Read the Bible in 2023 ◊ Week 24: Wednesday

Wednesday’s Bible reading is Psalms 69–71. As I read these psalms once more I thought about how very real the psalms are. There is no denial here of affliction or the fact that suffering hurts. These are not robotic or glib prayers. These are cries of the heart. It’s odd, isn’t it, how many times our ideas about the Christian life can be the opposite of the reality that God shows us in His Word? It’s not more spiritual to think that life is something it is not. God deals with reality, and because He does, we can as well.

David was a man with a nature like ours, and although he lived thousands of years ago, when I read his words I frequently find him echoing my thoughts and feelings.

His raw words shows us that it’s fallacious to believe we can have events under control or to think that when we’re cut, we do not bleed.

David keeps pointing us to God as he turns to Him again and again when in distress.

We need this example so badly. In the Psalms we see this juxtaposition of prayer and desperation. Look at the words of the next verse:

We do not have to pretend that events and circumstances do not leave us reeling. At the same time the psalms teach us to turn to God when we are over­whelmed in the mire of circumstances. As David trusts God to answer him and to help him, he teaches us to turn to God with the reality of our lives, and cry out to God in humility and need. The psalms tell us again and again that when we are sunk in life’s mire and overwhelmed with wave after wave of heartache and affliction that God will hear us and not despise us:

Some psalms are known as imprecatory psalms because of the cries for judgment found in them. In psalms such as these, not only does the writer call upon God for help, but he also calls upon God for vengeance. How do we understand these psalms? M’Caw and Motyer have some helpful explanations:

“…it must be clearly grasped that all the offending passages are prayers. There is no indication that adversaries were personally rebuffed by either word or deed. The persecuted men flew to God, and even though they certainly expressed themselves with vigour, fundamentally they assert their contentment to leave all to God, a course of action which Christians are commanded to follow (Rom. 12:19ff.). This trust in divine action is based on the revealed truth of the righteous judgment of God (see Ps. 7, where the imprecation of v.6 rests on the theology of vv. 11–13). J. R. W. Stott aptly comments: “I do not find it hard to imagine situations in which holy men of God do and should both cry to God for vengeance and assert their own righteousness. Since God is going to judge the impenitent, a tryly godly person will desire him to do so, and that without any feelings of personal animosity…

“…the motives behind these imprecations were three in number: first, the moral passion of a holy man (e.g. 139:21, 22). Stott confesses that ‘I myself would find it hard to echo these sentiments. The reason for this is not, however, that they are beneath me, but that they are beyond me. . . . I cannot attain to desires for divine judgment without vindictiveness nor to assertions of my own righteousness without pride’…Second, they were moved by a zeal of the clearing of God’s good name (e.g. 9:16–20; 83:16, 17), and third, by a determination to be realistic. Is it right to pray that God will avenge His persecuted people? If it is—as assuredly it must be—then the precise petitions of Ps. 137:7–9 are often involved, even if in our polite way we prefer to leave them unsaid. In the same way, we would readily pray Ps. 143:11, but hesitate over its realistic corollary, v. 12; likewise, we happily pray for the second coming without stopping to think that we are actually praying for the events of 2 Thes. 1:8. Possibly, therefore, our sense of offense at the imprecation arises not so much from Christian sensitivity as from our general inexperience of persecution and our failure to make common cause with Christians under the lash. ‘The victory of God’, says Hubert Richards, ‘cannot be had without the crushing of evil. It is an absurd sentimentality to want the one without the other’.”¹

When we are weary and worn to the bone with our sorrow; when we are estranged and abandoned and bear the infliction of wrongs; the psalms teach us to turn and pour out our heart to God, to call upon Him and trust Him with the reality of our lives.

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For a brief overview of the structure and poetry of Psalms see my post, The Five Books of Psalms.
Silvesterzug Laterne: Bk muc. (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Stuck Fast in the Mud, Zonnebeke: Alexander Jamieson. Cropped. Public Domain.
¹Leslie S. M’Caw, J. A. Motyer, “Psalms,” The New Bible Commentary: Revised, D. Guthrie, J. A. Motyer, eds., A. M. Stibbs, D. J. Wiseman, contributing eds. (Inter-Varsity Press, Downers Grove IL: 1970) 450–451.

I’m using Michael Coley’s Bible reading plan (one page PDF to print) to read through the Bible in 2023. Each day my posts are on different books because he divides Bible readings into seven categories, one for each day of the week: Epistles, The Law, History, Psalms, Poetry, Prophecy and Gospels. There’s more information on his plan and other ones at Read the Bible in 2023.

Copyright ©2011–2023 Iwana Carpenter