual nagging” aside but opened his life to its challenging journey.
My dad was a man like that. He was the black sheep of his family and the church. He asked questions that no one could, or wanted to, answer. However, as a child growing up it was plain to me that my dad had an on going conversation/argument/relationship with God. There was never a doubt about God’s existence. My dad just struggled to understand God’s intentions, or at other times submit to His call on my dad’s life.
One of the spiritual legacies my father left to me was the image of a real God who comes into our lives. He also showed me that this was a dynamic, on going and relationship. So, unlike the people in the photo above, there was never any doubt about how “life’s story” would end and who was in control.
Travels from Ur 