I said, “I will guard my
ways, that I may not sin with my tongue;
I will guard my mouth with a
muzzle, so long as the wicked are in my presence.”
I was mute and silent; I held
my peace to no avail,
and my distress grew worse.
My heart became hot within me.
As I mused, the fire burned;
then I spoke with my tongue:
“O Lord, make me know my end
and what is the measure of my
days; let me know how fleeting I am!
Behold, you have made my days
a few handbreadths,
and my lifetime is as nothing
before you.
Surely all mankind stands as
a mere breath!
Surely a man goes about as a
shadow! Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
man heaps up wealth and does
not know who will gather!
“And now, O Lord, for what do
I wait? My hope is in you.
Deliver me from all my transgressions.
Do not make me the scorn of the fool!
I am mute; I do not open my
mouth, for it is you who have done it.
Remove your stroke from me; I
am spent by the hostility of your hand.
When you discipline a man with
rebukes for sin,
you consume like a moth what
is dear to him;
surely all mankind is a mere
breath!
“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and
give ear to my cry;
hold not your peace at my
tears!
For I am a sojourner with
you, a guest, like all my fathers.
Look away from me, that I may
smile again, before I depart and am no more.
Psalm 39
Reflection – I am doing the next
instalment of the ‘Monday Psalter’ today, as I will have other fish to fry on
Monday, blog wise.
I love this
psalm. It is such a perfect poetic expression of a certain mood or experience most
of us have some of the time, and some people have much of the time. We all at
times touch the reality of the world gone very wrong, the very real and
excruciatingly painful injustices, the calamitous follies, the mind boggling
stupidities and just plain meanness of humanity broken by original sin and its
sad fruits.
One of the
perils of the internet age is that, while in the past we were mostly limited to
the injustices, follies, stupidities, and meanness of our immediate neighbours,
we can now if we choose spend every waking hour seeking fresh examples of these
from the four corners of the globe to outrage ourselves with. Whether that is a
wise and mentally healthy course of action is debatable, to say the least, and
yet quite a few people choose to do just that.
Meanwhile,
Psalm 39 enters into this experience of human folly and wickedness at a very
deep level, I would say. I do love how the bible in general, and the psalms in
particular, do not shy away from the messiness and incompleteness of our human
experience of reality. The psalmist really is at a loss here, and there is no
tidy resolution to his dilemma.
There is
evil, wickedness. At first he says ‘I will be silent’. Then he can’t quite
manage it, and so bursts into hot and fiery speech. And then he lapses again
into silence, and finally is brought down to prayer, a humble and broken kind
of prayer at that. He just doesn’t know how to make sense of the situation (it
is just right, by the way, that we are never told in these psalms just what the
situation is—it could be anything).
It is all so
very human, so very real. And in the midst of all this sweaty, messy, confused
grappling with the problem of evil, there is this nugget of wisdom, hard won
and barely held to. ‘Lord make me know my end, and what is the measure of my
days.’
Life is
short; eternity is long, very long. God has decreed it such that in this world
we do not have the perfect justice and perfect balancing of the books that (being
made in his image, He the Just Judge) our hearts cry out for. He has his own
reasons for this, and we are continually having to battle our way to trusting
Him in this matter in this life.
But in a
Christian praying of this psalm we do come to embrace the hope and promise of
heaven offered to us by Christ, where all things will be made as they should be.
And in a deeper yet Christian praying of this psalm, we come to know that our whole
movement in this world regarding evil and injustice is not to lash out with
rage and heat and violence, but to meet it with love, patience, forebearance,
and forgiveness. As did Jesus Christ, whose disciples we say we are.
In this Age
of Outrage in which we live, where everyone is perpetually getting offended and
where it seems many positively search around every day looking for things to
get mad about, Psalm 39 is a good psalm to pray. We need to go deeper in all
these matters; this psalm, especially when prayed in the light of our whole Christian
faith, helps us to do just that.
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