A Year In Psalms: Part One

I love honesty. There is nothing like an honest song. For all the well-written poppy hooks, all the sweetly written sentiment, there’s nothing quite like brutal, Dashboard Confessional honesty. Psalms like 51 (the repentance Psalm) and this one reek of a broken heart before God, no pretence, no polish, no attempts at glamourisation. There are places where the Psalms can be hard to identify with, where the Psalmist complains of being the only righteous man in a world full of wicked, simply because for me, the reader, I don’t know what that’s like! I do, however, get verse 2: “But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled / my steps had nearly slipped / For I was envious of the arrogant / when I saw the prosperity of the wicked”.

Asaph shatters two Psalm-myths here: the first being the aforementioned “I am righteous!” claim that if you can identify yourself with, well, that’s a sign you really shouldn’t; the second being the principle of Psalm 1, that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good, because Asaph here gets that this isn’t how it works out. In the short term at least, Asaph looks at how evil people cope with life, and it’s pretty cush: no pain until death; all pretty fat, and not in a bad way but in a good-life way (v3); not in trouble or afflicted (v4); their bellies are inflating (v7) as well as their pockets (v12); life is good. Asaph is doing what it is so easy to do: he says “All in vain have I kept my heart clean”. If life is so good for the evil, what’s the point in being good?

This, essentially, is uni life. All around are people getting wasted and having lots of sex, and yet the immediate wrath of God isn’t being revealed... in fact, it looks like they’re getting away with it, and having a better time of it. Thus, the existence of this Psalm in God’s holy, revealed, breathed word is comforting. I am not the first person to feel conflicted about this. It is okay; this doesn’t seem to make sense. Until we see Asaph’s solution: “...until I went into the sanctuary of God / then I discerned their end!” The bigger picture is that God will have his justice: that a life of sin may be good, but the death of the sinner is not. This does not stop it hurting, this does not stop the difference from seeming awkward and unfitting, yet this Psalm tells us, ultimately, that suffering now for righteousness’ sake is better than suffering forever.

That, in itself, would make a good Psalm. But Asaph’s quick repentance is possibly one of the most beautiful (and I don’t really like that word, but it’s the only one that fits) bits of honest poetry ever written (and I’ve read Wilde):

When my soul was embittered
When I was pricked in heart
I was brutish and ignorant
I was like a beast toward you

Nevertheless, I am continually with you
You hold my right hand
You guide me with your counsel
And afterwards, you will receive me into glory

Who have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth I want besides you
My flesh and my heart may fail
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever

First, grace comes. Not even as we repent (which is a work of the Holy Spirit in us anyway), but while Asaph still envies the evil and resents God, even while we are still in sin, God holds his right hand – he is with us now, in our future life, and in our future death. Even if wallets and bellies shrink to nothing, flesh and heart fail, God is still gracious and provides strength. An honest, brutish, pricked heart before the Lord receives mercy, which satisfies more than the present riches of evil men.

It is good to be near God, I have made him my refuge
That I might tell of all his works

His Love Is A Hurricane, I Am A Tree

The Psalms blogs are written, just not posted yet. Need to be edited. But I just felt the need to write, after a little bit of reflection...

I have spent the last year trying to unlearn the untruths of my faith. This has been a thorough and actually quite deeply personal thing - growing up in a good Christian home makes it not only hard to distinguish between what is true and what is additional (not necessarily wrong, just maybe not necessary) or religious (which is necessarily wrong, as all religion is Satanic), but also my faith, my identity in God has constituted a massive part of my own identity. Not just in a taking on the role of "token Christian" at Uni or defining my hobbies or whatever. I am finding the way I think about Christ changes the way I think about myself.

Theologically, this makes sense. I know I am made in His image, both pre-fall, in the created order, and post-Cross, where I am being made more and more like Jesus. My identity, therefore, if it is in Christ, rests on my understanding of Christ. My Christology is not just an abstract theological debate, it is intensely about, in a strange way, me. Primarily, yes, it's about Christ, but as Christ is the source of my primary identity - I am who I am before God - it is, in a very weird way, about me. (If I wanted to totally geek out, I would argue existential doubt and anguish, the likes of which destroyed Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus, are fundamentally rooted in a faulty Christology, but this is merely a passing point.)

This week is Together On A Mission, the international Newfrontiers conference. Stef Liston slayed it this afternoon, talking about coming like children. This is something I don't do well. At all. If there's one thing I daily battle to believe is that He loves me.

This, I understand, is ridiculous, given how much exposure, by God's grace, I've had to the cross this year. I know that this is love: not that we loved Him but He loved us; that this is love: that he sent forward His own Son to be my propitiation; that He became not just my legal scapegoat but my effective expiation, the cleansing of my guilt; that He now is creating me in His likeness, sanctifying me. He is my revelation, my conviction, my salvation, and my object of adoration.

But do I believe He loves me? In the process of deconstructing and rebuilding, I have studied the great reformers. I am pretty much convinced that Calvinism is totally Biblical. I get that I am, by nature, evil, offensive to God, deserve His total burning wrath but instead, by the amazing work of Jesus, that wrath was poured out in full on the one man in history who did not deserve it. I do not struggle to believe in my need for a saviour. Every tear is a reminder that I need Jesus more every day I wake up.

Part of the deconstruction has been against overly fluffy puff worship. Jesus is my boyfriend, He likes the way I style my hair, etc., and instead focusing on Jesus went through PAIN and DIED for my SIN taking my WRATH and PUNISHMENT so that I am no longer GUILTY because I was pretty EVIL and DEAD before. This is the stuff I can handle.

But Jesus is for me? Jesus is jealous for me? Jesus wants me? Yes, corporately as the Church, sure. But as an individual? Jesus will sing for me the way I have sung for others? Jesus burns with passion for me? Jesus is emotionally driven for my well-being? Jesus is destroyed when I am, rejoices when I rejoice, Jesus is intimately involved in every heartbreak and every new hope, Jesus takes pleasure in knowing me? That the cross was for propitiation, for my expiation, for the satisfaction, yes, but all of which ultimately takes back seat to the grand, ultimate, over-arching design and desire: the restoration of relationship??? The re-institution of intimate relationship? Fellowship? With me? LOVE?

I sing it so much but believe it so little. I find it impossible: how can you ever, ever be for me? Why do you even take notice of a repulsive little rebel like this one? Why take something so disgusting, so tainted and so impossibly far, and declare "in your sin, I will pursue you, I will chase you, I will run for you until your heart is won for me like mine is for you. I will die for you, not just for theological fact but for personal intimacy. For love"? The answer is the cross. The cross war done for love. The answer is love. And I hate how wooly that sounds, but I endlessly adore how true it is.

Still a way to go...