Sunday Morning Meds--Faith

Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me,
for in you I take refuge.

I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings

    until the disaster has passed.

I cry out to God Most High,

    to God, who vindicates me.

He sends from heaven and saves me,

    rebuking those who hotly pursue me--

    God sends forth his love and his faithfulness.

Psalm 57:1-3

 “He who, struggling with his own weakness, presses toward faith in his moments of anxiety is already in large part victorious.” 

Those words may not seem like John Calvin, at least the caricature John Calvin, but they're his—from Book III, chapter II of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a section in which he is discussing “Faith in the struggle against temptation.” 

I’m not sure there is a way of understanding the frenetic emotions David not only lives through but sings about and of in Psalm 57—and elsewhere—without understanding the character Calvin ascribes to believers in this section of the Institutes.

David has every reason to be deathly scared. It’s the King, King Saul, who’s hot on his trail, who has threatened his life, whose poison envy is more terrifying because it is so immeasurably beyond reason. David sits in a cave, surrounded by his closest friends and family, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. There he sits composing, singing, alone, maybe at the mouth of this dark hole, nothing to be seen before him but eerie shadows in the doubtful light of the moon.

Outside the cave is madness, but he knows he can’t stay inside forever. He has already given Saul grace by allowing him to live when he could have killed him. Instead, he took a shard of his robe. But David refuses to see the King as anything other than God’s own anointed, even though Saul won’t purge the envy that has poisoned his soul; instead, he gorges on it.

That’s why David cries the way he does: “Have mercy,” and then again, “have mercy.” There is nowhere to turn.

“And yet—and this is something marvelous,” says Calvin, “amidst all these assaults faith sustains the hearts of the godly, and truly in its effect resembles a palm tree: for it strives against every burden and raises itself upward.”

Verses two and three—amid the harrowing fear—is pure heart-felt testimony: you offer your wings as a refuge, Lord; you use me for your purposes, you hold back my enemies, you send love and faithfulness. David is still sitting where the moonlit landscape’s eerie outlines are  teeming with terror. No matter, he’s saying that he knows.

Maybe it’s a kind of mantra he’s offering, in part to God, in part to his own anguished soul. Maybe he’s remembering the chapters of his own story, when, not by his strength but by his God’s, deliverance was his blessing, his good fortune. Whatever the cause, faith, like that palm tree, is growing, even from the cold stone where he sits.

Faith, Calvin says, means a sure knowledge of God’s will, of his faithfulness. It arises from a knowledge and assurance of his Word and his will of love. “Unless you hold to be beyond doubt that whatever proceeds from him is sacred and inviolable truth,” Calvin says the terror of those shadows, like the Saul’s insane envy, will overwhelm.

Seems to me that David’s song—his fears and his testimony—at the mouth of a quiet, silent cave is itself the Word of the Lord.