The Spiritual Discipline of Remembering

When life is troubled it is important to remember. If one does not use one's memory life will be extremely difficult. In Asaph's 77th Psalm, one finds Asaph, again, like in his 73rd, deeply struggling with the attributes of God in the midst of trouble (77:2). The questions Asaph asks of God are questions about God's character, questions that call God's very attributes into question (77:7-9):

"Will God reject His people forever?"
"Will God never be favorable again?"
"Has He ceased being loving and kind?"
"Are God's promises even true? They seem to have ended forever."
"Has God forgotten to be gracious?"
"Has God stopped being compassionate because He is angry?" (my paraphrase)

Asaph challenges God's favor, God's presence with His people, God's love, God's faithfulness to His promises, God's grace, and God's compassion. So what does Asaph do, and what should the reader of the Psalm's do when they feel this way?

Remember.

"I shall remember the deeds of the Lord;
Surely I will remember Your wonders of old.
I will meditate on all Your work
And muse on Your deeds." (77:11-12)

Asaph remembers because currently life has dealt him blows by which He questions the nearness of God. God seems distant and different. All that remains is memory of what God has done. What is remembered is what is "old."

Remembering is an important spiritual discipline, sometimes, it is all one has.

What specifically does Asaph remember?

"You have by Your power redeemed Your people,
The sons of Jacob and Joseph." (77:15)

Asaph remembers that God's people, Israel, have been redeemed. They have been brought out of slavery into freedom. After years of slavery under an oppressive Pharaoh God delievered His people from Egypt. Asaph remembers God's redemption of Israel.

God's people are to remember God's rescue of them. Remember Egypt and Exodus. Satan has been defeated at the cross, and is no longer one's Master. One was in slavery to sin, and now, the Passover Lamb, Jesus, has died in the place of sinners, and has brought sinners to God and out of Egypt.

Remember the Gospel of redemption when you feel as if the loving, compassionate, faithful, gracious, "I am with you always" God is unloving, disapproving, without compassion, unfaithful, angry, and far away. Remember those times when you did feel as if you had been "led...like a flock" by a caring Shepherd (77:20).

Remembering is for endurance. Endurance is the Christian life, and the very impulse of endurance arises when God's presence in your life is called into question. God has not forgotten to be gracious to you. If you are trusting the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Jesus is your Shepherd, and He has promised that you will not be snatched out of His hand (Jn. 10:28). Sheep wander, but the best Shepherd never loses a sheep.

Endure by remembering.

Charles Spurgeon on Asaph's 73rd Psalm

The other day I posted a blog regarding Asaph's 73rd Psalm, and Charles Spurgeon, in his Treasury of David, came alongside to further illuminate:

Verse 12: “Look! See! Consider! Here is the standing enigma! The crux of Providence! The stumbling-block of faith! Here are the unjust rewarded and indulged, and that not for a day or an hour, but in perpetuity. From their youth up the men, who deserve perdition, revel in prosperity. They deserve to be hung in chains, and chains are hung about their necks; they are worthy to be chased from the world and yet the world becomes all their own. Poor purblind sense cries, Behold this! Wonder, and be amazed, and make this square with providential justice, if you can…both wealth and health are their dowry. No bad debts and bankruptcies weight them down, but robbery and usury pile up their substance. Money runs to money, gold pieces fly in flocks; the rich grow richer, the proud grow prouder. Lord, how is this?”

Verse 13: “Poor Asaph! He questions the value of holiness when its wages are paid in the coin of affliction."

Verse 18: “The Psalmist’s sorrow had culminated, not in the fact that the ungodly prospered, but that God had arranged it so: had it happened by mere chance, he would have wondered, but could not have complained; but how the arranger of all things could so dispense his temporal favours, was the vexatious question. Here, to meet the case, he sees that the divine hand purposely placed these men in prosperous and eminent circumstances, not with the intent to bless them but the very reverse…the same hand which led them up to their Tarpeian rock, hurled them down from it.”

