Sunday Morning Meds--My Rock

“I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? 

Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’"

Psalm 42:9

You can't help but be struck here by the use of the present tense in this sentence. The psalmist is not reporting some strange moment, a weird epiphany-gone-awry. What he’s saying is, “Whenever I feel estranged from God, I say to him, 'Why'?” Every darn time.

If that’s true, then what he says makes better sense. “I say to God my rock—my fortress in times of trouble—‘why aren’t you my fortress in times of trouble?’”

It's a hybrid pain only believers feel, because only someone who knows God as a rock can feel the terror of sudden quicksand. Only a believer continues to talk to a God who seems to be out of state.

           

Makes no sense, really, but then neither does faith itself, often enough. The paradox of the psalmist’s supplication is understandable only to someone who knows, who says “been there, done that.” Like me . . . and you, probably.

           

And the question, this time at least, isn’t “how long (as it is in Psalm 13, for instance),” but “why?” “Why” is a question that also suggests significant distance. We don’t have time for “why” in the middle of battle. “Why” arises only when the battle doesn’t quit, or when we begin to look at our wounds and realize the pain.

           

In “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” Cotton Mather, the firebrand Puritan prelate, makes great claims for New England’s founders. They were “a chosen generation,” he says, “so pure as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted reformation elsewhere, and yet so peaceable that they embraced a voluntary exile in a squalid, horrid, American dessert.” They were saints.

           

But, alas, Mather says, along came their children, who like “many degenerate plants,” were altogether “otherwise inclined.” The founders were grain; their children, weeds—that’s what Mather sees and how he explains why the Devil is rampaging through New England. Everywhere he looked, after all, he saw witchcraft.

Why? “We have all the reason imaginable to ascribe it unto the rebuke of heaven for our manifold apostacies.” Mather, unlike David, appears to know the answer to why. It’s all our fault. Lo and behold, we’ve departed from righteousness.

           

But Mather’s explanation fed the madness that filled prisons around Salem, Massachusetts, and finally took 25 lives. Thank goodness God isn’t Cotton Mather.

All of us want to know why; all of us seek understanding for what can’t be fully understood. It’s a human thing, and it’s been a great blessing. Why is the source question of science, the foundation of education itself. Why is the beginning of knowledge.

But the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And some questions we ask, questions from the heart and soul of our lives, may not have easy answers, and that’s the phenomena David is describing. Remember—it has happened more than once. Why have you left me alone?

And really, that’s the story of the psalm: even when he doesn’t seem to be our Rock, he is. It’s all here in this lament, in his pain and his joy. Even when there are no answers, he is.

Makes no sense at all unless you know it too.