I've been thinking about this blog for a long time. I've even talked about it to some friends - who all looked at me with that "we will disavow any knowledge of you" look. I know that hardly anyone will even read these entries, so maybe it's just therapeutic. But who knows...
Anyway...Psalm 139.
This Psalm is a great example of what I mentioned in my first entry: the church's tendency to take the parts they like about God and his Word, and ignore (or even cover over) the stuff they don't.
Psalm 139 is the banner that Pro-Life people fly over their cause. In it David waxes worshipfully about the wonder of how God made him. What's especially compelling in the early verses of that Psalm is the beautiful and amazing observations the psalmist makes about the way God was intimately involved in putting little baby David together in his mom's tummy. It powerfully proclaims the truth that David was a person, known and loved, while still "just a fetus".
It is no wonder we anti-baby killing folks love this passage!
But we almost always stop reading this passage at somewhere around verse 16. Sometimes we'll bleed over into verses 17 and 18 (they talk about how wonderful God's thoughts are).
I get it. It's pro-life Sunday. You want to read the verses that apply to that theme. Totally appropriate.
You will also hear people use verses 23 and 24 quite a bit. They are great devotional, introspection verses ("Search me, O God, and know my heart..."). Great communion service meditation material.
But do you see a "hole in the whole" here? What happened to verses 19-22? Let's take a quick read of those verses and see if they sound familiar to you:
Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!
O men of blood, depart from me!
They speak against you with malicious intent;
your enemies take your name in vain!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
Whoa...! What the...?! Wasn't David just making the case that every person is precious? And didn't he end this Psalm in a very soft-hearted, penitent, worshipful manner?
But here in these verses he is calling God - the loving God who made each one of these precious enemies who have a "right to life" - to "slay" them!
The ironic thing here is that I'd be willing to bet my iPhone that the death David has in mind for these folks is several degrees less humane than a modern-day execution, and probably even more gory than many abortive procedures. He wants God to rip these people to shreds and trample them in the dust.
Maybe it wouldn't surprise you (on second look) to realize that, from start to finish, Psalm 139 is mainly about how great God is and how humans should respond to him. If we saw that, maybe it wouldn't shock us to hear the "man after God's own heart" so unabashedly proclaim his "complete hatred" and his wishes for God to slaughter those who set themselves up against the kingship of the sovereign king of the universe.
Before we immediately jump into "that was the Old Testament - this is the New Testament!!" paroxisms, maybe we should pause to see if there is anything here that can stretch us.
I'll leave it like this: If David is a man after God's own heart and David has such a red-hot hatred of the enemies of God, does this show us anything about the heart of God toward sinners?
Maybe it wouldn't surprise you (on second look) to realize that, from start to finish, Psalm 139 is mainly about how great God is and how humans should respond to him. If we saw that, maybe it wouldn't shock us to hear the "man after God's own heart" so unabashedly proclaim his "complete hatred" and his wishes for God to slaughter those who set themselves up against the kingship of the sovereign king of the universe.
Before we immediately jump into "that was the Old Testament - this is the New Testament!!" paroxisms, maybe we should pause to see if there is anything here that can stretch us.
I'll leave it like this: If David is a man after God's own heart and David has such a red-hot hatred of the enemies of God, does this show us anything about the heart of God toward sinners?
There's the rub. Preaching all of God's Word. The good, the bad and the ugly (at least from our perspective!) I just read Ezk 36. In the middle of this book of destruction comes this passage about restoration and cleansing. But the tough sell in today's church are verses 22 and 32. "Not for your sake, but for my name's sake" is God about to do an incredible act of grace and mercy. In fact verse 32 says "be ashamed of your ways" Not very seeker (or member) friendly!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your heart, as the Spirit leads.
We tend to like to look at God through a single set of glasses, and today it's almost exclusively through the lens of "love" or "grace", even if those lenses have been distorted from what they originally were intended for. In other words, we cast God in an image we are comfortable with, and that usually makes him look a lot like us.
ReplyDeleteWhat is much more challenging is to look at God, as much as possible, as He really is - being honest about what Scripture says. Wrestling with all of the nuance and tension and paradox. He is, after all, God.
May we all strive to recognize our blind spots and know God as He is.
Correct me if I am "off" here but maybe a better way to say it would be~ God hates (with a Holy hatred) unrepentant sinners~which means that His infinite wrath will inevitably fall on them. "Surely God will shatter the head of his enemies, the hairy (huh?) crown of him who goes on in his guilty deeds" (Psalm 68:21). I am a sinner/depraved… yet God doesn’t hate me. He sees me in Jesus Christ. He has chosen me, loves me, and has destined me for glory. Praise be to HIM!
ReplyDeleteThere will be lots of room for clarification as this blog progresses. Right now I see my task less like the gentle tug you would give a child to guide him as you walk together on the sidewalk and more like the violent yank that the child would need if he was unknowingly stepping into traffic.
ReplyDeleteWhat I hope to do is to recover a more biblically full view of God that includes his wrath toward sinners. The "gospel" I am hearing nowadays is often that God loves sinners so much he can't stand to live without them.
More on this later...