E-note 5/27: A God for the Weak

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Psalm 13 begins in utter darkness: "How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?" (13:1-2). There is no darkness more dark than when God's shining face is hidden from you. No brilliance of earthly goods can illuminate the darkness that comes when God seems to have turned away from a beloved child.

And so this Psalm begins with some strikingly bad PR for God. God is late. God has forgotten. God is looking the other way. All this leaves the saint in tremendous pain. The pain is there every day, in fact.

From one perspective it is surprising that this Psalm made it into the Psalter. I can think of several corporations and presidents who would rig a cover-up before they would allow such bad press to tarnish such a great name. That's one perspective, the perspective that only strength deserves publicity. It is the perspective that is ashamed of weakness in God's people and a perspective that is ashamed of a God who is for the weak. But, of course, that perspective is not the gospel perspective.

From a gospel perspective this Psalm is an exceedingly reasonable contribution to the ancient Church's hymn book. For here we find the whole Church (remember, this is the Psalter) taking upon its lips the experience of one of its weakest members--the King of Israel no less! This dark, personal experience of David's overflows the banks of an individual story and floods the collective personality of God's people. One man's lament becomes the lament of all. One man's sufferings become the sufferings of all. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ accounts for this, for only because of the gospel are we all allowed to be as weak as the weakest of us. "Mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15). And are they not also Christ's sufferings we share?

There is something else about this Psalm that sticks out only because of the gospel: the lamentation is Godward. The Psalmist does not complain about God to man. He complains about God to God. Nor does the Psalmist wait until he is better to go to God. He exposes his raw wounded heart while it remains raw and wounded. How does he know that God is not ashamed of his weakness? Only because of the gospel, that gospel which God had promised long before the incarnation, "promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures" (Romans 1:2). It is the gospel that explains why Psalm 13 is in the Psalter, for here we again see God coming to us in our weakness, when our circumstances would have us charge God as unfaithful and have us measure him as more distant than our troubles, even in this disorienting state that our trials and weakness and faithlessness have concocted, God comes to us. That is the gospel! He revives and renews our faith. He does it not by lifting us up and out of our circumstances, no, not usually, but rather he comes and sits with us in them, showing us again his wounds. The wounds that make all our sufferings in faith a share in his own sufferings, the wounds that remind us that God has been good to us and will very soon renew the whole creation.

Psalm 13 ends not with a new earth (though it draws nearer every day) but with a new man: "I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me" (13:6). How did it happen? The weak drew near to the God who had graciously revealed himself to be a God who is not ashamed of their weakness. God then graciously drew near to the weak and revived their faith in him, his goodness, his gospel, his Christ.

Grace & peace, John