Verse 25: "Thus, then, [The Psalmist] turns away from the glitter which fascinated him to the true gold which was his real treasure. He felt that his God was much better to him than all the wealth, health, honour, and peace, which he had so much envied in the worldling…He bade all things else go, that he might be filled with his God."

When the Only Good is God

Some meditations on a Psalm of Asaph:

"Whom have I in heaven but You?
And besides You, I desire nothing on earth.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever...
But as for me, the nearness of God is my good;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
That I may tell of all Your works." Ps. 73:25-28

What will I do when the only good I can see in my life is my God, and when He is only dimly seen? What will I do when the plague, the disease, is in my body, and I notice that the wicked around me are healthy and happy? What will I do when I am lonely, the friends are dead and gone or only broken relationships remain, and others are surrounded by frienship? What will I do when there is no ease? Physically I'm shot, mentally I'm distracted, forgetful, depressed, little remembrance of God or His Word or friends and family, and emotionally I'm either dry to the point of no feeling or like a waterfall of out-of-control emotions? What will I do when the echoes of Christian culture and the words of well-meaning friends that are ringing in my ears is that blessing is my destiny, healing is my right, and with Jesus all things get better, and I am experiencing nothing of the sort? What will I do?

Honestly I don't know, but I pray I will open my Bible and listen to the counsel of the Holy Spirit in passages like Psalm 73.

I pray that even now my friends who know Jesus, and those that surround them watching them suffer with cancer and with brain tumors will remember that when everything fails: "flesh"--one's body--"heart"--one's dreams, desires, emotions, aspirations, longings, affections. When all of that fails that they would remember that God is their strength and that God is their portion.

For the one who trusts Jesus the failing of flesh and the failing of heart is all momentary anyway. The body will be restored and resurrected, and the heart will receive unbridled joy and the fulfillment of all one as ever wanted or all one ever dreamed would be possible. This will all take place in the new heavens and the new earth, and, most importantly, Jesus will be there.

The best good is God, and He will be near, because He will dwell with His people, and, in fact, does so even now with the cancer and with the tumor. Somehow all affliction is momentary and light, and the weight of glory ahead outweighs tiny afflictions like cancer and brain tumors, but it sure as hell won't feel that way sometimes. It will feel like all is failing, and, like this Psalm says, it "may fail."

But God. But God. But God.

Psalm 73 gives me the testimony of a godly man who experienced all of that and what he did in that state. I pray that that is what I will do, and that this is what you will do: First, remember that the end of the wicked, they that don't repent of their sins and trust Jesus, is destruction. Even if happy and healthy and wealthy till death--God despises them (Ps. 73:18-20). Second, repent of envy and being embittered (Ps. 73:21). Third, desire the only good one has, which is God (Ps. 73:28). Stay close to Jesus. Third, start talking about God and the things He has done (Ps. 73:28). Do this by preaching to your own soul and by telling others.

God is good all the time, even when every other good in one's life appears to be gone.

This is good news.

What the Selah!

Eugene Peterson, one of the best living Christian wordsmiths, offers this humorous take on the meaning of Selah--an oft repeated word in the Psalms--of which biblical scholars still can't figure out the meaning:

"Lacking a clear consensus from the scholars I have felt free to offer the less scholarly but more entertaining suggestion that Selah is a Philistine expletive that David learned during those hard years when he was banished from Saul's court and knocking around with ruffians and outlaws in the wilderness. He used it whenever he broke a string on his harp." Answering God, 148.

I like it.

Selah.

A Prayer for the Wicked

"Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime." Ps. 58:8

Can't Pray that Psalm

I don't know about you but I can't pray this Psalm, at least this verse, honestly:

"Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity,
And I have trusted in the Lord without wavering..." Ps. 26:1

Without wavering, C'mon!

However, when I look a few verses later I find that I can pray this:

"...Redeem me, and be gracious to me." 26:11b