Many
psalms attributed to David exude a confidence that God, who acted mightily in
the past, would act mightily again in the future. Yet there is also immediacy
about today’s very personal psalm: the writer desperately needs God now. God is
indeed God of the remote past and of the unseen future, but the writer recalls
that God has helped him recently. God has lifted him before from a slimy pit
and set his feet on rock (v 2) – and God can do it again.
I
know a young Aboriginal man with great potential for Christian leadership in
his depressed, damaged, substance-abusing community. We have often read this
psalm and translated it into his language. It mirrors his experience – evil
forces always try to draw him back into the slippery pit of alcohol and drugs,
to mire him in the black hole of depression. He has learned painfully, as
Christian did in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, that he cannot,
by his own efforts, pull himself out of the swamp of despair (‘Slough of
Despond’). Like Christian, other people who understand him can help him out,
but mostly he is like this psalmist. Only God himself can deliver him (v 17).
Like
the psalmist, we can genuinely love knowing and doing the will of God (v 8). We
can, like my young Aboriginal friend, be powerful witnesses to the saving power
of Jesus (v 10). For that very reason, the power of evil can draw us back down
into darkness, unable to see our way out (v 12) in a place where others give up
on us (v 15). Only God can penetrate that darkness. We must recognise our need
of him (v 17). Then God can lift us out again. Only God.
(reflexion
on Psalm 40, WorldLive by Scripture Union, 20th December 2015)
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