...the promise and suffering...

I have always been touched by Psalm 51, which was seen as the prayer of penitence, which David offered after his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband, Uriah:

“1 Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out my transgressions.

2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin.

3 For I know my transgressions,

and my sin is ever before me.

4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned,

and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you are justified in your sentence

and blameless when you pass judgment” (Psalm 51.1–4).

I have sinned, as have all Humans sinned, but God will still work through us; Israel has sinned, but God will still use the Israelites to bless the nations; monarchs have sinned grievously, but God still promises to bring the world into subjection under His anointed king. Unless this is sheer folly on God’s part, or indeed sheer arrogance on the psalmist’s part, this can only mean that these songs of praise, these psalms, are to be sung in the light of God’s intended future.

Someday, somehow, there will come a time when a Jesus Our King will come again and be exalted over the nations and bring God’s justice and peace to the world. And part of the task of that our coming Jesus, the King, will be, somehow, to take upon Himself not only the role of ruling Israel and the world but of bringing to its head the long entail of failure — human failure, Israel’s failure, royal failure. The prophets, especially Isaiah, point to all this as well.

And as in Isaiah, the Psalms seem to indicate that this long-awaited promise can and will only be fulfilled through a time of intense suffering. It is hard to tell whether the “suffering” psalms are also intended to be “royal,” though some have thought so. The sequence of thought in the great Psalm 22 does seem to indicate this as a possibility, moving from the God-forsaken lament at the start to the glorious vision of the kingdom at the end:

“1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;

and by night, but find no rest…

6 But I am a worm, and not human;

scorned by others, and despised by the people.

7 All who see me mock at me;

they make mouths at me, they shake their heads…

14 I am poured out like water,

and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax;

it is melted within my breast;

15 my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,

and my tongue sticks to my jaws;

you lay me in the dust of death” (Psalm 22:1–2, 6–7, 14–15).

And then, quite suddenly, the shout of triumph:

“22 I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters;

in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:

23 You who fear YHWH, praise him!

All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;

stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! . . .

27 All the ends of the earth shall remember

and turn to YHWH;

and all the families of the nations

shall worship before him.

28 For dominion belongs to YHWH,

and He rules over the nations” (Psalm 22:22–23, 27–28).

When we take the Psalms as a whole and learn to stand at their complex intersection of God’s time and ours, of the past kingdom of David with all its flaws and failures and the coming kingdom of God, with Jesus at the middle of that sequence, we find that they themselves express the tension between the end of time and today, inviting us to stand exactly there.

Today, turn to the Lord and ask Him to take our bones that are out of joint and help us worship Him so that He will rule over our own life and all of creation!

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

From the Bible:

“For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord” Zaphaniah 3:9.

“They forgot God, their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt” Psalm 106:21.

“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” James 5:16.