It’s not always easy to place a psalm in David’s life-line but Psalm 13 has obviously emerged from time when he has come near the end of his spiritual resources:
‘How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?’ (verses 1-2)
Reference to an ‘enemy’ may be taking us to that period when David was on the run from King Saul but he is certainly under pressure and needing to know a strength beyond his own strength. He finds this as he turns his mind towards his past experience of his God. Despite the pressure, the pain and the inner turmoil he can meditate on the ways God has shown His love and goodness in his life. In movingly simple words he writes:
‘I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the LORD’s praise, for he has been good to me.’ (verses 5-6)
Only a man who knows his God and has experienced all that flows from Him could write this. In the outworking of God’s will it has fallen to David to go through a challenging time but this is not an indication of God’s absence. The God who brought obvious blessings in the past is with him to take him forward in His loving and good will. For some reason those mono-syllabic words ‘he has been good to me’ resonate powerfully with me this morning. Sometimes counting your blessings as the old hymn exhorts us doesn’t work as well as we would like. The problem is getting it all from the head to the heart. There are days when nothing seems to work to take us forward with hope. This is when we need to focus on the supreme expression of God’s goodness to us, the ultimate blessing. I believe Paul in the midst of his many pressures would do this. Conscious of the broken world in which he lives and how that brokenness often touches individual lives he writes:
‘What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?’ (Romans 8: 31-32)
This is where another old hymn comes to mind:
‘Oh, make me understand it,
Help me to take it in,
What it meant to Thee, the Holy One,
To bear away my sin.’
To focus on the extent of God’s love for us as individuals that He would not hold back His most precious possession for our good is the way forward for us and the way out of the days of disappointment, disorientation and despair. It needs to be taken in until it becomes part of our spiritual DNA. I was reminded this morning in one of Sinclair Ferguson’s books of Polycarp, a second century Christian martyr. Aged 83 he was brought before the Proconsul of Smyrna and called upon to recant his faith. He replied:
‘Since you are vainly urgent that, as you say, I should swear by the fortune of of Caesar, and pretend not to know who I am and what I am, hear me declare with boldness, I am a Christian. And if you wish to learn what the doctrines of Christianity are, appoint me a day and you shall hear them.’
These are the words of a man who has ‘taken it in.’ The truth of who Jesus is and what He has accomplished for Polycarp is as much part of him as his own personal identity and cannot be denied. Now what do I do with this example? Do I sigh, put it down to an exceptional individual, think how wonderful it must be to this kind of person? Actually I believe this faith is God’s will for us all. Does He really want us paddling in the shallows of His revelation to us in Christ? Paul speaks of Christians being given ‘fulness in Christ’ (Colossians 2: 10). It is out of this fulness that we are called to think and speak and act so that our very lives are witness to what God has done for us in Christ. The word ‘martyr’ means ‘witness.‘
In many ways we are better placed than David. We have the full story of God’s revelation to humankind as it climaxed in Jesus. We cannot allow ourselves to be levered away from that. As David might say that must be our song even in the darkest days:
‘I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the LORD’s praise, for he has been good to me.’ (verses 5-6)
