Psalm 44

Today I read Psalm 44 and found it to be a very curious psalm indeed. It starts out by recalling the past:

"We have heard with our ears, O God;
our fathers have told us
what you did in their days,
in days long ago."

The author proclaims that the nation's victories were not due to mighty weapons but the grace and power of God. Continuing on, the author says "In God we make our boast all day long, and we will praise your name forever. " This is a good boast and well worth claiming, but at this point in the psalm (verse 8) a complaint begins and I can't help but think of Job: "But now you have rejected and humbled us; you no longer go out with our armies....All this happened to us,
though we had not forgotten you or been false to your covenant. Our hearts had not turned back; our feet had not strayed from your path."

I can't judge the state of the nation's heart - we are not given any context for the psalm, but I am certain that the writer was stating what he thought to be true. Let's assume that "feet had not strayed" as this interpretation takes at face value the words of the author and we have no reason to think otherwise. Once again, Job's mistake is repeated. "We are righteous, therefore nothing bad should happen to me" OR "We haven't strayed, why are we being punished?"

The final line, however, is telling, "Rise up and help us; redeem us because of your unfailing love." The request for help and redemption is the cry of everyone's heart and the statement "because of your unfailing love" accurately describes the heart of God. The error that is exposed in this psalm is that the author tied physical reward and punishment to the spiritual state of the nation and its inhabitants. Job showed us that this formula is false. Bad things happen to good people and those things cannot be interpreted as punishment or even judgment. God is sovereign over all things as Job found out the hard way. "His ways are greater than my ways, His thoughts greater than my thoughts" (Isaiah)

I would argue that Paul makes a similar argument when he references this psalm in Romans 8. Let me quote the relevant passage:

If God is for us, who can be against us? ³²He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? ³³Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. ³⁴Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. ³⁵Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ³⁶As it is written:
"For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." ³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing, whether good or baseparatestes us from the love of God. Our circumstances are not a reflection of how or whether He loves us. It's interesting to me to think that the psalmist gets it right in the first part of the psalm: "It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them." He recognized that it was not their might that granted victory but God; yet, in the same breath, the writer wants to claim that righteousness should grant them victory. God is not an entitlement program or a meritocracy. He does not grant material success or wellbeing simply because we follow Him. I think we can be thankful for this mercy, for how many of us would be destitute and downtrodden simply because our human weakness means "we all fall short of the glory of God"?

All this, I suppose, to come to the conclusion that it is heartening to know that even the writers of scripture struggle to know and understand God. Their inspired writings allow us to see and understand who God is and our relationship to Him. I am glad to join in this journey - perhaps Psalm 44 isn't so curious after all. It's just the cry of a desperate person to the Redeemer and attempt to reconcile circumstances with a just and loving God. Aren't we all doing that - even now?