Psalm 44

People need help!

We can think about what God has done for others in the past. The whole worshiping community can consider together the great events of our common deliverance. God did rescue His people when they were slaves in Egypt. The Lord did send His Son to deliver us from death and hell, and Jesus did demonstrate His accomplishment of that greatest salvation through His resurrection from the dead. When we think about these facts of history we are reminded of God's power and His love for His people.

Yet we still have troubles, and we still need help. It is one thing to be rescued from bondage. It is another to figure out how to live after that in a dark time.

God delighted in His people, and He gave them a job to do. They were to take the land according to His command. But He was the one who drove out the inhabitants of Canaan so long ago. Yet as long as this age continues, every monster seems to have more than one head. Cut one off and the thing still lives. Help in the past is not enough. We need help today. We need God to be King for us. He must defeat our enemies now, or we die.

We can know that Christ has defeated sin and death for us. We can believe that He is working all things together for the good of those who love Him. Yet it is disturbing to discover that the good that God is working has so much evil and pain in it. Apparently this is for the best. Still, we need help.

If we win some obvious victory today, we know that it is the Lord who has ordained it. If we have the energy to fight on, it was God's strength working through us, and He should be thanked for this. When we face another foe on a different day, we cannot trust in our own strength or in our superior firepower. We trust in God.

Therefore we cry out to the Lord in a time of extreme distress. And if the Lord cannot be found, if God has rejected His people, how will we survive? When the God of Jacob finally moved to close up the Old Covenant way, when the time had come for the exile of Israel and Judah, and when hundreds of years later the moment finally came for the message of His grace to go far beyond the borders of the Promised Land, something had to die in order for a new covenant community to be born. The same will be the case when the time for the return of Christ has come.

In that day church people will be crying out to God, wondering why He is not answering their prayers. Could it be that something bigger and more glorious is about to happen?

There is no denying that churches will be rejected. Every day dwindling groups of worshipers wonder why God's providence did not include their own plans of growth, or at least survival. They could have done such good works in their community! But now they feel as if God has rejected them. They are disgraced in the eyes of their neighbors. Ministries fail and must be closed. Evil springs up from within the number of those who proclaim the Lord's Name, and the faithful remnant are discouraged and confused. The worst oppressors seem to be winning.

We are brought to a frank consideration of the mystery of the providence of God, as was the apostle Paul who faced such vicious persecution in the establishment of the Christian church in the first century Roman world. He quoted from this psalm when he wrote these words: “You have made us like sheep for slaughter.”

Yet he reflected on the fact of Christ's victory, and the glory of faith in a day of loss, and he concluded that through it all we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us, and that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Read Romans 8.

We simply do not understand the providence of God. How can we, when the best Man died the worst death so long ago. Yet there was a purpose in the cross after all, and what seemed inexplicable has now become the glory of the church.

Yes, Israel seemed to have been sold to her enemies for a pittance. Neighboring nations more evil than they were laughing at the people of God. Countless New Testament servants have seemed to die alone with no one comforting them or counting them as people of worth. They seemed to lose. Their own strength failed at last.

We need help today. Therefore we remind God of what He already knows. We turn to the Lord again. Where else can we go? In Him we find the words of life.

Loss and despair are not only the experience of those who have forgotten the Lord. That we could understand. Disgrace finds the righteous who are seeking diligently to follow God's commandments and to walk in the Spirit. This is what we wonder about.

But it does help to remember the cross, and the most faithful One, the sinless One, who died there for us. And our perplexity does lead us heavenward to a place and a time beyond the here and now. And somehow we do find the strength to carry on. It must be the Lord after all who is with us. And we conclude that God has a purpose that we cannot yet see, and that “for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

Though our souls have been brought low, we look up as we cry out to God again. And we are convinced one more time that He will not utterly abandon us. He is not sleeping. He has not forgotten us. He will rescue His people. He is the Lord of steadfast love.